Spiritual Sunday – Mother’s Day
Today being Mother’s Day, here’s a Thomas Merton poem about the moment that Mary learned she was to be a mother. At that moment, the poet tells us,
Speech of an angel shines in the waters of her thought
like diamonds,
Rides like a sunburst on the hillsides of her heart.And is brought home like harvests…
The joy at the prospect of birth, however, contrasts with the dark world that the child will enter. While Mary is focusing on life,
The farmers and the planters
Fear to begin their sowing, and its lengthy labor,
Where, on the brown, bare furrows,
The winter wind still croons as dumb as pain.
If they were strictly logical, how many mothers, looking over the world’s brown landscape, would forgo having children? What youthful mother, W.B. Yeats asks in “Among School Children,”
Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
Fortunately for us, mothers focus on the possibilities of spring rather than on the uncertainties of winter. That leap of faith keeps us all going.
Aubade: The Annunciation
By Thomas Merton
When the dim light, at Lauds, comes strike her window,
Bellsong falls out of Heaven with a sound of glass.Prayers fly in the mind like larks,
Thoughts hide in the height like hawks:
And while the country churches tell their blessings to the
distance,
Her slow words move
(Like summer winds the wheat) her innocent love:
Desires glitter in her mind
Like morning stars:Until her name is suddenly spoken
Like a meteor falling.She can no longer hear shrill day
Sing in the east,
Nor see the lovely woods begin to toss their manes.
The rivers have begun to sing.
The little clouds shine in the sky like girls:
She has no eyes to see their faces.Speech of an angel shines in the waters of her thought
like diamonds,
Rides like a sunburst on the hillsides of her heart.And is brought home like harvests,
Hid in her house, and stored
Like the sweet summer’s riches in our peaceful barns.But in the world of March outside her dwelling,
The farmers and the planters
Fear to begin their sowing, and its lengthy labor,
Where, on the brown, bare furrows,
The winter wind still croons as dumb as pain.