Cacophony

Much rattles through my head. Organize! It'll be a couple of days and only then will I successfully orchestrate this entry. I begin with a quote I saved, and forgot, and found again. It is one of Thomas Merton, writer, priest, monk, contemplative, describing his peace. "Because today, it is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with one's hunger and sleep, one's cold and warmth, rising and going to bed. Putting on blankets and taking them off, making coffee and then drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditating, working, praying. I live as my ancestors have lived on this earth, until eventually I die. Amen. There is no need to make an assertion of my life, especially about it as mine, though doubtless it is not somebody else's. I must learn gradually to forget program and artifice."


Funny how within a day perspective changes. It is the day after I began this entry. Too often for me, though I think I am getting better, sometimes, it tends to go from good to less than good. On the weekend, where there was no pressure on my mind or soul I could enjoy the warming sunfilled days, reclining in my back yard, cat purring on my chest and praying with near intention on Palm Sunday at two Masses at which I assisted, one in which I distributed the Eucharist, a rare and awesome service to perform. But as soon as any regular life, work, demands of an unhappy consumer, requirements of the day interposed themselves, I felt the wall come up and the need to defend overtook. It was not sufficient to be, to do, move on to the next thing without fear and resistance. Merton's simple recipe seemed impossible, available only to someone who only visits the daily grind occasionally. In this world, to survive, it seems, one must make an assertion and develop both program and artifice. He was in his monastery and hermitage, protected against the jostlings of the day. Wasn't he?


Could he find peace faster than I because of where he lived and prayed, where prayer was the grist of is every day? Then I remember that every action and thought is to be a prayer and praying may not, does not, depend on where one lives or works. On the other hand, a lovely field and the vocalizations of bluejays or mockingbirds would seem to make prayer more readily accessible. In my office, bristling at the arch tone of a caller who feels, perhaps with justification in some objective sense, that I should account to her, the only thing readily coming to mind are endless cuss words I have to restrain myself from uttering. And I feel the moments of clarity I thought finally vouchsafed to me dissipating into a diaphanous haze as I watch a young colleague grapple traumatically with the palpable evil of the world reposing in a prosecution to which I have assigned her.


The ordinary human mode is sometimes too much to take; it offers no peace. But then, suddenly, I remember the week that it is, when the Extraordinary One took on the ordinary human mode right down to a violent death in a miraculous joining to His beings--we with the cacaphony in our heads that all too often pours out and destroys anything within range of us.


I live my life as my ancestors did, plodding from day to day, only if I just stop I have that which heals the cacaphony, a saving like no other, by One like no other. If only I would stop and realize and be thankful, before there are no more tomorrows.