Street Seens: Merton, Music and a Spirited Bunny

In less than six days my voyages of discovery in three of our city’s villages revealed a treasure house of talent, creativity and openness to see beyond the predictable.

It started on a Thursday evening when a visit to the three-hour Heart Health Month fair at New York Hospital provided not just descriptions of health promoting and enhancing techniques and habits but also the gift of being able to sample them. So it might be predicted that I was a bit reluctant to head up to Corpus Christi Church in the Columbia University “village” to experience a one-man play called “Alive at Fourth and Walnut,” about the astounding life of Thomas Merton: from birth to a Quaker parent in France to untimely death in Bangkok. The moral of my little story is push on, there’s yet another mind and soul expanding experience awaiting you in our uber-village’s treasury of miracles.

Thomas Merton

Corpus Christi is the church where Merton was baptized while an undergraduate at Columbia. The storyteller was James Nagle, Ohio-based actor-playwright and curator of an apparently encyclopedic body of research on the life and spiritual pilgrimage of the man of the world who died a Trappist monk. There may have been people in the audience that night who knew Merton only as one of the four national treasures Pope Francis named in his recent address to the US Congress. Nagle began with the iconic event in Merton’s life of a blinding insight that came to him at the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky. With an impact akin to Paul’s on the Road to Damascus, the monk who had come into the city for a dental appointment saw, really saw as if for the first time, the cosmic connection he had with all of his brothers and sisters. An intellectual and spiritual belief was bonded into his whole being.

As the story unfolded, (and don’t ask me if it was five minutes or five days, ordinary time became irrelevant) Nagle guided us through the events, the longings, the peaks and valleys that defined the life of Merton. It included the account in which he saw the image of a burned man, an image he perhaps only really understood in the last moments of his life.

I apologize for telling you this “after the fact” but urge you to establish a channel of communication with the International Thomas Merton Society and the Campus Ministry at Columbia to learn more about next and other performances. This was the second of which I got word from Brenda Fitch Fairaday. Remembering the power of Boston College Professor Paul Mariani’s exploration of the impact of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry on the writings and life of Merton was easily enough to make the pilgrimage to an urban village some hundred blocks away irresistible. (And to inspire a shout out for the wonders of MTA Bus 4 and its intersection with the 66th Street crosstown.)

James Nagle’s card, which includes none of the predictable references to electronics, styles him as “Storyteller for the Lord.” So let me also include a shout out and congratulations on said Lord’s choice of an ambassador.

By this past Tuesday I had learned enough to put aside cautions about the rather unpleasant weather that had to be dealt with to get to Carnegie Hall. I was not familiar with the night’s artist, Dame Mitsuko Uchida (which I think condemns me to be rated as a Philistine since she has a stunning discography and honors ranging from a DBE from Elizabeth II to Japan’s highest cultural honor via a pathway crowded with awards and artistic achievements). The twin magnets that drew me to 57th and Seventh were the generosity of my friend and subscription owner and the variety of a program that began with Alban Berg and went on to conclude with Schumann’s Concerto in F Sharp Minor following four Schubert Impromptus and a Mozart Rondo that led me to hope that the tortured young composer had himself felt some of the serenity Dame Michiko captured in her performance.

Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesDame Mitsuko Uchida

And if all that is not enough to underscore the value of travelling to other villages to encounter beauty, there was the fellow concertgoer I passed at the interval who was putting finishing touches on an infinitely detailed and beautiful pen and ink drawing he had done of the pianist from his vantage point far to the left of the stage. He had captured her bent reverently over the keyboard and an insert of her (I thought most unusual for a pianist) hands. Strong enough to support the raw physicality of some of her performance they looked also as if they were not strangers to pain and well suited to brush away the tears that she experienced in the course of the performance. When complimented on his work he told me that by drawing he is reminded of and better able to hear the music he has heard. The program notes told us Dame Michiko Uchida is a devotee of chamber music and plays with many of the world’s finest instrumentalists. Remembering the definition of that form as “the music of friends” I was not surprised at her commitment to it. I recalled the wedding day toast of the groom of a dear friend granted an MBE for her service to Northern Ireland’s tourism when he said, “Maebetth has an honor from the Queen, but a personality from Heaven.” Some version of the same might be said of Dame Michiko Ucheda. And so too of Carnegie Hall and its faithful audiences and supporters.

That brings us to Wednesday when I was retracing the pathway on Third Avenue that passes Pier One Imports en route to the Chase Bank branch whose ATM distributes a variety of bills in addition to the ubiquitous $20s. An elegant young woman was looking in the display windows at an assortment of artful bunnies: natural grass, porcelain, and pillows in an extensive evocation of Spring and Easter. She commented, as I passed, “Aren’t they lovely? Do you think they are for sale or just for display? “

“Oh they are definitely for sale and I urge you to go about three windows North to see Sofie the Bunny pillow. A brown bunny sitting upright, like a lead character in Watership Down with ears alert and surrounded by lovely blossoms and butterflies. I sent that to my sister just yesterday.”

bunny

She looked as if she expected the story to continue. And so it did. “What drew me was the fact that a few months after the death of their son on an Easter Sunday, she and her husband returned to Sea Island, Georgia where they had spent their honeymoon. On opening the drapes one morning they saw a brown bunny looking quite like the one you’ll see. Sitting still and looking at them.”

She interrupted, “It was a spirit.” “I think so”, I answered, “their firstborn son. And even today a bronze figure of just such a bunny guards the door of a gazebo in their lawn that in spring and summer is crowned with clematis.”

The young woman said, “My Uncle died recently and when the family gathered on the deck a buck came up nearly to the railing and stood there looking intently at all of us who had come to mourn him. Nothing will convince me that that was not the spirit of my Uncle.”

I can’t say that encounter was unique. I am constantly surprised and delighted by what I hear from strangers on buses, sidewalks and supermarkets. Because as I suggested when we started these shared voyages of discovery I hoped they might lead us to look at things with a fresh eye, it was because I knew what richness there is in “Street Seens” we share.

Photo of Mitsuko Uchida by Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

About Annette Sara Cunningham (119 Articles)
Annette Sara Cunningham comes to Street Seens and Woman Around Town as a “villager” who migrated from Manhattan, Illinois to Manhattan 10065. She is currently the recovering ringmaster of a deliberately small three-ring enterprise privileged to partner with world-class brands to make some history as strategist and creative marketer. The “history” included the branding, positioning and stories of Swiss Army’s launch of watches; Waterford Crystal’s Millennium Collection and its Times Square Ball; the Orbis flying eye hospital’s global assault on preventable blindness; the green daring that in a matter of months, turned a Taiwan start up’s handheld wind and sun powered generator into a brand standing tall among the pioneers of green sustainability; travel to Finland’s Kings’ Road and Santa’s hometown near the Arctic Circle; the tourism and trade of Northern Ireland; and the elegant exports of France. She dreamed at age 12 of being a writer. But that dream was put on hold, while she became: successively, teacher of undergraduate philosophy, re-brander of Ireland from a seat at the table of the Irish Government’s Export Board; then entrepreneur, as founder and President of ASC International, Ltd. and author of Aunts: a Celebration of Those Special Women in our Lives (soon to be reborn as Aunts; the Best Supporting Actresses.) Now it’s time to tell the 12-year old that dreams sometimes come true.