~ Yet freedom, yet Thy banner, torn but flying, streams like the thunderstorm, against the wind ~

(From the acclaimed television series Against the Wind, Pegasus Productions, 1978)

Thomas Merton says rather prolifically in the context of a chapter title from one of his perhaps lesser known yet marvelous works Raids on the Unspeakable, that “The Time of the End is the Time of No Room” and that the Incarnation of God’s only begotten Son into human experience signaled the Coming of the End. It effectively ushered into motion the End of Days as an evolutionary process, an unfolding of the drama of universal salvation that is a lead-up to a final show-down between what St Ignatius of Loyola calls The Two Standards or banners, one being The Standard of Christ and the other being The Standard of Satan. Now while this time of the definitive two standards or banners is in the process of unfolding and evolutionarily presenting itself to the world via the Church’s witness to the faith and its’ evangelization, there will come a time when the definitive choice of these two banners will be made crystal clear by Almighty God in a way not too dissimilar to the choice He gave the angels at the time He presented them with this choice of allegiance. For the evolution of the Time of the End has entered human history, indeed that of all creation at the birth of the Saviour, as the dawn of this climactic phase in history was in fact instigated by the very First Christmas.

What a phenomenal witness Merton gives all due reference to here when he says:

“The Evangelists, preparing us for the announcement of the birth of the Lord, remind us that the fullness of time has come. Now is the time of final decision, the time of mercy, the “acceptable time”, the time of settlement, the time of the end. It is the time of repentance, the time for the fulfillment of all promises, for the Promised One has come. But with the coming of the end, a great bustle and business begins to shake the nations of the world. The time of the end is the time of massed armies, “wars and rumours of wars,” of huge crowds moving this way and that, of “men withering away for fear,” of flaming cities and sinking fleets, of smoking lands laid waste, of technicians planning grandiose acts of destruction. The time of the end is the time of the Crowd: and the eschatological message is spoken in a world where, precisely because of the vast indefinite roar of armies on the move and the restlessness of turbulent mobs, the message can only be heard with great difficulty. Yet it is heard by those who are aware that the display of power,  ‘hubris’ and destruction is part of the ‘kerygma’. That which is to be judged annouces itself, introduces itself by its sinnister and arrogant claim to absolute power. Thus it is identified, and those who decide in flavour of this claim are numbered, marked with the sign of [tyrannical] power, aligned with [tyrannical] power, and destroyed with it.

Why then was the inn crowded? Because of the census, the eschatological massing of “the whole world” in centres of registration, to be numbered, to be identified with the structure of imperial power. The purpose of the census: to discover those who were to be taxed. To find out those who were eligible for service in the armies of the empire. The Bible had not been friendly to a census in the days when God was ruler of Israel (II Samuel, 24) The numbering of the people of God by an alien emperor and their full consent to it was itself an eschatological sign, preparing those who could understand it to meet judgement with repentance. After all, in the Apocalyptic literature of the Bible, this “summoning together” or convocation of the powers of the earth to do battle is a great sign of “the end”…….It was therefore impossible that the Word should lose Himself by being born into a shapeless and passive mass. He had indeed emptied Himself, taken the form of God’s servant, man. But He did not empty Himself to the point of becoming mass man, faceless man. It was therefore right that there should be no room for Him in a crowd that had been called together as an eschatological sign. His being born outside that crowd is even more of a sign. That there is no room for Him is a sign of the end.

Nor are the tidings of great joy announced in the crowded inn…..Hence The Great Joy is announced, after all, in the silence, loneliness and darkness, to shepherds “living in the fields”, or “living in the countryside”, and apparently unmoved by the rumours or the massed crowds. These are the remnant of the desert-dwellers, the nomads, the true Israel.

Even though “the whole world”  is ordered to be inscribed, they do not seem to be affected. Doubtless they have registered as Joseph and Mary will register, but they remain outside the agitation, and untouched by the vast movement, the massing of hundreds and thousands of people everywhere in the towns and cities.

They are therefore quite otherwise signed. They are designated, surrounded by a great light, they receive the message of The Great Joy, and they believe it with joy. They see the Shekinah over them, recognize themselves for what they are. They are the remnant, the people of no account, who are therefore chosen, the anawim. And they obey the light. Nor was anything else asked of them.

They go and see not a prophet, not a spirit, but the Flesh in which the glory of the Lord will be revealed and by which all men will be delivered from the power that is in the world, the power that seeks to destroy the world because the world is God’s creation, the power that mimics creation, and in doing so, pillages and exhausts the resources of a bounteous God-given earth…..

We live in a time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with a lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power, and acceleration [aka: the algorithm].

The primordial blessing “increase and multiply” has suddenly become a hemorrhage of terror. We are numbered in billions, and massed together, marshalled, numbered, marched here and there, taxed, drilled, armed, worked to the point of insensibility, dazed by information, drugged by entertainment, surfeited with everything…..

As the end approaches, there is no room for nature.” (1.)

He surveys much here, all of which ties in so poignantly too with the very struggles of our own time, not to mention our own locations and histories that while they are circumstantially placed outside of the Biblical canon, they nevertheless resound with all the force and might evoked by the echo of the Biblical narrative’s prophetic reverberation down through the ages. I originally wrote this reflection on Thomas Merton’s work on All Saints Day and have to remark that on All Saints Eve, I watched the 1st and 2nd episodes on disc 3 of the epic Australian mini-series Against the Wind*, which depicted how the colony of NSW was essentially founded as a gulag, a penal settlement, a place where because there was strategically “no room” left in the prisons of the British Isles, the backlog had to be siphoned off somewhere. As the times of that period (1788 – 1808) were set in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, this combined with the latent turmoil caused by the Reformation meant that the vast majority of those forced on ships to this new world gulag were not exactly what you would call your stock-standard hardened criminals. Most of these poor suffering souls were prisoners of dire poverty and socio-economic oppression brought about by either the squalor of Dickensian urban life in England or by the political repression undergone by Irish Catholic peasantry in their Gaelic homeland which was at the time being forcibly swallowed up by the greed of British empire-making ventures. This stunning semi-biographical basically showed how the theme of All Saints Eve corresponds to a commemoration of the Saints who were martyred while All Saints Day celebrates the gift to the whole Church that is the entire throng of all the Saints – those who were martyred and those who weren’t. One of my questions about this whole celebration is how come on All Saints Eve, there is no longer the liturgical colour red being donned by priests in their vestments considering that they donn red on the feast days of individual martyrs? Why then don’t they donn this colour on the feast, the vigil of All Saints which was historically dubbed an occasion to collectively commemorate all the martyrs in their own “Good Friday” which is their personal adjoining with Christ’s passion through the experience of their martyrdom? It would then follow that the following day is likened to Easter Sunday with white being aptly the liturgical colour. Also, I must add that the episodes I watched that evening tied in so well with the thematics of Thomas Merton’s paragraph on what the ushering-in of the End of Days means for us in light of the world’s bigger-picture situation. The first was called “An Agreement Between Officers and Men” and the second, “When Kings Come to Do Battle” . Both strategically hint at how it is that all too often the social and political calamities which unfold are more often than not highly indicative of a battle raging in the heavenlies, a spiritual battle taking place in the realm of the unseen but which manifests itself symptomatically in the temporal realm as the stuff of civil unrest, military strife, and empire-making.

And as for the crowd theme which features enigmatically in Thomas Merton’s imagery of the First Christmas, there was of course a huge crowd to incidentally accompany the birth of Christ, although it did not exactly welcome Him into the world as it merely convereged around about the general vicinity where He was born for the census just as there was one at His death which although amassed in a great throng around Him as He made His way to Calvary, did not actually give Him a hero’s send-off. We must however remember that Merton is speaking here of certain signs, things which have symbolic import as to the greater significance of the occasion, beyond, let us say here relative to the census scene in Bethlehem at the time of Christ’s birth, than what at first meets the eye.

At the time of reckoning, it is hinted, there will be these displays of convergence and as much as they serve the soveriegn will of God to augment or prophesy, they also serve to be instruments in the process of the unfolding of divine revelation in it’s outworking in the temporal realm. When we say that in God’s plan, nothing is ever wasted, we are pointing out the greater meaning of all that goes on in the world. If Alice von Hildebrand speaks of such a thing as redemptive suffering, then this is what she means. Saying this is not in any way meant to dilute the seriousness of all that unfolds but rather to the contrary, it is intending to make sense of it in such a way that powerfully aligns it with the all-beneficient plans of the Almighty. However, this realization no matter how objectively true cannot diminish the subjective or experiential weight of the pains undergone. And this latter point is precisely that which often hits us the hardest and in the most direct of ways.

And as I was contemplating the scenes Merton was describing from the first Christmas, scenes of what he saw as the stark contrast between the hussle, bustle, and frenetic pandemonium of the amassing crowds in Bethlehem for the census and the sheer ineffibility of silent wonder that struck the scene out in the fields yonder where shepherds kept and watched over their flocks on a night that was lit not so much by the light of the moon but by that of a perhaps never before seen celestial wonder of a star so huge, so magnificently adorned in arrayment, so majestically bright, high in the sky on that effervescently luminous and most awesome of serenely silent nights…….

There came to me this supposition and I saw it so clearly within my imaginative comport as one sees a scene unfold in a movie ……the speculation that there could very well have been a woman who, amidst all the hussle and frenetic movement of crowds in the centre of a town so caught up in the buzz of this highly charged politicized convergence of a great many throngs, a woman who had the distinct sense that something much more significant and of a far greater importance was actually going on since she could sense this – not the mere heightened freneticism of human activity – but something mysteriously captivating that at one and the same time seemed to hover over this activity and yet went beyond it….and I saw this vision of her being awe-struck by it in the midst of the bustling crowd and it was as though she was overwhelmed by a weight of glory beyond all telling……..could it be that she had experienced what St Teresa of Avila calls the union with the divine? She was obviously struck so obliteratingly full that it was as though her whole being was struck by lightening from within by something that wasn’t lightening as such but it was nonetheless from without, somewhere around about the place on which she stood, and it seemed to her that it came from somewhere yonder the town itself……Might it be that the dream she relates to this friend in passing, which she tells that she had dreamt last night, the night before being awe-struck in the street, prove to be something more than just a dream? She tells of a dream she had wherein which she saw that somewhere outside a bustling town such as the one she was in the midst of, beheld the birthing of the long-awaited Messaiah, only that the friend she spoke of this to was blithe to accept her tellings as more than the mere stuff of dreams whereby the mind sorts out its own dilemmas by way of imparting to the sleeping recipient powerful visual imagineries. It struck me all the same that this woman could have been blessed to encounter Jesus in the flesh once He had grown to manhood and was active in His ministry.

And while there is no direct mention of such a woman in the canonical Gospel accounts, there is no reason for us to make the cold-hard presumption that she could not have possibly existed. It just may well be that some archaic tradition could very well speak of such a woman. We could very well connect this with one of the women whom encounters Jesus in the Gospels. Because none of the Gospel accounts indicate Mary Magdelene’s age, it is only right to speculate that she could very well have been somewhere around the age of 45 at the time of encountering Jesus in His adulthood which then means that when Jesus was born, she would have already been 15. There is some likelihood to this story but as with all stories which remain unattested to or largely unverified, the significance would be allegorical and serve to carry pious symbolism rather than any kind of dogmatic decree. The convoluted manner in which God’s sovereign will unfolds is the stuff of that which we often dubb as God working in mysterious ways. And stories such as the one described above are no exception.

The thing that strikes me as most significant in view of this theme of the Coming of the End is none other than how this phenomenon of “no room” categorically plays out in the contemporary era. This day and age is perhaps characterized by the phenomenon of “no room” in a far more uniquely extreme way that has ubiquitously impacted inter-societal relationships on an inter-personal level to such a degree the likes of which have never been seen before. Thomas Merton made no overstatement when he said that the time of the End is the time of no room. As is very often the case with nameless, faceless crowds there is all too often a menacing spiritually felt resonance that signals there is no room in their hearts for love. It is the ultimate tragedy of this age and we need to take stock of this in order to counteract it with the full veracity of the virtue that ought to tend our hearts – for the culture of life needs to be that which overcomes the culture of death as the ushering in of the New Era of Peace promised us by the First Christmas depends on it.

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Endnotes:

(1.) Merton, T., Raids on the Unspeakable, 1977, pp. 45-49, London, Burns & Oates.

* Pegasus Productions, Against the Wind, 1978, Umbrella Entertainment, Sydney, Australia.