Thomas Merton Hermitage, Day 3

St. Anthony's Chapel

At 21 on and a trip to England, attending Evensong at York Minster turned out to be a pearl of great price in my spiritual journey. What impulse had driven the construction of such a building, I wondered? What longing had inspired such music—its composition and its singing? What force had sustained the keeping of both building and liturgy for 8 centuries? Maybe, from my point of view that night, it was the God beyond the image of the God I had stopped trusting.

Kneeling (a 21 year old skeptic kneeling!) and hearing that stunningly gorgeous music, hearing those near perfect voices and trying to connect them to those impossibly young faces filled my heart and mind with yearning and sadness and joy and a suddenly vast sense of sacred possibility.

I still sense untapped possibility when I hear simple, achingly beautiful music. And lately I’ve been wondering if we can’t experience something very like it in our local most assuredly non-cathedral spaces. I’ve been collecting recordings of chant (and what a lot of it there is) and listening, discerning, wondering how to be with it in morning, noon or night prayer.

What a gift to be at the Hermitages—what a wonderfully designed chapel for prayer and listening. Barbara and I have been experimenting with a mix of spoken prayer, silence, and recorded music in the morning, at noon and just before bed.

There’s obviously something ‘mechanical’ about plugging in a sound system and docking an iPod to it. And yet sitting in the chapel while experiencing simple sacred music is wholly glorious. This music endures because it opens us to God. It’s a joy to hear (a joy to sing too, but that’s another matter). To paraphrase Urban Holmes, music like this has the ability to bring our souls relatively unencumbered to a place where we encounter God.

Attention deepens what it regards. And realizing there’s something regarding us on the other side is powerful stuff.

God of left brain right brain whole body every body, give us wisdom to hear you and to know you. Amen.