The Glories of Upstate New York

For as long as I can remember I've had a deep appreciation for natural beauty. Growing up, I was always fascinated by animals, captivated by sunsets, and would gladly spend hours romping around in the woods. So thinking that the Finger Lakes and the rolling hills of the Chemung Valley were astonishingly beautiful as I was growing up was nothing out of the ordinary. But it was only after leaving the area for school and other travels that I recognized within myself a new appreciation for the simple beauty that this region of the country so consistently provides every season of the year.

Seneca Lake from Watkins Glen

So it was a great delight to find another "evangelist" for upstate New York in Thomas Merton. As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm chipping away at his spiritual classic The Seven Storey Mountain during lunch breaks and the like. Currently, Merton is telling of his years in graduate school and, specifically, about a trip he and his friends had taken to Olean (near Buffalo) via train from Columbia University. It was with a certain sense of pride--and gratitude to God--that I read the following passage:

"For the first time I saw a part of the world in which I was one day going to learn how to be very happy--and that day was not now very far away.

It is the association of that happiness which makes upper New York state seem, in my memory, to be so beautiful. But it is objectively so, there is no doubt of that. Those deep valleys and miles and miles of high, rolling wooded hills: the broad fields, the big red barns, the white farm houses and the peaceful towns: all this looked more and more impressive and fine in the long slanting rays of the sinking sun after we had passed Elmira.

And you began to get some of the feeling of the bigness of America, and to develop a continental sense of the scope of the country and of the vast, clear sku, as the train went on for mile after mile, and hour after hour. And the color, the freshness, and bigness, and richness of the land! The cleanness of it. The wholesomeness. This was new and yet it was old country. It was mellow country. It had been clearned and settled for much more than a hundred years."

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (Harvest Press, 1998: p.219)

Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

Thomas Merton

I've been slowly reading Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain and have been enjoying it quite a bit. I say slowly because I've mainly been reading it in 15-30 minute snippets during lunch breaks. But occasionally I'll be posting quotes that I find thought-provoking.

Speaking about his educational experience in Oakham, England, Merton writes of his school's chaplain, Buggy Jerwood, and his "sermon" on the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians. In his exegesis of this famous Pauline opus, Buggy suggested that the word "love" (or "charity") simply referred to "all that we mean when we call a chap a 'gentleman.' " Merton recounts Buggy's suggestion that one ought to replace charity with the word "gentleman" in order to get at what St. Paul surely must have meant. For example: "A gentleman is patient, is kind; a gentleman envieth not, dealeth not perversely..."

But gentlemanliness, for Buggy, was much more (or much less?) than what St. Paul had in mind. And Buggy was simply using Paul's Hymn to Charity as a celebrity endorsement for stock English gentlemanliness: "good-sportsmanship, cricket, the decent thing, wearing the right kind of clothes, using the proper spoon, not being a cad or a bounder."

But this is the passage that struck me:

The boys listened tolerantly to these thoughts. But I think St. Peter and the twelve Apostles would have been rather surprised at the concept that Christ had been scourged and beaten by soldiers, cursed and crowned with thorns and subjected to unutterable contempt and finally nailed to the Cross and left to bleed to death in order that we might all become gentlemen. (p.82)

So often we're content with simply being gentlemen, good citizens or nice people. We forget that Christ beckons us beyond niceness and into a Newness that only He can offer.