CENTENNIAL

When a Columbia graduate student named Thomas Merton walked down Broadway on a Sunday morning in August 1938, he was on his way to Corpus Christi Church, West 121^st Street, for the first time. He notes that the bells of what he called the Rockefeller Church and what we call Riverside Church were tolling, a call to worship at both sanctuaries. Both churches were new, and the pastors of both churches were friends. As you know, Rev. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick was founding pastor of Riverside in the early nineteen thirties. Rev. George Barry Ford would be second pastor of Corpus Christi and was already the Catholic chaplain at Columbia University. The parish was founded in 1906 by Rev. John Dooley. After Dooley’s death in late l934, Ford was named pastor, and he undertook the building of the current church which opened its doors in l936.

To say that the pastors were friends might seem strange today. Certainly, the pastors of neighboring Christian churches would be expected to communicate and be friends. But this was l938, and the ecumenical movement, especially as concerned Catholics in the USA, was in its infancy. Fosdick and Ford remained friends throughout their lives, a fact attested to when I met some of Dr. Fosdick’s relatives at your 75^th anniversary worship. However, in the 1940s, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York did not look favorably on Fr. Ford’s gift of flowers to Riverside Church to honor an anniversary and his attendance in this sanctuary for services. Fortunately, the ecumenical relationship remains, as Dr. Forbes has preached at our church and has invited me to be part of prayer and worship here. The wonderful choir of Riverside, under the direction of Tim Smith, has sung at our Vespers, and Riverside’s handbell choir, under the direction of Christopher Johnson, performed at Corpus Christi just a few weeks ago. Part of why I am happy to be with you today during the centennial year of Corpus Christi is to thank God for the bonds of friendship that have existed between our congregations, and to pray they continue. I also feel at home, for I possessed in my office when I was the director of the Catholic Center at New York University the two-foot model of the figure of Christ in Majesty by Sir Jacob Epstein that is in your balcony. The first time that I realized this made me feel so at home at Riverside Church. I look at Jesus here as I did at NYU, and I look at Jesus here, in the faces of my brothers and sisters with whom I worship today.

But Thomas Merton did not make a left at 120^th Street and Broadway in l938 and come to Riverside. He made a right at 121^st Street and Broadway and came to Corpus Christi. He was 23 years old, had lived a dissolute life through teenage and young adult years. I doubt that he would have identified himself with the sinful woman of today’s gospel when he came to church for the first time. He had never been in a Catholic church except to visit some European churches as museums. But in the days after attending Sunday Mass at Corpus Christi, a quiet voice in his conscience and mind kept telling him, “You know what you ought to do; now do it.” Merton’s story would rank with Paul at Damascus and Augustine of Hippo as one of the major conversion stories of Christianity. He presented himself to Father Ford and was baptized in Corpus Christi on Nov. 16, 1938. Within three years, he was a candidate to enter the Trappist Order, at that time one of the strictest orders in the Catholic church, at the monastery of Gethsemani, Kentucky. From his monastery in Kentucky, he would become one of the most prolific and well known spiritual writers in English during the 20^th century.

When he entered Gethsemani Monastery in 194l, he fled from a world that had been one of sadness, temptation, and sin. He lost his parents to death when he was young. Sexual promiscuity started for him in teenage years, and he enjoyed drinking to excess. His baptism at age 23 was a real turning from sin. By then, he saw himself as the sinful woman who loved Jesus and needed to show that love. In his poem “On the Anniversary of My Baptism,” he writes:

Stunned at the execution of my old companion, death,

And with the murder of my savage history

You drowned me in the shallow font

For Merton, a talented writer, poet, and artist, a brilliant student at Columbia, monastic living would be the best way to continue to die to self and live for God. Monastic living would show how much he wished to wash the feet of the Lord with his tears of sorrow for his sinful life. He would run away.

But, at the insistence of his religious superior, the abbot of Gethsemani Monastery, Merton wrote his autobiography, a book entitled The Seven Storey Mountain. This story of conversion and fervor made him a public figure and a bestselling author. He would continue to write works of spirituality that can be purchased in the most secular of bookstores today. But his thinking would change. Contemplative prayer which grounded so much of his monastic life would lead him to new understandings of his relationship with the world. He would see contemplative prayer as helping him to be more like Jesus, who in many encounters, including that with the sinful woman today, did not shun sin and the world but united with it. Jesus loved to dine with sinners and tax collectors. He was in the house of Simon the leper. He was with Zaccheus.

As Merton puts it, when we talk about the world and the necessity of running from it, too often we are referring to the flesh. He rejects his early writing. “I was still dealing in a crude theology that I had learned as a novice, a clean out division between the natural and supernatural, God and the world, sacred and secular, with boundary lines that were supposed to be quite evident. Since those days, I have acquired a little experience, and have read a few things, tried to help other people with their problems – life is not as simple as it once looked in The Seven Storey Mountain.” He would write, “If the Lord of all took flesh and sanctified all nature . . . we too have our work to do in extending the power of the resurrection to the whole world of our time. Nothing so effectively prevents this as the division, the discontinuity of spiritual lives that place God and prayer in one compartment, work and apostolate in another, as if prayer and work were somehow opposed."

From those early days of his Christian life when he would flee the world and end up at the Trappist monastery of Genthsemani in Kentucky, Merton is transformed. In his spiritual growth, he finds great power in the liturgy:

Monks daily chant the psalms.

Monks daily hear and read God’s Word in the Bible.

Monks daily celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

Merton learned to embrace the feet of Christ.

And that Christ whom he would embrace would be the Jesus of history, the Jesus of Holy Eucharist and the Jesus whose mystical body St. Paul would describe so beautifully in First Corinthians:

“Now you are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it."

During the 100^th anniversary of our parish, this image of Body of Christ looms large, for it is the patronal title of our church on West 121^st Street. Corpus Christi are the Latin words for the body of Christ.

Corpus Christi has multiple meanings, and I have sought to bring our parishioners to a deeper understanding of them all.

Corpus Christi – the body of Christ:

That body embraced by the sinful woman.

That body pierced with nails and a lance as it hung upon a cross.

That body raised glorious but still bearing the imprint of the wounds.

Corpus Christi – the body of Christ:

That Eucharistic body which at the Last Supper we are told to share

in remembrance of Jesus Christ.

That Eucharistic body at which supper we proclaim

the death of the Lord until he comes.

Corpus Christi – the body of Christ.

I do not think that it is coincidental that St. Paul in First Corinthians 11 describes the eucharistic presence of Christ – this is my body / this is my blood; and in First Corinthians 12 Paul describes the mystical body in this world – we the members and part of it. As the wonderful hymn we sang earlier states, “The poor of the world are my body, he said.” In another place, “Whatsoever you do for the least, you do for me."

In the daily life of the monastic community of Gethsemani which Merton joined in l94l, he discovered that his Christian life couldn’t be running away but an immersion in the Body.

In his monastic prayer, study and work, Merton was preparing himself for a revelation from the Lord that would tear away the veil that kept him from seeing that the world is God’s world, the people are God’s people, and what God has created is good. He would see all Christians as the Body of Christ.

It is precisely in his contemplative prayer that he is able to bring all this to clarity. So many people think that contemplative prayer is only the province of cloistered men and women. But did you hear or see the phenomenon of the recent film Into Great Silence, which was scheduled to play at a movie theatre in Manhattan for two weeks and ran for nine? It is about the cloistered life of some monks in France. The movie is three hours, plotless, and practically with no sound track. So many people attended the film. Are not people today searching desperately for contemplative prayer? Monks and nuns are not a privileged state to practice contemplation. In fact, Merton shows that all Christians are called to it.

Contemplative prayer is:

It is quiet.

It is silence.

It is the prayer of the heart.

It is a constant awareness of the presence of God.

In contemplative prayer, like the sinful woman who knows sin and knows forgiveness, we see for ourselves and grasp for ourselves the power of the resurrection. One might be tempted to say, “I know all that. I know that I am to love my neighbor and to see Christ in all.” But, as Claudel says, the longest journey is that from the mind to the heart. Contemplation enables us to integrate what we know into our very being. Merton calls this prayer a “deep personal integration in an attentive, watchful listening of the heart. It is not one of jubilant or audible witness. It is wordless and total surrender of the heart in silence."

On this weekend when Americans honor our ancestors, perhaps we can recall saying how much a beloved grandmother or grandfather seemed always at peace, even in the midst of great suffering or injustice. I’m sure they had integrated the Christian life by their contemplation, maybe without knowing the definition of the word.

How did Merton’s contemplation spring forth in justice? His contemplation made him attentive to God and to God’s world. Let me quote some of his contemplative insights. In a visit to a doctor in Louisville, he says, “I went through the city, realizing for the first time in my life how good are all the people in the world and how much value they have in the sight of God.” At the corner of 4^th and Walnut Streets in Louisville, he walks amid a noontime crowd of hundreds of people. He writes of that experience about how much he loved all those people, how much he would like to go up to each one of them and tell them that they are shining like the sun.

He writes that his contemplation led him to find the image of God implanted in himself; therefore he cannot evade the responsibility of loving everyone else who bears that image. "It is my belief," he writes, "that we should not be too sure of having found Christ in ourselves until we have found him in the part of humanity that is most remote from him" – the sinful woman, I suggest.

Contemplatives, he writes, are so dazzled by the reflection of God in the souls of the people they live with that they no longer have any power to condemn anything they see in another. Even in great sinners they can see virtues and goodness that no one else can find. Jesus saw that in the sinful woman. Despite her sins, how much she loved!

And so Merton wrote. He corresponded. He never hesitated to address political and church leaders demanding justice.

In the late l950s and until 1968 when he died, he was one of the leading white spokespersons for civil rights. In l968, an opportunity to bring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to meet Merton at Gethsemani was being planned when Dr. King was assassinated. (As an aside, American Christians suffered deep looses in ’68 – Dr. King, Robert Kennedy. Merton and Reinhold Niebuhr, the great scholar at Union Theological Seminary, our neighbor, both died on the same day in December l968.)

After his baptism at Corpus Christi in l938, Merton discerned whether his vocation would be the monastery or working with Baroness Catherine de Hueck among the poor in Harlem. His sensibilities were wounded by the injustice shown to the African-American people in this nation. Though he did so from a monastery, by the late l950s, his contemplative prayer made him a loud voice to challenge this country on racism.

Merton’s writings on nuclear disarmament and an end to the war in Vietnam still echo today. In reading some of his works, you just have to substitute Iraq, Afghanistan, Middle East for some of the statements of troubled places in the '50s and '60s (Vietnam, Cambodia, Russia), and Merton continues to speak to us.

In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Merton shows us how his contemplation brings him even beyond the bounds of the mystical body:

The more I am able to affirm others, to say yes to them in myself, by discovering them in myself and myself in them, the more real I am. I am fully real if my own hearts says yes to everyone. I will be a better Catholic, not if I can refute every shade of Protestantism, but if I can affirm the truth in it and still go further. So, too, with the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists, etc. If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic: and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it.

A contemplative who was at the forefront of the work of justice from a monastic hermitage about one and one half hours outside Louisville, Kentucky, wrote, “The answer is not liturgy alone or meditation [on the scriptures] alone. But a full and many-sided life of prayer in which all these things can receive their proper emphasis."

So with Merton:

Create your private monastic cell, your own hermitage.

Seek quiet.

Close the door, even if you have only a studio or a one-bedroom.

Go on a silent retreat. You might say that Catholic or Episcopal monasteries are only for Catholics or Episcopalians. Remember Kathleen Norris and The Cloister Walk? There always is room for a Christian sister or brother in the silent monasteries of this world.

Turn off the cell phone and the noisemakers.

Seek silence.

In contemplation, hear the tiny whispering sound which Elijah heard in First Kings 19 – the God who is in the gentle wind.

You and I will be enriched as Christians. But as a man like Thomas Merton shows us, you and I as Christians will enrich our world.