| I was thunderstruck,
completely bowled over. Here was a true masterpiece. It was essentially
undiscovered, and it was lying right in my hands. I immediately called Dr.
Chekwas and prevailed upon him, no, begged him, to set up an interview for
me with the creator of this remarkable, sumptuous, miraculous poetry as soon
as could be. He was a little hesitant
at first and tried to put off my request for an introduction and interview
with the poet for consideration at some later date, "a more opportune time,"
he said, but finally, after some friendly cajoling, and reminders to him of
a particular literary favor I had done him in the past, and which I had not
called upon for repayment until that moment, he agreed to do his best for
me. He knows how I love to be the first one on the block to introduce any
new work of honesty and integrity that portends to be of genuine, long
lasting value to readers of very high, very fine literature.
Marvelous to say, he got me the introduction
and interview that very day.
I arrived in much anticipation at the poet’s
residence in Fresh Meadows, New York in the early evening. Who was he? What
would he be like? My psyche was at full alert. I couldn’t wait to meet him.
At last, I was ringing his doorbell, and he
opened to let me enter. I found him both humble and lively. He seemed filled
with a kind of hidden, secret delight that threatened to bubble over from
within him at any moment. He was very gracious and forthcoming, and he
answered all my questions in a thoughtful, considerate manner. And I must
say, he put me completely at my ease.
I realized, however, why Dr. Chekwas had been
hesitant at first in attempting to get me an introduction and to set up the
interview with the poet for, as it turns out, Mr. de la Trinité is a mystic
and hermit. Indeed, the genuine article. He is not, however, a recluse in
the strict sense of the term since he works in the world, in Manhattan, of
all bustling cities, and is in regular contact with family and friends,
which would not be the case with someone who is reclusion. No, he is a
hermit living in the world in a marvelously wonderful mix of the active and
contemplative lives, that he successfully melds together into one,
ostensibly living each one to the hilt.
His poetry is steeped in the direct
experience of God and overflows in a rich and vast outpouring of mystical
insight, exclamations of love and exultations of a heart that is truly
engaged with sheer wonder in its journey in the quest of Divine Wisdom and
Love. We talked for about an hour and a half, too much for the allowable
space of this article, but here are some excerpts from that engrossing and
enlightening conversation.
Mr. de la Trinité, let me get directly to the
point and ask you, what is the source of your inspiration? The excelling
language of your book took me quite by surprise, I must say.
Please call me "Jean-Marie" or simply "John."
I think that is friendlier, don’t you? And thank you very, very much. I do
appreciate your kind words about my little book. Well, the source of my
inspiration? That is a wonderful question, and I can tell you in a single
word, God. God, is my inspiration.
What do you mean by that? Do you have a
direct experience of God?
We all have a direct experience of God. We
have it every day and all day long. But we are very busy, and too often we
do not recognize our experience as an experience of the truly Divine. But it
is there, for me and for everyone else. We just have to open our eyes and
look around us. Beyond that, we simply have to be quiet within and look into
our own hearts in silence, and we will discover a vast and endless terrain
of divine experience and, yes, the direct experience of God.
How does this direct experience of God work?
How is it manifested in your writing?
Well, if you mean, what is the creative
process for me? I can certainly answer that. I don’t so much write my own
works. What happens is that I sit at my computer or before my blank
notebooks, and I pray, and then I write what I hear in my heart, what passes
through my soul. Suddenly, a current of song, of words, a kind of inaudible
but very clear linguistic music occurs within me, a music of words, and I
write it down. That’s all. That’s essentially it. O yes, I look the writing
over very many times, and I make small changes here and there, really just
grammatical things because I have written the words very quickly and have
made mistakes. Everything happens so fast. But there never are any
considerable changes to be made. I just write down what my heart hears.
That’s all.
Do you mean that God speaks to you?
Oh, yes. God speaks to me and to all of us,
but we are too busy to hear Him. Sometimes He breaks through to us with
great force to get our attention, perhaps through a loved one, a family
member, some crisis or unforeseen event in our lives that makes us sit down
and listen and, if we listen very carefully, we realize that it is God who
is talking to us through our friends or loved ones or in some extraordinary
event in life. Perhaps it happens and we hear God in a walk by the sea,
working in the garden, reading a fine book, in a marvelous dream, listening
to beautiful music, to the beautiful voice of a superb singer, looking at a
painting, seeing a sunset, gazing at the stars. Perhaps we even feel Him in
the rush of the wind upon us, or hear Him in rain falling on leaves. In the
song of birds. Personally, I think the perfume of roses is a wonderful
witness to the existence and the very real presence of God. It is the rarest
of scents, wouldn’t you agree? The scent of roses really does place my soul
in an other-worldly context that verges on the purest beauty imaginable. I
find the beautiful scent of roses a kind of foretaste of Divine Peace.
Surely it is the flower of Heaven. The desert gives it to us very well, and
the silent falling of snow. I mean this sense of the Presence of God.
Perhaps we are touched by the suffering or the joy of someone we know,
someone we love, and we experience God. We experience joy in a catharsis of
beauty, and we melt into tears. That is God. Oh, yes, God. With me, as a
writer and a man of prayer, it’s a little different though. You see, I am
used to listening to God, or perhaps better put, listening for God. I’m very
used to waiting upon God. And, yes, God speaks to me, and I hear Him very
clearly. It’s difficult to explain.
I find that interesting and very moving. How
you explain it, I mean. And the scent of the rose is extraordinarily
arresting, I must agree, although I have never thought of it in the
beautiful terms you use. Could you try to explain somewhat more what you
mean by listening to God in your writing, or listening for God, as you put
it?
Yes, I’ll try. You see, I listen very
carefully and quietly to my heart. I pray, and then I sit attentively and
wait for what will pass in my soul that will captivate me and that is of
value to my mind and heart, to my intellect and my soul. I don’t do anything
in particular. I don’t try to stir things up, so to speak. I just wait upon
God, and I don’t wait long. Almost immediately something occurs. Words begin
to flow within me, and I am right on the verge of them as they occur inside
me, at the height of my mind, in the depth of my heart, right at the source
and the mouth of the well-spring from which they emerge, wet and gleaming,
vibrant and alive, and they are not at all elusive, although they are as
quick, and luminous, as mercury, and I write them down as rapidly as I can.
Thank God I’m a very good typist. In fact, I call myself God’s secretary.
That’s really my profession. In the matter of poetry, I am the secretary to
God. I don’t really write the books, you see. They sort of write themselves,
coming directly out of a Divine Force, a powerful and sweet Source of Light,
Fire and Thought that lives within me and that gushes up from my inmost
depths, as though I were standing at the mouth of a mighty river that is
pouring through a gorge into an enormous sea. Some of the spray, the
droplets of that stupendous outpouring into the sea of this tremendous
inward river of my heart is captured in the mirror of my soul in sound,
color, fire and light, in a kind of dazzling bejeweling of my
preconsciousness that leaps into full awareness within me, and I write it
all down in the instant that it springs upward from the inner depths of my
soul into the full consciousness and light of my mind. I call that God. If
you will, the Word of God alive and flowing and speaking in my heart.
That is wonderfully put. How did your
experience of God begin, if I may ask?
Thank you and, oh, yes, please do ask. It is
the most important thing. It began when I was five years old. At that tender
age, I used to have this very clear sense of a Great Presence near me. This
Presence was extraordinarily attentive to me and very, very loving toward
me, and I toward It. I sensed great Love from It, and It accompanied me
always, but It was especially present to me when I went to bed at night and
when I woke in the morning. I would say goodnight to It, and I would greet
It in the morning. I would say, "Good morning, God, good morning." Or I
would say, "Excuse me, God, excuse me." Or little things like that. "I love
You." Things like that, all day long. Little prayers of the heart throughout
the whole day. And I have continued that practice all of my life. But now my
prayer, though still quite simple in essence, is more elaborate and complex
as far as words go. But I don’t always pray in words, however. And, in fact,
words have very little to do with prayer that is truly advanced. No, then
quiet is really what is needed, that is, the prayer of the heart silently
gazing with love upon God who has become the heart’s Beloved, eventually to
become the Husband of the soul in a spiritual marriage of the two such that
they become One. Does that help? I hope that makes some sense. But it’s all
there in my writing, in all the books that I have written. Maybe one day I
will get the chance to publish them all. I sincerely hope so.
From what I have read of your work and from
listening to you now, I sincerely hope so too. How many books have you
actually written?
I think 12 or 13, so far. I’m still looking
at how to divide up some of the work. But I think about 13 books. Actually,
it’s only one book that is in 13 Parts. Dr. Chekwas has been kind enough to
discuss all of my work with me in a very detailed manner. I get a very good
feeling when I speak with him about my work. He is extremely optimistic, and
it rubs off onto me, and I become optimistic too. He seems to understand
what I’m trying to do, where I’m coming from, as we say. I’ve written two
novels and a very long epic poem of over 36,000 lines of basically iambic
pentameter rhyming verse. And I’ve written two theological studies of the
subject that is dearest to my heart, which is the love of God and the Way of
Divine Love, the way of the soul’s ascent to God. All of this writing is on
the theme of the superman, or the journey of the mystic, the journey of the
soul to God, which is really the journey of anyone and everyone to God. We
are all called to the same Divine End, and the ways of our ascent really do
overlap one another when we have entered upon the pure mystical way of this
enormous ascent to the Divinity. That really defines all of my work.
You are Roman Catholic, are you not?
Yes, I am, I am happy to say, and that comes
out in my work, but I hope that I write from a general experience of Divine
Grace that is accessible to anyone of any religious background. And I do
think that I have achieved that to a certain degree. Protestants, Hindus,
Buddhists, Moslems and Jews alike have read or listened to my poetry and my
prose writing and have all derived some good from it, they tell me. I am
humbly very gratified at this fact. I’ve always wanted to write for
everyone, no matter whom, no matter what religious background, or even of no
religious background at all. It is always good to introduce someone to a
slightly different way of thinking about the same thing, or introducing them
to the possibility of experiencing something quite new that will be a divine
benefit for them. Something beautiful for God and for their souls as they
are related to God and seeking to find Him out, so to speak, seeking to
really live with God. I think that is so important, don’t you? I think,
really, that I write for the secret, hidden lover of beauty and of God in
all of us. And I dare say, beauty is one of the divine names, as Dionysius
the Areopagite makes quite clear in his extraordinary little work On The
Divine Names.
I see that you have many paintings. They are
very striking. Really extraordinary. Did you do them?
Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks be
to God, they were produced by my humble hand. Oh, yes. I’m a painter. I say
this with much and very deep humility when I look at the beautiful works of
other painters. Those artists who are truly painters, for whom that artistic
exercise is their life work and the principal avenue of the expression of
their particular grace of beauty. I truly think of the arts as pure graces
of Pure Beauty and divine gifts given to us by God. I am perhaps more a
student of painting, an amateur, in the best sense of the word though,
someone who truly loves painting, the activity of the process, as well as
the finished work. The journey, the process, can be as important as the end,
I think. I paint, again, from the overflow of my heart, from my love of God
and humanity. It is another expression of the same thing, the same fire that
consumes my heart and my thought and that is the engagement of my every
waking hour and, indeed, of my sleeping hours as well, and that comprises
the sweet, eager joy of my soul. This all comes from prayer as union with
God. You see, prayer, union with God, which is of the essence of all of my
work, does not cease when one falls asleep. No, at a certain level of
practice and development, prayer becomes continual and continuous. It
becomes coextensive with one’s life. It is the air one breathes. It is the
breath, the breathing of the soul. And finally, it is the very reality of
love itself, that is, the reality of the very love of one’s heart, that
exists within one’s heart, the love of one’s being and one’s will that is
the inner fabric of the fire of desire and beauty within one. One of the
great mystics has said that if you love, you don’t have to worry about
praying always, which is the wonderful admonishment of Holy Scripture, that
is, to pray always and to never get tired, to pray without ceasing, because,
this mystic says, the one who loves prays constantly. His love is true
prayer, and his prayer is true love. I think it may have been the great
African Bishop of Hippo, St. Augustine, who said that.
So he means by that that love is prayer, and
it doesn’t matter so much if you say words when you pray. You don’t have to
worry about that, about words I mean, so long as your heart is filled with
love. Is that right?
That’s it exactly. That’s exactly right. And
his is an honest and very insightful statement. One of those statements that
makes one say, "I wish I had said that." But, of course, Jesus has preceded
us all in the teaching of love as the way of the divine ascent. He is my
principal Teacher and my profound and sublime Beloved, the great Love and
Joy of my being, of my very existence. He is my Divine Brother, Husband and
Lover. He says to His disciples, "I am the Vine; you are the branches. As
the Father Loves Me, so also I Love you. Remain in My Love. If you keep My
commandments, you will remain in My Love, just as I have kept My Father’s
commandments and remain in His Love" That is what He says in John’s Gospel.
And His commandments are only two, love of God above all things, with all of
one’s being, and love of one’s neighbor as one’s self, or beyond this, as
He, Jesus, has Loved us. So love itself is this continual and continuous
prayer of one’s being that has become a living flame of the love of God and
neighbor, as St. John of the Cross says.
As it turns out, Jean-Marie de la Trinité is
a very good neighbor and an honest and very insightful poet who, in THE
WEDDING FEAST, has written a palpable lyric masterpiece. I have kept it with
me ever since I first received it, opening it here and there, reading
passages of it to myself, and to friends and loved ones, and thinking on it
in rare moments throughout the day, because, ultimately, it is not one of
those books that one reads and then puts down and essentially forgets about.
No, this one is to keep with you, to take with you wherever you go. It is
the reincarnation of the pocketbook in the best sense of the term, a vade
mecum, a "go with me" of one’s heart that sustains one’s love of life in its
continual perusal in refined meditation and contemplation.
All in all, an extraordinary spiritual and
literary achievement. To this reader, with this book, and the books to come
from Mr. de la Trinité, some of which he kindly allowed me to peruse during
our visit, this writing heralds the appearance of the remarkable, profoundly
gratifying spiritual masterpiece of the new millennium, indeed, I dare say,
of the millennia.
Remarkably, a priest friend of mine knows de
la Trinité as well as anyone knows him since he was his confessor for a
considerable time and still corresponds regularly with him. He said to me
privately the other day, "I assure you, people will be reading him 500 years
from now." I am convinced that this is no exaggeration and that he is
correct in his judgment. His work will easily stand the test of time, and
his writings will stand with the very greatest works of
mystical-contemplative experience and writing in all history. When the great
ones in all of the history of mystical experience and mystical poetry,
theology and writing in general, homilies, meditations, novels, memoirs and
the rest when they are all recounted, and from all the annals of the
world, his name will be on the short list of the very uttermost excellent
among them, and we will find him standing in the midst of them, as it were,
in the Divine Fire in the Central Height of Heaven.
Gus Stratos is a freelance
writer based in Queens, New York
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