Hagia Sophia 16th century depiction

‘There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribably humility. This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my Creator’s Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom.’

This is the beginning of Thomas Merton’s prose/poem ‘Hagia Sophia’ that celebrates Divine Wisdom as the feminine manifestation of God, as found in the Book of Proverbs. Structured in four parts Merton’s work is based on the canonical hours of prayer, and is his most lyrical expression of “Christ being born into the whole world” especially in that which is most “poor” and “hidden.” It is a hymn of peace.

In the late 1950s, the image of Christ as the Wisdom of God, as Sophia, began to haunt Merton’s religious imagination as a Love and Presence that breaks through into the world. He writes about this in his Journal. In 1958, Merton had a powerful dream of a young Jewish girl named “Proverb”, who came to embrace Merton ‘with determined and virginal passion’. Some days later, he reflects more deeply on his dream:

‘How grateful I am to you for loving in me something which I thought I had entirely lost, and someone who, I thought, I had long ago ceased to be. And in you, dear, though some might be tempted to say you do not even exist, there is a reality as real and as wonderful and as precious as life itself.’

Some weeks later, Merton envisioned this same female manifestation of God at the crossroads of Fourth and Walnut streets in downtown Louisville as part of his famous epiphany. A year later, he writes that he met Proverb again in an encounter when woods near Gethsemani caught fire, and he met and spoke to some impoverished children  traumatized by what has happened.

‘I came home thinking of nothing but these poor little Christs with holes in their pants and their sweet, sweet voices. Once again I had seen Proverb and heard her speak and remained heartbroken with love for her. If only my love could have some truth in it.’

Over a year later, on the Feast of Visitation, Proverb came in the guise of a nurse, whose gentle whispers awakened him one morning as he lay in a hospital bed awaiting X-rays:

‘At 5.30, as I was dreaming, in a very quiet hospital, the soft voice of the nurse awoke me gently from my dream – and it was like awakening for the first time from all the dreams of my life – as if the Blessed Virgin herself, as if Wisdom had awakened me. We do not hear the soft voice, the gentle voice, the feminine voice, the voice of the Mother: yet she speaks everywhere and in everything. Wisdom cries out in the market place- “if anyone is little let him come to me.”’

Two years later, in 1962, Merton wrote his extraordinary prose poem on Hagia Sophia, reworking his epiphany with the nurse and ending that part with:

‘When the helpless one awakens strong at the voice of mercy, it is as if Life his Sister, as if the Blessed Virgin, (his own flesh, his own sister), as if nature made wise by God’s Art and Incarnation were to stand over him and invite him with unutterable sweetness to be awake and live. This is what it means to recognize Hagia Sophia.’