Dates matter to me. The 10th of December is the Feast Day of Karl Barth and Thomas Merton. They both died in 1968. Barth was a theologian and Merton, a Trappist monk. When I arrived at The General Theological Seminary in September of 1969, I did not know anything about either of these two men. However, during my years at Seminary they both became important to me in my own spiritual growth…even though it has taken many years of living beyond those years for me to come close to understanding why that would be so.
My fleeting memory of anything about Barth comes from a professor at GTS who, commenting on something I had written for his class, wrote in a comment that my thoughts were “Barthian.” Unfortunately, Dr. Carpenter who wrote that note did not elaborate and, more unfortunately, since I was not a very good student, I had read not one word of Karl Barth to that point. Dr. Carpenter’s note spurred me on to check out Barth…and there is a lot to check out! Barth wrote a thirteen-volume opus: Church Dogmatics. “He was one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century whom Pope Pius XII regarded as the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas.” If you are curious about my theology, friends reading this, read some Barth…you will be at it for years to come since there is so much to read! In retrospect, I should have been honored at the time when Dr. Carpenter wrote that note on my paper. To be compared to Karl Barth in any way should have made me sit up and take more notice.
Thomas Merton was introduced to me by an upper class student shortly after I arrived at GTS. Rick gave me a copy of Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, the writer’s personal reflections and meditations on contemporary issues. It would become as important to me as Holy Writ and the Book of Common Prayer. Still is. If you have never read this book of Merton’s, I would encourage you to find one and read it. Easy, because it is in short snippets which, even the worst reader and most easily distracted, could read and find worth their while. Even easy for the busiest student currently in a seminary in Fort Worth, whom we at St. Thomas the Apostle all know and love. Soul food par excellence that lasts a lifetime. Merton died from an accidental electrical shock while attending a meeting of religious leaders during a pilgrimage to the Far East. Years later, I would find his grave at the Trappist Monastery near Bardstown, Kentucky, making my own pilgrimage to pray in thanksgiving for this powerful man of God.
Good friends in God and St. Thomas the Apostle, all of us are connected not only to one another but to that vast cloud of witnesses who have come and gone before us in the Faith. Their witness to God’s love and purposes in God’s World matters and informs our current attempts at witness. Knowing about them and what they wrote and believed and taught enlightens our own lives. Mercifully, we are not the only Christians to come down the pike…others have come before us…others will follow us. Yet, while we are here (alive in this life) let us all work to spread The Light in the Darkness, taking some of the fire from those who have gone before.
10 December 1960 was the date of my confirmation as a member of the Episcopal Church. Dates do matter. They tie us together in the Faith.
Stephen Waller
