Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Monk’s Record Player
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1941?
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE: MI
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
He and his wife, Shelley, play in the old-time string band Gooder’n Grits; phone: 616 682 4830; http://www.gooderngrits.us/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 88059776 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n88059776 |
| HEADING: | Hudson, Bob, 1953- |
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| 001 | 3000321 |
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| 040 | __ |a DLC |c DLC |d DLC |
| 100 | 10 |a Hudson, Bob, |d 1953- |
| 400 | 10 |a Hudson, Robert R., |d 1953- |
| 400 | 10 |a Hudson, Robert, |d 1953- |
| 670 | __ |a A Christian writer’s manual of style, 1988: |b CIP t.p. (Bob Hudson) |
| 670 | __ |a Ph. call to B. Hudson, 6/10/88 |b (Bob Hudson; b. 8/28/53) |
| 670 | __ |a Companions for the soul, 1995: |b CIP t.p. (Robert R. Hudson) |
| 670 | __ |a The Christian writer’s manual of style, c2003: |b ECIP t.p. (Robert Hudson) |
| 953 | __ |a ba30 |b lf03 |
PERSONAL
Born August 28, 1953; married Shelley Townsend; children: Abbie, Molly, Lili.
EDUCATION:Holds a master’s degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, journalist, editor, musician. Zondervan/HarperCollins, Grand Rapids, MI, senior editor at large; editor of WorkingPOET.com; member, with wife and others, of the old times string band, Gooder ’n Grits; cofounder, with wife, of Perkipery Press, a chapbook publisher. Serves on the board of the Calvin College Center for Faith and Writing. Has been a teacher, a book-store clerk, a journal editor, a translator, a book designer, a proofreader, and he has certificates in bookbinding and hand printing.
MEMBER:West Michigan Thomas Merton Society.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles and poetry to to Blue Unicorn, Seneca Review, Formalist, Mennonite, Christianity Today, Other Side, Mars Hill Review, West Hills Review, and many other journals.
SIDELIGHTS
Robert Hudson is a writer and editor whose work focuses on religious topics. Among his titles is the popular The Christian Writer’s Manual of Style, now in its fourth edition; Companions for the Soul: A Yearlong Journey of Miracles, Prayers, and Epiphanies, coedited with his wife, Shelley Townsend-Hudson; Four Birds of Noah’s Ark: A Prayer Book from the Time of Shakespeare, originally written in 1608 by playwright Thomas Dekker, and edited for a modern audience by Hudson; and the 2018 work, The Monk’s Record Player: Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966.
Hudson, who has been an editor Zondervan for over three decades, also writes poetry and with his wife is a member of the string band, Gooder ’n Grits. A man who wears many professional hats, Hudson is also cofounder with his wife of the chapbook publishing house, Perkipery Press.
The Christian Writer's Manual of Style and Companions of the Soul
Originally published in 1988, The Christian Writer’s Manual of Style has been updated and revised several times, with its most recent edition appearing in 2016. This has become the standard in the Christian publishing industry, and the fourth edition tackles aspects of the new technologies, including how to turn blogs into books and the effects of digital media on books. The work also includes an updated word list as well as the usual editorial information on abbreviations, capitalization, citations and other topics. Reviewing the 2016 edition in the online CBA, Ann Byle noted: “Publishers and writers looking for the definitive resource on religious publishing will find it in the newly released The Christian Writer’s Manual of Style … . This new edition features a quarter to a third revised material from the last edition, released in 2004, with the rest new or heavily revised.” In the same article, Hudson commented: “I have a passion for this stuff … . I want to help the reader receive an author’s ideas most effectively and smoothly. The words and mechanics should become invisible to the reader. But it’s amazing how emotional some of the discussions on these topics can get.”
Hudson and his wife serve as editors on Companions for the Soul, a gathering of daily meditations that will take the reader throughout the year. The editors include an eclectic mix of writers, from the Venerable Bede to John Wesley, Sir William Osler, and Dwight L. Moody. “Happily for us, Celtic saints and gospel-song writers share pages in an elegant devotional book,” noted Christianity Today Online reviewer Diane Komp.
Four Birds of Noah's Ark
With Four Birds of Noah’s Ark, Hudson re-introduces a forgotten classic to modern readers. Playwright Thomas Deckker originally wrote this gathering of fifty-six prayers in 1608 in the midst of the Black Death. Hudson modernizes and annotates these prayers from the time of Shakespeare and also provides an introduction to the work. The four birds of the title are the dove, the eagle, the pelican, and the mythical phoenix.
Reviewing Four Birds of Noah’s Ark in the online Spectrum Magazine, Alisa Williams noted: “In this newly released edition, published by Eerdmans and edited expertly by Robert Hudson, Dekker’s poignant, fervent prayers are available to a new generation, and are surprisingly and delightfully still relevant for today’s Christians. … Dekker’s little book is a powerful reminder of the beauty of prayer for our everyday lives, and the accessibility of Christ — our friend — if we just open our hearts to Him.” Writing in Lutheran Forum website, Sarah Hinlicky Wilson also had praise, commenting: “Four Birds of Noah’s Ark is such a delightful surprise: prayers that do not bore.” Online Presbyterian Outlook writer Roy Howard was also impressed, observing: “This is a most unusual book–and a lovely one at that.” Howard added: “Hudson … has done the world a great favor by retrieving this old book of prayers. … The prayers have a precision and eloquence that still lift the spirit.” Church Times Online reviewer Michael Caines similarly termed this a “careful reworking of Dekker for today.”
The Monk's Record Player
In The Monk’s Record Player, Hudson offers a parallel biography of two cultural icons in one pivotal year. Thomas Merton, the activist monk, began living as a hermit outside the walls of his Trappist monastery in 1965. Months later, after a secret yet physically chaste affair with a young woman, Merton seemed on the edge of losing his life’s work as his abbot discovered the romance. Merton found solace, however, in an unlikely place: the songs of singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, who was experiencing his own creative crisis in the summer of 1966, re-imagining his career as a rocker at the Newport Folk Festival. Hudson looks at the influence of Dylan’s music on the writing and life of Merton, and also how Dylan during this same time was recuperating from a motorcycle accident.
Reviewing The Monk’s Record Player in Booklist, Ray Olson observed: “There are many books about Merton already, but Hudson, merging his fascinations with Merton and Dylan, writes so limpidly that shelf room just must be made for this one.” A Publishers Weekly contributor similarly noted that Hudson “weaves a fun tale of cross-cultural influence in this exploration of Bob Dylan’s influence on Thomas Merton.” Commonwealth Online writer Eric Miller felt this book is “delightfully difficult to classify.” Miller went on to comment: “Neither scholarly disquisition nor celebrity bio, it is rather history in the form of a fable: not dark but rather light comedy. It is light that illumines, finally, a direction home: through solemn vows, a solidarity born of forgiveness, and at least a touch of rock-and-roll.” International Times Online reviewer Rupert Loydell likewise thought this work is “refreshingly irreverent and impious, and makes Merton complex and very human, rather than a minor saint.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 1, 2018, Ray Olson, review of The Monk’s Record Player: Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966, p. 5.
Publishers Weekly, January 8, 2018, review of The Monk’s Record Player, p. 59.
ONLINE
CBA, http://cbaonline.org/ (May 10, 2018), Ann Byle, review of The Christian Writer’s Manual of Style.
Chrisitanity Today Online, https://www.christianitytoday.com/ (August 12, 1996), Diane Komp, review of Companions for the Soul: A Yearlong Journey of Miracles, Prayers, and Epiphanies.
Church Times Online, https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/ (November 24, 2017), Michael Caines, review of Four Birds of Noah’s Ark.
Commonwealth Online, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/ (April 18, 2018), Eric Miller, review of The Monk’s Record Player.
Englewood Review of Books, http://englewoodreview.org/ (January 26, 2018), Colin Chan Redemer, review of Four Birds of Noah’s Ark: A Prayer Book from the Time of Shakespeare.
Eerdword, https://eerdword.com/ (October 13, 2017), review of Four Birds of Noah’s Ark.
Festival of Faith and Writing, http://festival.calvin.edu/ (June 3, 2018), “Robert Hudson.”
Gooder’n Grits, http://www.gooderngrits.us/ (June 3, 2018), “Robert Hudson.”
International Times Online, http://internationaltimes.it/ (April 11, 2018), Rupert Loydell, review of The Monk’s Record Player.
Lutheran Forum, https://www.lutheranforum.com/ (October 9, 2017), Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, review of Four Birds of Noah’s Ark.
Nights and Weekends, http://www.nightsandweekends.com/ (June 3, 2018), “Robert Hudson.”
Presbyterian Outlook, https://pres-outlook.org/ (December 6, 2017), Roy Howard, review of Four Birds of Noah’s Ark.
Spectrum Magazine, https://spectrummagazine.org/ (March 13, 2018), Alisa Williams, review of Four Birds of Noah’s Ark.
Verse Daily, http://www.versedaily.org/ (June 3, 2018), “Robert Hudson.”
Gooder ’n Grits is a local West Michigan old-time band that has a Southern orientation without the twang or drawl. Focusing on the pre-bluegrass era of the Carolinas, we play fiddle and banjo in the Round Peak style made famous by Tommy Jarrell and others.
We have two banjo players who clog and flatfoot, two fiddlers, and two married couples whose lives have overlapped in many ways.
This music could be considered sentimental because its simpler, elemental Mayberry-era sound harks back to a time when people could sit on their front porches playing music or spend a Saturday night going to dances. But these tunes and songs of love’s innocence, humor, and hope for the future have a rightful place in today’s entertainment-saturated society.
The music still resonates in our collective memories, rich and sweet and lovely.
We practice real hard, so we know we’ll be Gooder than Grits.
Where we will be Playing
Here at GRFAS Contra Dance January 1, 2016 with our best bassist Bryan Wittemore.
Feb 14, 2014
"We had so much fun Friday night—and Gooder'n Grits was a hit! We heard from so many people that they truly enjoyed the music and the event.
We loved the music and you guys were great. Stephanie was in awe of your talent—as we all were, but those in our church who had no idea of your band couldn't stop talking about you—or--y'all!
R. told me later she had been skeptical about the event but she said it was too fun, and once she got on the dance floor she couldn't stop dancing!
I also need to thank the great callers you brought. I liked the way Karin got us out on the floor at the beginning; they made it fun for kids and adults.
Oh! It was a great night.
Thank you again so very very much!"
Paula
SEE FACEBOOK
FOR EVENTS AT THE SHAKER BARN, ADA MI
Our Youtube Videos
At the Outer Fringe GR Festival of the Arts 2015
At Bob's Barn 2013
Facebook Videos
Clogging at G.R. Festival of the Arts 2014
Water Bound/June Apple at Bob's 3-3-13
Check out the Dutch River Old Time String Band site for Old Country Love Songs
Short Profile:
Gooder’n Grits
Is an Old Time String Band that is inspired by the centuries old fiddle tunes of the upper south. Truly mountain music that is having a revival in the neo rural and urban folk bands. Two banjos, fiddle, guitar and bass bring you back a hundred years to when your family and neighbors gathered on Saturday for food music and dance. The hilarious songs take you aback at their rural universality,
Beware clogging, or flatfoot dancing may break out. A square dance could commence with the energy that emanates from these simple forms. They are definitely Gooder than Grits.
Robert Hudson is senior editor-at-large for Zondervan, a division of HarperCollins. He has co-written three books, most recently Companions for the Soul with his wife, Shelley Townsend-Hudson, and Beyond Belief with Duane W. H. Arnold. His work has appeared in Blue Unicorn, Christianity Today, West Hills Review, and many other journals.
Bob Hudson
Poetry, Publishing
Robert (Bob) Hudson is a senior editor at large for Zondervan/HarperCollins and the author of The Christian Writer’s Manual of Style, now in its fourth edition, which has become the industry standard. He has also written a collection of poems, Kiss the Earth When You Pray, and a study of Bob Dylan’s influence on Thomas Merton, The Monk’s Record Player. In addition, he has recently collected and edited the Thomas Dekker’s prayers, Four Birds of Noah’s Ark.
Hudson co-wrote Beyond Belief: What the Martyrs Said to God with Duane Arnold and Companions for the Soul with his wife, Shelley Townsend-Hudson. Together, they also own the Perkipery Press, a chapbook publisher that has issued dozens of volumes over the past three decades.
Hudson’s poetry and articles have appeared in the Seneca Review, the Formalist, the Mennonite, Christianity Today, the Other Side, and Mars Hill Review, among many others.
Dear John the Evangelist: What If the Writer of the Fourth Gospel Had to Get His Work Published in Today’s Market? | article | Christianity Today
On Prayer II | poem | The Other Side
The Woman at the Next Table | poem | The Formalist
Review: The Christian Writer’s Manual of Style | review | Sojo Theo
BOOKS: Good Company | review | Christianity Today
Festival Years: 1990, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2018
Recommended Reading
The Christian Writer’s Manual of Style (4th ed., 2016)
Companions for the Soul
Beyond Belief: What the Martyrs Said to God
The Monk’s Record Player
Four Birds of Noah’s Ark
Robert Hudson Contributor
hudsbob@comcast.net WorkingPOET
Robert Hudson is editor of WorkingPOET.com, an online journal about the process of poetry. He also edits books for Zondervan and has co-written three books, most recently Beyond Belief. In his spare time he likes to play with his three wonderful daughters and swing Tai Chi swords around -- though not at the same time.
QUOTE:
There are many books about Merton already, but Hudson, merging his fascinations with Merton and Dylan, writes so limpidly that shelf room just must be made for this one.
The Monk's Record Player: Thomas
Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous
Summer of 1966
Ray Olson
Booklist.
114.11 (Feb. 1, 2018): p5. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Monk's Record Player: Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966. By Robert Hudson. Mar. 2018. 260p. Eerdmans, $23.99 (9780802875204). 271.
Writer, mystic, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915-68) discovered Bob Dylan in 1965--That was the year that he began to live separately from his fellows in the new hermitage building on the grounds of his Gethsemani, Kentucky, monastery and that Dylan controversially came out as a rocker by opening his Newport Folk Festival set accompanied by electric blues players. Since 1958, Merton had refocused from personal spiritual development to human rights and international peace, and he found appropriate inspiration in "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'." Dylan's newer, rock-accompanied, surrealist songs "Maggie's Farm," "Positively Fourth Street," and others cut even deeper, affecting in particular Merton's new poetry. Hudson presents Dylan's influence on Merton during a momentous period, 1965-68, that also included, for Merton, a clandestine (and physically chaste) love affair; for Dylan, a sidelining motorcycle accident and a huge burst of creativity. There are many books about Merton already, but Hudson, merging his fascinations with Merton and Dylan, writes so limpidly that shelf room just must be made for this one. --Ray Olson
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Olson, Ray. "The Monk's Record Player: Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer
of 1966." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2018, p. 5. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com /apps/doc/A527771699/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c1d03569. Accessed 9 May 2018.
1 of 3 5/9/18, 10:32 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527771699
2 of 3 5/9/18, 10:32 PM
QUOTE:
weaves a fun tale of cross-cultural influence in this exploration of Bob Dylan's influence on Thomas Merton
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The Monk's Record Player: Thomas
Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous
Summer of 1966
Publishers Weekly.
265.2 (Jan. 8, 2018): p59. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Monk's Record Player: Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966 Robert Hudson. Eerdmans, $23.99 (260p) ISBN 978-0-8028-7520-4
Hudson (The Christian Writer's Manual of Style) weaves a fun tale of cross-cultural influence in this exploration of Bob Dylan's influence on Thomas Merton which never convincingly demonstrates a relationship beyond artist and fan. Though a Trappist hermit, Merton was also a worldly monk who traveled outside the monastery walls at the Abbey of Gethsemani in central Kentucky to meet with such cultural and religious figures as Joan Baez, Jacques Maritain, and Thich Nhat Han, Hudson writes. Merton also listened to jazz and folk (especially Dylan) on the abbey's record player. Drawing on the well-known details of the lives of these two figures in what's billed as a parallel biography, Hudson sketches arcs for both men that eventually come together with their separate involvements in pacifist movements of the mid-'60s. Readers are left with Merton's journals about Dylan as the two men's only connection since the book's protagonists never actually met. While Dylan's music serves as a nice frame for Merton's activism--chapters conclude with timelines tracking Merton's biography and Dylan's discography--the book reveals little new about either man. Newcomers to Merton will find many endearing details here, but general readers will come away wishing for deeper insights into the ways Dylan's music might have informed Merton's religious thinking. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Monk's Record Player: Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966."
Publishers Weekly, 8 Jan. 2018, p. 59. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com /apps/doc/A524503033/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=3e7b7ec3. Accessed 9 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A524503033
3 of 3 5/9/18, 10:32 PM
QUOTE:
In this newly released edition, published by Eerdmans and edited expertly by Robert Hudson, Dekker’s poignant, fervent prayers are available to a new generation, and are surprisingly and delightfully still relevant for today’s Christians.
Dekker’s little book is a powerful reminder of the beauty of prayer for our everyday lives, and the accessibility of Christ — our friend — if we just open our hearts to Him.
Book Review: Four Birds of Noah’s Ark
13 March 2018 | Alisa Williams
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“Prayer is the opening of the heart to God as to a friend.” —Ellen G. White
For many life-long Christians, prayer comes naturally. It’s something we’ve grown up with. We’ve prayed at the dinner table and heard prayer from the pulpit. Perhaps we whisper our individual prayers in the waking hours of the day or as the sun is setting in the evening.
But how does a new Christian “learn” to pray? How do those raised in a Christian environment keep from falling into the rut of prayers said as habit, rather than prayers said from an open heart “to God as to a friend”?
In college at Andrews University, an English professor would read to us from the Book of Common Prayer each morning for worship and I always appreciated the fresh perspective and timeless beauty of those prayers. Crafted in 1549 in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, these prayers formed the Anglican liturgical service, with litanies for communion, baptism, confirmation, marriage, funerals, and more.
Written almost 60 years later, in 1608, Thomas Dekker’s little-known Four Birds of Noah’s Ark takes prayer a step further. In his hands, prayer becomes an intimate, daily interaction between ordinary people and God.
In this newly released edition, published by Eerdmans and edited expertly by Robert Hudson, Dekker’s poignant, fervent prayers are available to a new generation, and are surprisingly and delightfully still relevant for today’s Christians.
To fully appreciate Dekker’s work, it’s important to know a little history about his life. Dekker was an Elizabethan playwright who penned his work as the Black Death ravaged London. Throughout his lifetime, he would survive a total of four major London plagues. Despite the danger and tragedy that surrounded him, Dekker remained in London, writing prayers “in honor of the ordinary working people for whom he had such a deep and enduring affection” (1). Dekker also bore witness to chaotic political upheaval. During his childhood, the Parliament of England declared Catholicism a crime punished by death. When he was 16, the English fleet defeated the Spanish Armada. He was 31 when Queen Elizabeth died and James was crowned King. He was 39 when the King James Bible was published.
Unlike the Book of Common Prayer, which was compiled, written, and supervised by bishops, kings, and religious scholars, Dekker was none of these things. He was a common working man; a professional writer, though not a particularly successful one. Hudson writes that “In 1612, Dekker found himself in debtors’ prison—for the third time in his life—where he would remain for seven years” (3).
Though most certainly a Christian, he was not particularly religious or pious, nor did he write any other spiritual works. In fact, “scholars suggest that Four Birds of Noah’s Ark was a bit of religious hackwork, written for wealthy patrons as a way of cashing in on the anxieties of the time” (6). Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Dekker’s prayers are powerful. After all, is it not when we are faced with the common pressures of everyday life—health and financial concerns—that we most passionately and desperately turn to God? Dekker’s prayers were perhaps crafted with sincere conviction because debtor’s prison and plague were constant, looming threats in his life.
Hudson tells the reader that by the time Four Birds was published, the Black Death had abated and urgency for God’s help in times of suffering had dwindled. There was no second printing of Dekker’s work. It was not until 1924 (over 300 years later) that a new edition appeared from F.P. Wilson, who served as tutor to none other than C.S. Lewis when he attended Oxford. Lewis, who became familiar with Dekker’s writings through his tutor, “occasionally quoted from them in his letters and essays” (12).
It is from Wilson’s edition that this new edition by Hudson is largely based. Though Hudson has modernized the language for a new generation, he has taken care to stay true to Dekker’s original meanings. Hudson also took the liberty of formatting the prayers into short lines so they read like poetry.
Dekker separated his prayers into four sections, represented by four birds (21):
The Dove: Prayers of Blessing for the Poor, the Humble, and All Those Who Labor in the Cities and Fields
The Eagle: Prayers of Blessing for the Nation and All Those Entrusted with Authority
The Pelican: Prayers of Supplication to Christ to Help Us Overcome the Seven Deadly Sins
The Phoenix: Prayers of Thanksgiving for the Benefits We Receive in the Death and Resurrection of Christ
The book concludes with a section of “short, pithy meditations” that Hudson has christened “Feathers.” Here Dekker includes quotes from some of the most well-known scholars and theologians of his time, including Augustine, Bernard, Gregory, and Jerome.
Within Four Birds are prayers for a child going to school, for farmers, soldiers, pregnant women and midwives, the ill, the imprisoned, and the coal miner. The poor and the wealthy, the commoner and those in power, can all find prayers for their specific trials and challenges. There are prayers for leadership, both of the country and of the church.
In Dekker’s “A Prayer for the Council” he writes what could be a prayer for our General Conference in session:
Counsel to a kingdom is like the compass
to a ship under sail; without the one,
a state is shaken by every tempest,
and without the other, people run upon
the rocks of inevitable danger.
Therefore, set your foot, O God,
among the lords of our council.
Sit at the table with them,
and let no decrees pass but those
in which you have had a hand.
“For, alas, what reason have I to be proud?” asks Dekker in “A Prayer against Pride.” He continues,
Am I not dust and ashes?
Am I not made of the clay of the earth?
And must I not, in the end, like a potter’s
earthen vessel, be broken all into pieces?
And in “A Thanksgiving for All Those Benefits We Reap by the Death of Christ” Dekker reminds us that Jesus “ventured his life and lost it / we ventured nothing but were upon the point / of shipwreck, and yet we came home survivors.”
The last prayer in the book is “A Thanksgiving for All Those Benefits We Are to Receive by Christ’s Coming in Glory” and Dekker concludes with the following lines:
Make us, O Lord, to be Doves in our lives,
innocent and without gall;
to be Eagles in our meditations,
clear-sighted and bold to look upon you;
to be Pelicans in our works,
charitable and religious; and lastly,
to be as the Phoenix in our deaths,
that after we have slept in our graves,
we may rise up in joy with your Son,
and ascend with him up into heaven,
and there at your hands receive
an immortal crown of everlasting glory. Amen.
Dekker’s little book is a powerful reminder of the beauty of prayer for our everyday lives, and the accessibility of Christ — our friend — if we just open our hearts to Him.
Alisa Williams is managing editor of SpectrumMagazine.org.
Image courtesy of Eerdmans Publishing Co.
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QUOTE:
Four Birds of Noah's Ark is such a delightful surprise: prayers that do not bore.
Oct 9 Review of "Four Birds of Noah’s Ark" by Thomas Dekker
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Four Birds of Noah’s Ark: A Prayer Book from the Time of Shakespeare by Thomas Dekker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 176 pp.
reviewed by Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
I begin with a confession: the point during the worship service when I am most likely to yawn, get distracted, find myself plagued by phantom itches, or decide I have to go the bathroom is during the Prayers of the Church. This makes me a terrible person and a worse Christian. Nevertheless, there it is: prayer bores me far more often than it should. Which is why Four Birds of Noah's Ark is such a delightful surprise: prayers that do not bore.
Thomas Dekker was a playwright around the time of Shakespeare, which must be the worst time in English history to be a playwright unless you happen to be Shakespeare himself (or maybe, maybe, Christopher Marlowe). However, Dekker did pretty well for himself, writing plays and all sorts of other things. This is his only explicitly religious work, and apparently it startled some of his contemporaries, who took him for a “rogue.” That may be exactly why his prayers are so satisfying. They have real texture and depth, personality and vigor.
The four birds are not all mentioned in the Noah’s ark story, not exactly. Actually, as far as I can tell, only the first bird, the dove, qualifies. No matter; piety has never been limited by such nit-picking considerations. The idea is that these birds are all messengers sent out from the ark of salvation to the sinner in need of assistance.
The dove comes first, humble pigeon of peace. The prayers of this section are of ordinary folks in their everyday vocations. You get the feeling that Dekker really paid attention to the people around them. The wonderful thing in praying these prayers is that as you share in their petitions you also feel yourself in their shoes, learning the evangelical skills of imagination and empathy. You get to be a schoolchild, a merchant, a midwife, a sailor, and a miner, among other things.
The eagle (who comes next) is loftier than the dove, but this means the stakes are higher for such as the queen (Elizabeth I) or the king (James I) or the nation’s council or the church or the clergy. Lawyers, magistrates, and universities learn to pray here, and everyone learns to pray for relief from famine, pestilence, and war. The scope is broader, for the life of the city and the nation.
Then comes the pelican, a favorite of medieval imagery, for this bird was thought to plunge its beak into its own breast to draw blood to feed its young—the christological connection is obvious enough. In these prayers, which are framed with ones for morning and evening, the penitent calls upon Christ’s help in fighting against the seven deadly sins and the temptations of the devil.
The final prayer section on the phoenix—who dies and rises again, another obvious christological symbol—takes off in a flight of glory and gratitude in prayers that praise God for all the ways we are saved by Christ’s death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and coming in glory.
One last section is not prayers but edifying quotes from the greats of church history, which editor Robert Hudson charmingly entitles "Feathers."
To put the whole thing in catechetical terms: the work is one of the Holy Spirit’s guiding our prayers first through confession of sin and then mounting up to proclamation of the gospel. It is a trinitarian work with an implicit rubric of law and gospel. And the good theology is so beautifully expressed; no wooden constructions of rigidly accurate dogma here.
For one thing, the biblical allusions are constant and effortlessly interwoven, a confident example of figural exegesis, such as in the Prayer against Envy: “Purge, therefore, O Lord, our veins and let not the stinking poison of envy infect our blood, but following in the steps of Samuel, let us pray for King Saul, even though he is an enemy to your servants; and like Moses, let us not repine at the stubborn Hebrew children, even hough they rebel and threaten us with death.” Or the Thanksgiving for Sailors’ Safe Landing: “We were in the lions’ den, and yet did he deliver us. We were in the furnace, yet not a hair has perished. We were at the gates of hell, yet he fetched us back.” One more, from the Thanksgiving after a Woman Delivers Her Child: “Sanctify, O Lord, the breasts that must give suck to this babe, and, when it pleases you to fill her with understanding, feed her soul with the milk of your Word.”
Another wonder of the book is its sheer vividness. One of the things that loses me in church prayers (rightly or wrongly) is the repetition of bare petitions, working doggedly through all the topics that need to be covered in almost ex opere operato fashion. Dekker’s prayers engage all the mind and senses, so that praying is also seeing, struggling, learning, reflecting, and feeling. For example: “O let not, therefore, the gripping talons of covetousness seize upon our souls. It is a golden devil that tempts us to hell. It is a mermaid whose songs are sweet but full of sorcery. It is a sing that turns courtiers into beggars, and yet makes them wear monopolies on their backs, when the commonwealth shivers through the cold.”
Finally, it is wise. Dekker knows and believes the good news and is eager to give a musical voice to it. I’m happy to give him the last word here—hoping that training in his prayers will ultimately make me (and maybe others) a more attentive pray-er in church.
From the Thanksgiving for All Those Benefits We Reap by the Ascension of Christ:
Lift up your eyes, O you sons of Adam, and behold
your Savior ascending up into the clouds.
Bitter was his death;
his resurrection victorious;
but his ascension glorious.
He died like a lamb,
he rose again like a lion,
but he ascended like an eagle.
By his death did he quicken us to life;
by his resurrection did he raise us to faith;
by his ascension did he lift us up to glory.
The resurrection of Christ is our hope,
but the ascension of Christ is our glorification.
He ascended into heaven—but how?
He shut not the gates of heaven upon us
but went there on purpose to make
the way plain before us. His body is in heaven,
but his majesty abides upon earth.
Here he was once according to the flesh,
and here he is still according to his divinity.
Absent is Christ from us,
yet is he still present with us.
Would you see him?
Would you touch him?
Would you embrace him?
Your eyes have sight too weak
to pierce through the clouds;
his brightness is too great and
would strike you blind with dazzling.
Your hands are too short to reach
up to the seat where he sits;
and your arms not of compass
big enough to be thrown around his body.
But let your faith open her eyes,
for she can behold him.
Let your faith put out her hand,
and with the least finger she can touch him.
Sarah Hinlicky Wilson is the Editor of Lutheran Forum.
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Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
prayer, book reviews
C.S. Lewis Introduces Thomas Dekker—Author of Four Birds of Noah’s Ark—to the Inklings: An Imaginary Meeting
Robert Hudson is the editor of Four Birds of Noah’s Ark: A Prayer Book from the Time of Shakespeare. This new edition of a timeless classic includes annotations on each prayer, modernized language, and a new Introduction.
* * *
Let’s begin our imaginary meeting. . .
Scene:
The Rabbit Room:
The Eagle and Child pub
Oxford, 1938
The Rabbit Room: Home of the Inklings
Lewis: Friends, you are no doubt curious as to the identity of my guest for this evening, and I trust you will forgive his uncouth attire as well as honor his request that we forego the use of tobacco. It is, he says, a “filthy, idle, slobbering” habit and that “men look not like men that use it.” [general laughter]
You will also note that his accent is, as Orlando says in As You Like It, “something finer than you could purchase in so removed a dwelling” as Oxford. He is here under the auspices of Mr. H.G. Wells, presently of London, who retrieved this gentleman at my request in one of his time-traveling devices. [More laughter]
C.S. Lewis (left) and J.R.R. Tolkien, friends and Inklings.
So, allow me to introduce to you Thomas Dekker, poet, playwright, journalist, and Londoner, visiting from the year 1612. [Aside to the company:] He is currently residing in debtor’s prison and believes we are nothing more than a dream he’s having. So please don’t disabuse him of that notion.
Welcome, Master Dekker. Thank you for being here.
Thomas Dekker’s 17th Century London
Dekker: [looking around, astonished] I wish my frugal cheer might be worthy of the thanks.
Looking into the Rabbit Room from the Eagle and Child bar.
Lewis: Rest assured we are all friends and eager to learn more about you.
Dekker: If we be friends, then might I impose upon your grace for a stoup of thick beer?
Lewis: [signals to the barman] Now, sir, I would like to ask the first question. You are known as playwright and pamphleteer, so what moved you to write a collection of prayers, Four Birds of Noah’s Ark?
Dekker: Well … if thine ears may bear it, I shall tell thee—but ’tis like to beat out the billows of thy tears.
A painting depicting the Great Plague of London (1665).
In the year our Lord 1603, I was present during the great London plague, when more than forty thousand ghosts were driven from their earthly dwellings by the virulent poison of infection. I saw the desolate hand-wringing of the widows; I saw the departed husbands and breathless infants, the outcast and downtrodden orphans. A dead march I witnessed of three thousand souls—husbands, wives, and children led to one grave as if gone to one bed. In such a pitiful, pitiless perplexity stood London, forsaken like a lover, forlorn like a widow, disarmed of all comfort. Even those who fled could not out-gallop the pestilence.
I wrote a series of pamphlets on the subject at the time, inviting only Sorrow and Truth to be my Muses, to help me delineate the story of this mortal, pestiferous battle.
I will not dwell further on these stiff and freezing horrors but mention them only to answer your suit. Five years later, when the glorious city was again beset with contagion, I conceived a plan—to offer prayers of pity in place of lamentations, to call the citizens of London in their several stations to reflect on the condition of their souls and turn their countenances to heaven, to make prayer the anchor of their drifting hopes: the farmer, the miner, the midwife, and the maid; the king and the lady, the lord and the judge. My intention was to remind us all of our perilous state, bedeviled by the seven sins; and to put us in mind of the benefits we gain from the death and resurrection of Christ.
The four birds were these: the dove for the laborers and common folk; the eagle for the nobles and gentry; the pelican for the sufferings of Christ; and the Phoenix for his resurrection in our behalf. And thus, Four Birds of Noah’s Ark. Does that answer thy query?
Lewis: Most thoroughly.
Dekker: Then let me ask thee in return, wherein the blessèd name of Saint George is my double beer? I’m dry as dust. [laughter as Lewis signals the barman, who brings a tray of glasses.] Come now, no more talk of pestilence. Let’s be merry while we are young. Old age, liquor, and sugar will steal upon us before we be aware!
St. George was a Christian martyr and, according to the Golden Legend, slew a dragon. Photo Credit: Marissa Herrera.
Lewis: As the shoemaker in your play says, “Let wine be plentiful as beer and beer as water!” [To which all answer, “Amen!”]
[Note: Other questions were asked, mostly about Dekker’s opinions of Shakespeare and other writers. At evening’s end came this revelation: their guest, in disguise, was Dekker scholar, professor F. P. Wilson, Lewis’s former tutor at Oxford. He was currently teaching at Bedford College, London, and compiling a complete edition of Dekker’s works. In 1924, Wilson published Dekker’s Four Birds and, in 1925, Dekker’s Plague Pamphlets. Much of Dekker’s conversation above is drawn from those pamphlets and from Dekker’s most famous play, The Shoemaker’s Holiday.]
Purchase Four Birds of Noah’s Ark from Eerdmans.com, Amazon, or Christianbook.com.
QUOTE:
This is a most unusual book – and a lovely one at that. Robert Hudson, the poet and scholar whose works include “Kiss the Earth When You Pray,” has done the world a great favor by retrieving this old book of prayers.
The prayers have a precision and eloquence that still lift the spirit.
Four Birds of Noah’s Ark: A Prayer Book from the Time of Shakespeare
December 6, 2017 by Roy Howard
Thomas Dekker (Robert Hudson, editor)
Eerdmans, 176 pages
This is a most unusual book – and a lovely one at that. Robert Hudson, the poet and scholar whose works include “Kiss the Earth When You Pray,” has done the world a great favor by retrieving this old book of prayers. Written during the chaos of the early 16th century, Dekker was a contemporary of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Neither a theologian nor a minister, he was a playwright of considerable skill and notoriety. Dekker lived through four London plagues and several stints in debtors’ prison, as well as witnessing the publication of the King James Bible in 1611 when he was 31 years old.
These prayers are arranged in four sections named for birds and corresponding to the people for whom the prayers are written. They include the entire human family from poor to rich and in every circumstance. “The Dove being the most humble bird of all, represents the prayers of everyday working people.” The Eagle is the section with prayers of the noble. The next two sections, the Pelican and the Phoenix, include the prayers that most closely follow the life, death and resurrection of Christ. The prayers have a precision and eloquence that still lift the spirit. Dekker concludes with a section called Feathers that includes short sayings and meditations.
Thomas Dekker – Four Birds of Noah’s Ark [Review]
January 26, 2018 — 0 Comments
Giving Us Words
A Review of
Four Birds of Noah’s Ark:
A Prayerbook From the Time Of Shakespeare
Thomas Dekker
Paperback: Eerdmans, 2017
Buy Now: [ Amazon ]
Reviewed by Colin Chan Redemer
Recently a young mother said she wanted to start praying with her kids but didn’t know how, or what to say. Had I known then about the new edition of Thomas Dekker’s Four Birds of Noah’s Ark: A Prayerbook From the Time Of Shakespeare edited by Robert Hudson I perhaps would have been more helpful to her. It is easy for folks who’ve spent roughly a seventh of their life in a church pew to say “well just speak to God.” But prayer isn’t quite the same as chatting with a friend over coffee; it is spiritual food. I can image Jesus looking down at us and, echoing Mark 6:37, saying “you, give them [words to say].” Well this prayer book from the 1600’s offers many such words which, hundreds of years later, are fitting. The day I started reading the book was in my son’s first season of kindergarten. There I read the first prayer titled “For A Child Going to School” and I realized the value of being instructed in prayer even as my son was heading off to class. “Be my Schoolmaster to instruct me,/ that I may repeat the rules of true wisdom.” It is a striking prayer, that God would be the one who instructs us. If he uses the teacher in my son’s public school, so be it. And if that teacher fails in her cosmic duty: have faith, God will make a way. That alone is worth the price on the back.
But it doesn’t stop there, all the various aspects of human life are covered here, and it is a healthy reminder that human life— the aspects of life that make us human— haven’t changed at all. There are no less than three prayers for pregnant mothers and their caregivers and the unborn: “And when the time comes that you will call the child/ out of this house of flesh,/…set that sacred seal of baptism,/ that it may be known as a lamb of your own flock.” There are prayers for farmers, for soldiers, servants, merchants, sailors and pastors. And if there isn’t one for the modern office worker then one of the two prayers for those in jail will have to do: “I am now entangled in the chains/ of captivity; yet, O my God, bestow upon me/ the freedom of my soul.” That’s a song to make the desk-bound sing.
There is a question standing between you and this modern edition which is: who would read this version of it? I imagine the ideal audience for Dekker to be someone who’s into English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Not casually into it, but really into it. This is the guy who’d corner you at a party to explain why “The Wild Goose Chase” by Fletcher is funnier than “The Isle of Dogs” by Johnson. If you asked this person what version of the bible they read they’d drag out the old Dangerfieldesque saw: “well the authorized version was translated by people who didn’t know Greek or Hebrew, but modern translators don’t know English… Am-I-Right?!”
I could imagine someone like that seeking out to read Dekker’s obscure book of prayers. The problem is I can’t imagine that person either needing or being at all pleased with the “updated” language provided by Hudson. Wouldn’t the slight archaicism be part of the pleasure? We may never know.
I, however, am not that person. And having read this book I can say without qualification: it is a delight. Dekker manages in a brief book to do what hundreds (thousands?) of American pastors fail to do every week either from the pulpit or from the covers of endless piles of self-help books. He speaks directly to people where they live and work in a clear voice that elevates the reader and edifies their soul. And this edition smooths edges that might otherwise be overly sharp to the general audience. The beauty of the layout, font, paper, and pictures adds to the experience as well. This is a book that was made to be returned to. Like prayer itself.
The American audience might be put off by the extensive set of prayers for the King, Queen, and other Royals. But it can be instructive to remember that the reason for such prayers, and indeed for such roles, is for our good. After all, someone is going to rule me here on earth and I sure hope they are like Methuselah, Solomon, Abraham and David, while not “fall[ing] into David’s sins.” The alternative is bleak. Better to be ruled “for the benefit of your church,/ for the honor of this kingdom,/ and for the peace of your people” than the opposite. But if the #resistance types would prefer something political but less hagiographic Dekker writes to please. Try out “A Prayer For The Confusion of Those Who Would Harm Our Nation By Violence” in which there are truly #woke lines like “O God, in your just wrath, smite the rocks/ and send the whirlwinds forth to blow the dust/ of their wicked counsels into their own eyes.” I can’t wait to read that on a picket sign at the next protest. If that line strikes an Augustinian tone in your ear that makes sense too, at the end of the book he includes some aphorisms worth meditating on for your spiritual development. Half of them are from Augustine.
One aphorism however is from Seneca, the ancient Roman pagan philosopher. This is just absolutely perfect, from my reading, because Dekker is so clearly not a trained philosopher or theologian. From my brief study he doesn’t even seem to be a particularly committed Christian. Dekker was a playwright who spent a lifetime in debt, in and out of prison, and his craft was born of necessity. In this work he’s someone who is struggling. He’s struggling to see God clearly and communicate what he’s seeing. But he’s also struggling to make a quick buck. This book was written with the marketplace in mind. During an outbreak of plague in 1608 no one was going to the theatre out of fear. Dekker likely wrote this to make ends meet.
Would that we lived in a reality where the best writers in the world were financially motivated to compose fitting prayers for common people. Or one where the average reader might know the name Seneca. I don’t want to be nostalgic, but if I’m nostalgic I need to bring that boldly before God; that’s something Dekker is teaching me. There’s a prayer for every aspect of human life, so don’t shy away from your life, lift it to God.
The climax of the prayer book is a set of meditative prayers on the death and resurrection of Christ. And so we see that, while this isn’t quite Dante, the move from my common experience towards God is ultimately a move up to a beautiful vision that draws all our experiences into itself. I imagine most people will die not having read Dekker’s prayer book— even among those who do read his plays. That’s a shame because while “the wombs of our mothers/ are the first lodgings that we lie in,/ and the womb of the earth is appointed/ to be the last. The grave is a target/ at which all the arrows of our life are shot,/ and the last arrow of all hits the mark.” Our one lasting hope remains in Jesus that we can “go into our graves/ in peace; so shall we be sure/ to come from our graves in gladness.”
———-
Colin Chan Redemer is a professor at Saint Mary’s College of California and a fellow of the Davenant Institute. His writing has appeared in the Evansville Review, Sojourners Magazine, and the Tampa Review.
In *Featured Reviews*, VOLUME 11 Prayer, Review, Robert Hudson, Thomas Dekker
permalink
QUOTE:
careful reworking of Dekker for today,
Four Birds of Noah’s Ark: A prayer book from the time of Shakespeare edited by Thomas Dekker and Robert Hudson
24 November 2017
Michael Caines looks at a devotional text adapted for today
FOR the playwright Thomas Dekker, 1609 was a busy year, despite the severe outbreak of plague that had closed the theatres. He resorted to pamphleteering, and one of his publications was a book of prayers: Four Birds of Noah’s Ark.
Dekker is now best known for his comedy The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), and his sweet poem “Golden slumbers kiss your eyes” (adapted by the Beatles on their album Abbey Road). Four Birds has a claim to being another of this prolific writer’s finest achievements.
It is a sustained act of devotional ventriloquism, in which Dekker offers a sequence of prayers in different voices, all the way up the social scale: the midwife asks for help delivering a “new unborne creature”; the miner requires protection, since “death is . . . at my elbow”. Others are prayed for rather than imagined offering prayers of their own. “Wipe away al miusts of errors from their eies,” for example, is a supplication made on the clergy’s behalf.
There are prayers for the city and the country, and against the Deadly Sins. The avian quartet of the title hover overhead: the comforting Dove, the courageous Eagle, the health-bestowing Pelican, and the life-giving Phoenix.
If you like reading your old literature in something resembling its original form, seek out Four Birds in F. P. Wilson’s lovely pocket-sized edition of 1924. Robert Hudson’s new edition is something else: a careful reworking of Dekker for today, subtitled A prayer book from the time of Shakespeare.
Here, spelling, syntax, and grammar are modernised, and archaisms make way for modern equivalents. Hudson notes relevant Bible passages, cuts some of the “brimstone and damnation”, and renders Dekker’s prose in quasi-poetic lines, “to group ideas together and to encourage the reader to read slowly and meditatively”.
It is an effective approach — only Hudson seems to believe that Dekker wrote the prayer “made by” Queen Elizabeth. On the contrary, it is un-Dekker-like because Dekker did not write it: it was prompted by an expedition to the Azores, led by Elizabeth’s sometime favourite the Earl of Essex, in 1597. No wonder Hudson has trouble adapting it for modern use.
Michael Caines is English Literature editor at the Times Literary Supplement.
Four Birds of Noah’s Ark: A prayer book from the time of Shakespeare
Thomas Dekker; Robert Hudson, editor
Eerdmans £14.99
(978-0-8028-7481-8)
Church Times Bookshop £13.50
QUOTE:
Happily for us, Celtic saints and gospel-song writers share pages in an elegant devotional book
BOOKS: Good Company
A devotional that will point your soul to the living Christ.
August 12, 1996
"Companions for the Soul: A Yearlong Journey of Miracles, Prayers, and Epiphanies," edited by Robert Hudson and Shelley Townsend-Hudson (Zondervan, 392pp.; $17.99, hardcover). Reviewed by Diane Komp, professor of pediatrics at Yale University School of Medicine and author of "Breakfast for the Heart: Meditations to Nourish Your Soul."
Saints come in all stripes," remark Robert Hudson and Shelley Townsend-Hudson in their preface to "Companions for the Soul" as they prepare to dish up the Venerable Bede and Dwight L. Moody on the same plate. As the Hudsons note, some of the famous divines they quote would not have agreed in their lifetimes to stand together shoulder to shoulder. Happily for us, Celtic saints and gospel-song writers share pages in an elegant devotional book that delivers on the editors' promise to provide a "breathtaking variety of spiritual expression."
The Hudsons introduce us to their collection with an early twentieth-century speech to pastors by W. W. Staley at "A Seaside Chautauqua and School of Methods": "A mighty host surrounds me in my library. . . . They speak to me; they kindle the fires of my imagination; they quicken my faith, humble my pride, rebuke my wrong-doing and wrong-thinking, warn me against sin, and point my soul to the living Christ." So it is with this anthology. Some of the readings included in this Evangelical Christian Publishers Association Gold Medallion finalist are old friends--John Wesley, for instance, and his case of holy heartburn--but others are new treasures, such as this quote from one of my physician heroes, Sir William Osler: "Begin the day with Christ and prayer--you need no other. Creedless, with it you have religion; creed-stuffed, it will leaven any theological dough ...
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QUOTE:
delightfully difficult to classify. Neither scholarly disquisition nor celebrity bio, it is rather history in the form of a fable: not dark but rather light comedy. It is light that illumines, finally, a direction home: through solemn vows, a solidarity born of forgiveness, and at least a touch of rock-and-roll.
Neighboring Souls
‘The Monk’s Record Player'
By Eric Miller
April 18, 2018
Music
Spirituality
Secularism and Modernity
Merton in his study at the Abbey of Gethsemani (The Merton Center)
As the twentieth century recedes ever further into the past, Robert Hudson invites us to revisit it through an unexpected passageway: the troubled circumstances in which two of its most brilliant poets found themselves as the 1960s broke loose. Hudson calls The Monk’s Record Player: Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966 a “parallel biography,” but it’s weighted heavily toward Merton. And anyway, it’s really more a tale, a comic tale, of two men seeking a way through the age’s “baroque obscenities,” in Merton’s piquant phrase, to a place of solitude and hope.
The unlikely pairing of Dylan and Merton is the charm of the book. Merton and Dylan were a duo that never quite became a duet. They had no acquaintance, and so far as influence goes, it went in one direction. Merton, introduced to Dylan’s music in 1966 by a fellow monk, responded with instant affirmation in a letter to his editor. “Incidentally,” he wrote, “I heard a record of Bob Dylan lately and like him very much indeed. Respond extremely to that, very much at home in it.”
The record in which Merton felt himself at home was Highway 61 Revisited, and Merton’s “baroque obscenities” line was his description of the absurdist running commentary on the world beyond the gates of Eden Dylan was frenetically and gleefully dispatching. Merton was so taken with Dylan’s vision and approach that he quickly produced Cables to the Ace, Or Familiar Liturgies of Misunderstanding (1968), a book Hudson describes as a “long anti-poem” for which “Dylan’s work was the ongoing frame.” Hence Hudson’s arresting judgment: “although they lived their lives a thousand miles apart, their souls were next-door neighbors.”
The conditions that sparked such intimacy had to do with intimacy of another kind, and this now-familiar story is at the heart of Hudson’s tale. He tells it well. In Louisville for back surgery in the spring of 1966, Merton, age fifty-one, convalesced under the care of Margie Smith, a student nurse. She was half his age and engaged to a soldier, but their souls, too, established an easy company. “The sufferings of the soul that thirsts for God are blended with mystical joy,” Merton once said, and Margie infused no small amount of it into an aging, sojourning monk. For a season, in the spring and summer of ’66, Merton and Margie wrote, telephoned, and even, with the help of several accomplices, arranged the occasional rendezvous; Merton’s journals reveal that they managed over many weeks to talk by phone more than once every two days. Their predicament loomed embarrassingly large. What was a monk to do?
For his part, Dylan by that summer found himself in his own conundrum, one that also involved a kind of trap: fame. “Privacy is something you can sell,” he would wryly observe, “but you can’t buy it back.” He tried, though. Having loosed himself from the folk-music establishment the year before by, famously, going electric, he now wished, as Hudson says, “to go undercover and stop being Bob Dylan.” A mysterious motorcycle accident of uncertain severity became the pretext for his “own search for solitude.” And so Dylan would go underground for three years at his home in Woodstock, New York, writing and recording music, living convivially with family and friends, and avoiding the audience he had so assiduously sought. It sort of worked, for a time, Dylan’s “so-called hermit years.” But even his rural retreat became, as he put it, “a place of chaos”—its end symbolized by the cartoonish invasion in August 1969 of tens of thousands of young people in one of the age’s emblematic events. Solitude was very hard to come by, even in Woodstock. So was home.
Bob Dylan with his son Jesse in Woodstock, 1968 (Walter Oleksy / Alamy stock photo)
Merton’s way of escape was more excruciating but in the end more satisfying. Having called Margie on one of the abbey’s party lines in June 1967, he was discovered, and quickly confessed to the abbot what he later would refer to, ambiguously, as his “affair.” He was met with sympathy but also strictures, and while he and Margie continued to sneak letters, phone calls, and an occasional meeting, by the end of July the affair was mostly over, with a final phone call occurring in November.
Merton felt acutely the absurdity of his situation—“a priest who has a woman,” he acidly wrote in a diary. But it was not simply the threat to his priestly vows that troubled him. Solitude had always been, in Hudson’s words, “his first love,” and marriage to Margie would certainly end it. The year before they met he had finally, after years of pleading, been given permission to live as a hermit at Gethsemani. It was a signal moment in his pilgrimage. For Merton, writes Hudson, “solitude was solidarity,” a gateway to love. “He who is alone and conscious of what solitude means,” Merton sensed, “finds himself simply in the ground of life. He is ‘in love.’”
These lines he had penned just before meeting Margie. But now, at the moment he had finally achieved solitude, he found himself doubly in love, discovering through Margie “a new kind of solidarity with the world,” as Hudson says. Still, in the end his vows and his calling—as celibate, hermit, and priest—retained their hold.
But not without—and most certainly with the aid of—Dylan’s mordant, tortured whispers, quicksilver in his mind and soul. Merton’s first mention of Dylan in his journals was the day of his June confession to the abbot. “Invisible. ‘Like a rolling stone,’” he wrote, cryptically. Both he and Dylan knew that the age—brash, boastful, obscene—was nonetheless inflamed with the kind of longing without which humanity turns grey. The catalog of madness Dylan was issuing was an honest telling, Merton could see; Dylan was “definitely conscious of a poetic vocation,” he thought. And no one was more conscious of that vocation’s necessity than Merton.
In perhaps the book’s most amusing vignette, Merton in October 1966 entertains the eminent and aged Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain at the hermitage, along with a few of his younger companions. Maritain and Merton, long friends, celebrate Mass and, with the others, settle around a fireplace, drinking coffee. The request soon comes for Merton to read some of his writing. He pulls out what will become Cables—followed hard by an earnest commendation of Dylan, whom he describes to Maritain—no mean aesthetician—as “a modern American Villon,” a reference to the wandering, path-breaking fifteenth-century French poet. But Merton doesn’t stop there. He fetches the abbey’s portable record player and spins some choice selections, “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “The Gates of Eden” among them—all for a man born in 1882! One of those present recounted that “played at full volume, the Dylan songs blasted the still atmosphere of Trappist lands with the wang-wang of guitars and voice at high amplification.”
It’s a fitting image of Merton as he neared his unsuspected final turn, his accidental death in 1968. In Cables he declared that “with the unending vroom vroom vroom of guitars we will all learn a new kind of obstinacy, together with massive lessons of irony and refusal.” Merton excelled at all three lessons. But if obstinacy, irony, and refusal served any purpose for him, it was to preserve hope, and most crucially, the hope of home: for that land where we were conceived in joy and will be welcomed in warmth, where our desires were born and will surely be met.
That hope provides the final destination for a book that is delightfully difficult to classify. Neither scholarly disquisition nor celebrity bio, it is rather history in the form of a fable: not dark but rather light comedy. It is light that illumines, finally, a direction home: through solemn vows, a solidarity born of forgiveness, and at least a touch of rock-and-roll.
The Monk’s Record Player
Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966
Robert Hudson
Eerdmans, $22.99, 263 pp.
QUOTE:
Publishers and writers looking for the definitive resource on religious publishing will find it in the newly released The Christian Writer’s Manual of Style, 4th Edition (Zondervan, $34.99). This new edition features a quarter to a third revised material from the last edition, released in 2004, with the rest new or heavily revised.
“I have a passion for this stuff,” says Hudson. “I want to help the reader receive an author’s ideas most effectively and smoothly. The words and mechanics should become invisible to the reader. But it’s amazing how emotional some of the discussions on these topics can get.”
New Style Guide Covers Religious Publishing
Christian MARKET
Publishers and writers looking for the definitive resource on religious publishing will find it in the newly released The Christian Writer’s Manual of Style, 4th Edition (Zondervan, $34.99). This new edition features a quarter to a third revised material from the last edition, released in 2004, with the rest new or heavily revised.
Ann Byle
“Our aim is to be comprehensive, to think of everything under the sun,” says Robert Hudson, who compiled all editions. “As I edited manuscripts and came across issues not mentioned in the 2004 edition, I made a note to add them to the new edition. Two-thirds of the fourth edition is things not mentioned in other style manuals.”
He stays consistent with the book publishing industry’s “bible,” The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition, “with lots more detail on religious writing,” and is about 85 percent consistent with the AP Stylebook, used by journalists.
“The publishing industry is divided into niches, with the religious market probably the largest macro niche after the general market,” says Hudson, who is a senior editor-at-large for Zondervan and has nearly 40 years’ experience in publishing. “Anyone writing for that macro niche, the Christian marketplace, is going to need this book.”
The Christian Writer’s Manual of Style, inches thicker than its predecessor, is divided into two main sections: a style guide and a word list. It also includes sections on abbreviations, capitalization, pronunciation guide for audio books, permission guidelines for quoting the Bible, and numbers.
“Perhaps the most controversial issue in the 4th Edition is the possessive of Jesus. Traditionally Christian publishers have used “s’,” a rule established by the Chicago Manual of Style,” says Hudson. “But the new edition changed that, and I decided to follow [it]. A consistent rule seems to be a good thing.”
So instead of “Jesus’ disciples,” the guide calls for “Jesus’s disciples.” Hudson talked to the staff of the The SBL Handbook of Style, 2nd Edition, used by scholars in biblical studies and related disciplines, and they, too, are using “Jesus’s.”
“There was a howl from academia, with one post saying ‘this is a faith changer,’ so I hedged a bit in [the guide],” he says. Another controversial area is capitalization of the deity pronouns “he” and “him.” “When the capitalization originated, it wasn’t to show respect but to distinguish between general and specific,” says Hudson. “It feels very Victorian; I recommend using lowercase for deity pronouns.”
Sales totaled 20,000 for all previous editions of the style manual, with the last edition selling about 13,000.
“I have a passion for this stuff,” says Hudson. “I want to help the reader receive an author’s ideas most effectively and smoothly. The words and mechanics should become invisible to the reader. But it’s amazing how emotional some of the discussions on these topics can get.”
Hudson is working on other books as well, including a modernized version of Thomas Decker’s prayer book written during a time of plague in London, and a parallel biography of Thomas Merton and Bob Dylan that shows the influence of Dylan on Merton’s life and writing.
QUOTE:
refreshingly irreverent and impious, and makes Merton complex and very human, rather than a minor saint.
The Monk’s Record Player:
Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan and the Perilous Summer of 1966, Robert Hudson (263pp, £17.20, hbck, Eerdmaans)
The Monk’s Record Player is the most fictional of creative non-fiction books, a work based on conjecture and supposition, on possibilities, maybes and perhapses. It purports to discuss how the worlds of Thomas Merton and Bob Dylan might have intersected; how – without them ever meeting – they influenced each other and shared ideas; how they orbited and circled the same creative planets as each other: two very different shining stars.
Thomas Merton was an enigma: a social hermit, a doubting monk, a down-to-earth mystic, who thought nothing of jumping over the monastery fence to take trips with his friends, or of holding impromptu picnics and drinks parties when visitors turned up. He wrote ‘cold war letters’ of pacifism and debate in response to being instructed to not write about the war, explored zen and sufi ideas, and managed to fall in love with a nurse; all the while maintaining (or just about maintaining) his monastic vows of chastity and obedience. And he wrote about it all, in voluminous journals and correspondence, all now published and in print, many years after his death.
What’s most fascinating to me is how he could in many ways be so isolated and so traditional a religious figure, yet be so wise, so able to see and comment on the world he mostly only saw from afar. His physical distance gave him mental space, the chance to ponder, digest, think and comment.
Of course, through a network of friends, publishers and correspondents, he was able to receive books and records, including LPs by a certain Bob Dylan, who was busy reinventing the protest song and electrifying folk music. Merton became obsessed by Joan Baez’s and Bob Dylan’s music (he met the former), and Robert Hudson shows, by referencing specific journal entries and examples, how Dylan’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics influenced Merton’s Cables to the Ace, a surreal long poem in 88 sections published in 1967.
So far, so good, if more of an aside or footnote than anything else. But Hudson somehow creates a whole book from this kind of thing. Well, actually he mostly vividly brings to life certain episodes of Merton’s life, then interrupts this story with chapters that reflect on Dylan’s life and music in, he suggests, a parallel world. It’s an enjoyable and lively romp through the mind of Merton, but the book says little about Dylan or Merton that hasn’t been said before, although of course, no-one has tried to pair or intertwine them in this way before.
I’m rather drawn to the book though. Like Michael Higgins fairly recent Heretic Blood (Wipf & Stock), which explores Merton through the work of William Blake, it is refreshingly irreverent and impious, and makes Merton complex and very human, rather than a minor saint. I’m not convinced that Dylan and Merton shared much between them – directly, indirectly or conceptually – but I’m glad they both exist and created what they did.
Rupert Loydell 2018