Mirth Tons – an essay by Angela Townsend

Mirth Tons

Thomas Merton and I are having a small quarrel.

That’s not entirely fair. My Thomas lives in the great crescendo beyond quarrels, and when he prays for me, his smile is as warm as peace.

But my Thomas was once a tight knot, and I tangle with him across time and space.

My Thomas is not my Thomas alone, of course. Many others feel his arm linked in theirs, his soft steps crunching leaves beside them. He is one of those writers who feels like home, precisely because he never seems fully at home. 

That makes my Thomas a bit of a mood ring, which would amuse him immensely. The Vatican I persnicketies, the Buddhiversalist kaleidoscopes, my angriest atheist colleague, and the man who mops the Wawa — they all claim my Thomas as their friend. None of them are wrong.

But when his youth was a fist, my Thomas would have called them all wrong.

In the brisk certainty of first faith, my Thomas was November wind. His words gasp exasperated in this era, pedantic and squeezing. 

How do the self-indulgent not see what he sees, a pitiful shoreline of Jabba the Hutts making Jesus weep? How could their arms be so limp, their hands so grasping, their fidelity prone to brown-outs when the Power was present?

This is where I’m meeting my Thomas right now, in his early writings. Even though I know how he later unfurled, bewildered with wonder and large with love, I wriggle when he tells me I am flabby and blind. 

I wriggle because I see the wraith of myself at the same age. 

I knew who was right and who was wrong, and I feared the fat of gentleness. Far better to err on the lean side, the pristine side. 

This took different hues for me than for my Thomas — where he was crisply Catholic with stern centuries behind him, I was an undercooked evangelical, counting among my favorite theologians Larry the Cucumber and Kirk Cameron, spurning mood rings and desktop Buddhas as nefarious New Age devilry.

I quarrel with my Thomas when he speaks in razors, because when we walk together, I realize we have matching, self-inflicted wounds. 

But my Thomas loved the Wounded One enough to keep walking. 

As they walked into the night together, my Thomas was taken by surprise. The people of peace came in colors outside any codex. Distant hymns did not align with fixed hours. What was asked and what was given took each other’s hands, and grace had the stronger grip.

And when my Thomas unclenched his fist, seeds of joy blew in a thousand directions.

Love overtook my Thomas, love that left him with a limp and a laugh. He famously fell into ecstasy on an ordinary street corner, engulfed in God’s infatuation for the selfish, threadbare, gasping strangers scrambling past. They were so beautiful, he trembled. His open hands stretched to show them what he knew: “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

But he did, my Thomas. For the rest of his life, he did, and he does, and he will, until every wound is healed and the only knots are cords of love. 

Like all his moody, muddled friends, I have made Thomas Merton my own Thomas, when he is of course God’s Thomas. In the post-rigid recovery of my wildflower-child faith, I have probably painted him more technicolor than he was, a huggable universalist Jesus freak who wants me to prioritize self-care whilst feeding the hungry.

But my Thomas, cresting the great crescendo, can forgive me. 

My Thomas, who found the grace to go without knowing, goes with every mixed-up mystic with courage to quarrel. We are all so right and so wrong, street-corner urchins saved by grace. We hurt ourselves and each other. We get our fists pried open and filled with bread. Jesus bandages our wounds before the light turns red.

We all belong to God.

We shine like the sun.

Peace be with you, my Thomas, my brother, my friend.

Story is the soul of Angela Townsend’s calling. As Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary, she has the privilege of bearing witness to mercy for all beings. This was not the vocation Angela expected when she got her Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary, but love is a wry author of lives. Angela also has a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from Vassar College. She has had Type 1 diabetes for 32 years and lives in Bucks County, PA with two shaggy comets disguised as cats.