The Trouble with Angels: RIP Sr. John Eudes

Sr. John Eudes, inspiration for ‘The Trouble With Angels’ passes away at age 95. Her character was a feisty young woman who learned "scathingly brilliant" wisdom from her perceived imprisonment.

News story here. This video clip is also quite good:

Venezuelan gangs now using food to recruit children

Bundles of bolivars

The Eudists serve in Venezuela. The people of the country are now facing unimaginable difficulty securing the basics of life: food, medicine, electricity...

Inflation soared over 2,000% in 2017 by conservative estimates (4,000% according to Bloomberg which is no slouch in fact-checking). This means that “If you want to buy a can of tomatoes, you have to carry six bundles of 100-bolivar bills.” [source]

Further bad news: "75% of people who die as a result of the criminal violence are less than 30 years old, and that the same percentage of the killers are 29 years or younger." And gangs which perpetrate this kind of violence are using food to recruit more members.

Pray for the people of Venezuela, pray for the Eudist priests and lay associates ministering there. Pray especially for the students they teach in the diocesan seminaries. I imagine that an intense amount of pressure is put on those young men: do they stay in formation? Do they go home in the desperate hope that their families would better survive with their help? Are the seminary's resources even enough to support them or would they be just as well served looking elsewhere?

Their plight brings to mind a letter which St. John Eudes wrote to a dear friend of his who was suffering terribly in mourning for her brother who was killed in war. I find it to be a beautiful hymn to the unity of Christ's body with our Head when we suffer. He writes:

"My soul is filled with sadness and my heart with anguish at the thought of your agony. I cannot think of you and your pitiable state without pain and tears. That, I believe, I am allowed. I see Jesus, the joy of heaven and earth, giving way to profound grief and sobbing at the sight of the tears of Martha and Mary bemoaning the death of their brother...

I want to weep with Jesus that I may honor His tears.
I wish to weep with the same emotions and sentiments as Jesus when He wept.
I desire to offer Him a sacrifice of tears in homage of His divine and adorable tears.
Let us, madam, offer Him our tears in honor of His.
Let us beseech Him to unite them to His...

Madam, behold Jesus within your heart. He is there wishing to bear with you the harshness of your trial. But he neither can nor does he wish to bear it without you. Unite yourself, therefore, with Him that you may bear your sorrow with Him.

He would pick up this same theme almost without interruption in a later letter to her:

He is there, madam; He abides within you.
He is present in your anguish and sufferings.
He is there, all love and completely transformed into love for your sake.
He is there, preparing and giving order to these sufferings for love of you.
He is there, bearing all the anguish of mind and body that is yours to bear.
Bearing it with you through His love...

Jesus allows us to weep for the pain of our brothers in Christ, for this suffering branch of our human family. As we do, let us remember that hidden in these tears, sobs, and cries of pain which we share with them, underneath is the voice of Christ, crying, sobbing, and aching along with them as "in our bodies we make up for what still remains in the sufferings of Christ."

We are not alone in our own Good Friday. And we shall not be alone when He shares with us His Easter Sunday.

Thomas Merton and St. John Eudes

It's a whodunnit.

St. John Eudes' bestselling classic, The Kingdom of Jesus, was published in English for the first time in 1947. The title page declares it as "Translated by a Trappist Father in the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani." Two years later, The Seven Storey Mountain would be published from that same abbey selling 13,000 copies in its first month. Thomas Merton's runaway bestseller catapulted him from total obscurity to a path which would make him arguably one of the greatest Catholic thinkers of the 20th century.

So naturally, everyone wants a piece of him.

Some Eudists have been eager to claim this superstar as the anonymous "Trappist Father" translator of The Kingdom, while others are not so sure. Detractors would say that Fr. John Eudes Bamberger lived across the hall from Merton at Gethsemani for 18 years. Certainly if this man chose John Eudes as his religious name, wouldn't he be the more likely candidate?

Wonder no more.

Merton scholars probably have only a vestigial knowledge of who St. John Eudes is, but the 2002 Thomas Merton Encyclopedia claims it unquestioningly. Their chronology of Merton's work places The Kingdom's translation as an assignment he was given as a novice in 1946 (chronology on p. vi, with a full entry on p. 259-256):

"Only this volume (of St. John Eudes' works) was translated by Thomas Merton, who is simply identified as 'a Trappist Father' (even though he was still three years from ordination at the time)."

It was evidently one of two spiritual classics translated from French by Merton between his simple vows (1944) and solemn vows (1947), the other being Dom Chautard's Soul of the Apostolate. Merton's attribution for this latter work was again anonymous: "A Monk of Our Lady of Gethsemani," although he would claim it when a new edition was published in 1961 (Encyclopedia, p. 445-446).

A passage from The Seven Storey Mountain does obliquely describe a translation process during Lent of 1946 (p. 401 of the 1948 Harcourt edition), but fails to name the works in question:

"After the Conventual Mass, I would get out book and pencil and papers and go to work at one of the long tables in the novitiate scriptorium, filling the yellow sheets as fast as I could, while another novice took them and typed them as soon as they were finished." 

The decisive testimony required to settle the question comes from the memoirs of the "other novice" referred to. Fr. Benjamin Clark published his recollections of "Thomas Merton's Gethsemani" in vols. 4-5 of "The Merton Annual." The translation for which Fr. Clark was the typist is described on pp. 249-250 of vol. 4:

"I remember one such assignment which Merton records (SSM, p. 401). Gethsemani had entered a contract to translate the work of St. John Eudes for the publication of a new edition. Several of the monks had been assigned volumes to translate, and Merton was given The Kingdom of Jesus in Christian Souls. The publishers had allowed only a short time for the work to be completed and so I was assigned to help Merton meet the deadline. I typed the finished copy in triplicate as Merton dashed off the original on sheets of yellow paper...

When the work was finished and delivered to the publisher, I told Father Robert [the novicemaster] that I thought Merton had done an excellent job of translating. Father Robert told me that the publisher agreed and said that it was the best translation of any of the works of St. John Eudes that he had seen. As the name Thomas Merton would have meant nothing at that time, the translation was published without mentioning the translator's name"

There we have it. A firsthand account from the typist.

So what?

Merton was obedient, but did he actually read the thing as he was "dashing off pages"? Patrick O'Connell gives a highly condensed answer. An answer which could be rather unsatisfying if one is looking for concrete connections:

"While the highly structured devotional emphasis of the work has little in common with Merton's own contemplative focus, Eudes does share with Merton a strongly Pauline emphasis on identifying with the person of Jesus Christ as the central spiritual dynamic not just for professed religious but for all Christians."

Being far from a Merton scholar myself, I can bring the question no further. I did, however, discover St. John Eudes sneaking into the Trappist's poetry. The 2000 Fall edition of the "Merton Seasonal" contains a group of early poemspreviously unpublished. Two are early drafts of a piece entitled "Sacred Heart 2 (A Fragment--)." St. John Eudes would fall out of the final cut when the poem was published posthumously in the 1971 collection Early Poems. However, his place in the early versions provide a lyrical note on which to end this article. The following are two versions of an early stanza in the unpublished drafts. The poem as a whole (well worth reading in extenso) seems to explore the tension between apophatic unknowing and kataphatic raptures:

(earlier [?] version)
"...when I try to build You in the Sisters' jigsaws
And make You come out even, with a face of flowers,
My heart is deader than the sheep in the design,
My mind is stuffy with their artificial wool -
For all these holy fervors,
Sung in the long light-operas of St John Eudes,
Build me a thousand barricades,
And there I die, abandoned, in a sing-sing of affections..."

(later [?] version)
"...Lock me and bind me and save me from the Sisters' jig-saws,
I cannot make You come out even, with that face of flowers:
My will is deader than the sheep in the design,
My faith is stifled by their artificial wool,
And all these courteous fervors,
The holy arias of St John Eudes,
Rack me and kill me in a Sing-sing of affections,
Break me and slay me in a pile of cushions..."