What memories has Christmas left to abide forever in the heart? The feast has passed. The afterglow remains. Grace, granted in a moment of time, is strength forever. Could one forget a swift walk across Rome to reach the Basilica of St Paul (outside the walls) on a mild Christmas Eve. First Vespers began as we entered. The monks chanted the great anthem of hope and joy. We were one with Notre Dame, Chartres, Canterbury and Armagh: "Rex Pacificus, the King of Peace, has shown Himself in Glory. All people desire to see Him. Today true peace comes down from heaven. The skies rain down blessings all across the world!" Our Christmas had begun.
Bill Long (known to many from radio, television and written word) shares with us a memorable Christmas. Some 30 years ago he was in New York at Advent time. He had no desire for a Christmas of noise, excess and false gaiety. He phoned his friend Father Thomas Merton, the much loved spiritual writer, at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemane in Kentucky. The monk answered. He was welcoming and succinct. "Airport closed, heavy snow. Come by train. Overnight in Cincinnati. Only one other guest!"
On the evening of the second day Bill arrived. A Christmas moon lit the landscape, recalling for him Dylan Thomas: "Wanton in moonlight/As a dust of pigeons."
When he reached the church the monks were chanting Compline, the office that closes the monastic day with the canticle of holy Simeon, Nunc Dimittis. Sleep after toil recalls our final resting when all work is done. Salve Regina is the gracious goodnight prayer to Mary, mother of the Church, who gave us Christ in Bethlehem. Bill remembers: "The plain chant ceased. Standing under the great vault of the Kentucky sky I listened to the wind polishing the moon and the bright stars." He murmured a poem by his host: "And intellects are quieter/Than the flocks that feed by star-light/O white full moon ... as quiet as Bethlehem."
A typewriter broke the profound silence and hinted that the other guest might be a writer. He was. Erskine Caldwell, Pulitzer prize-winner, author of Tobacco Road, God's Little Acre and A Lamp for Night Fall. He had come to visit a former fellow-journalist, now a monk, Brother Andrew. Bill and he were to walk in snow-covered fields and share Christmas chat, monastic silence, and the log-fire warmth of the guest house library. Words can unite us. So can stillness. Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ knew this well: "Elected Silence! Sing to me!/And beat upon the whorled ear./Pipe me to pastures still and be/The music that I long to hear." One mysterious topic Bill and Erskine discussed was loneliness. After a long walk in sub-zero temperatures the Vesper Bell summoned them to pray. Later by the fire they watched the logs "flicker and flare and die again, each man with his private thoughts, his own loneliness." The famous writer, much older than our Bill, was getting over the pain of a third divorce. "Lonely business, divorce!" he confided.
Before falling asleep on that Christmas night, Bill whispered into the close and holy darkness a poem of his monk-friend. This was to be Merton's last Christmas in our Pilgrim World. "November analysed our bankruptcies, but now/His observations lie knee-deep beneath our/Christmas Mercies, while folded in the buried seed,/ The virtual summer lives and sleeps."
Erskine Caldwell died in 1987. Bill Long still lights for us our way. We recall the profound and moving commentary on his heart transplant operation given on RTE television last September.
May Christ of Christmas heal our loneliness, light our winter darkness, forgive our every sin and be our guiding star as we pass through the gateway of another year.
(See the full story, The Santa Claus of Loneliness, by Bill Long, in the November-December issue of the inspiring review Spirituality, edited by Tom Jordan OP.)
F.MacN.