Permission to “Be”

 

The first chirps of the waking birds mark the “point vierge”

of the dawn

under a sky as yet without real light,

a moment of awe and inexpressible innocence,

when the Father in perfect silence opens their eyes.

They speak to Him, not with fluent song,

but with an awakening question

that is their dawn state,

their state at the “point vierge.”

Their condition asks if it is time for them to “be”?

He answers “Yes.”

Then they one by one wake up, and become birds.

They manifest themselves as birds, beginning to sing.

Presently they will be fully themselves, and will even fly.

Meanwhile, the most wonderful moment of the day is that

when creation in its innocence asks permission

to “be” once again,

as it did on the first morning that ever was.

All wisdom seeks to collect and manifest itself

at that blind sweet point.

Man’s wisdom does not succeed,

for we have fallen into self mastery and cannot ask

permission of anyone.

We face our mornings as men of undaunted purpose.

We know the time and we dictate the terms.

We know what time it is.

For the birds there is not a time that they tell,

but the virgin point between darkness and light,

Between nonbeing and being.

So they wake: first the catbirds and cardinals.

Later the song sparrows and the wrens.

Last of all the doves and the crows.

Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us

and we do not understand.

It is wide open. The sword is taken away,

but we do not know it:

we are off “one to his farm and another

to his merchandise.”

Lights on. Clocks ticking. Thermostats working. Stoves

cooking. Electric shavers filling radios with static.

“Wisdom,” cries the dawn deacon, but we do not attend.

Thomas Merton wrote this in the early 1960s (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, pp 131-32), when indeed there were radios in every home and electric shavers did create static in those radios. Long-play records have made a comeback – they call them vinyl now – so perhaps radios too will come back. We live in a retro age.

But the more important things reflected in this meditation will not come back. The silence of the morning that Merton experienced in his Kentucky hermitage is not ours to experience. The new creation that takes place every morning in the depths of nature are beyond our understanding. 

And yet, we can be like those birds. We can wake up each morning and ask permission from God “to be”! God’s answer will always be “Yes” to that question. 

As we get older many of us wake up each morning grateful to be alive. Don’t stop there. Ask permission from God to be! To become a new creation each day! Nothing pleases our heavenly Father than to see us rise each morning and become more fully human than we were when we went to sleep the night before.

This meditation by Merton seeks to enlighten us with God’s wisdom. But man’s wisdom stands in the way. The tragedy is that “we have fallen into self mastery and cannot ask permission of anyone.” Not even of God. So we pursue our own “undaunted purpose.”

“Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand….Lights on. Clocks ticking. Thermostats working. Stoves cooking. Electric shavers filling radios with static.”

“Wisdom,” cries the dawn deacon, but we do not attend.

“Wisdom, let us attend,” our Liturgy also calls out several times. There is wisdom here. There is wisdom all around us. Sophia!