Fragmenting ourselves in the whirling rides, noise, lights and ordors

On a Theme By Thomas Merton

by Denise Levertov

"Adam, where are you?"

God's hands

palpate darkness, the void
that is Adam's inattention,
his confused attention to everything,
impassioned by multiplicity, his despair.

Multiplicity, his despair;

God's hands

enacting blindness. Like a child
at a barbaric fairgrounds --
noise, lights, the violent odors --
Adam fragments himself. The whirling rides!

Fragmented Adam stares.

God's hands

unseen, the whirling rides
dazzle, the lights blind him. Fragmented,
he is not present to himself. God
suffers the void that is his absence.

The problem with mistakes in our past is that they compound themselves geometrically into the future unless we face them by looking in the mirror and asking for forgiveness.  The truth is that unless we have a conversion of heart that helps us see what we have become - that we have not just been "assimilated" to the culture of violence and death but that we have also been absorbed and bleached and digested by it then we will fail in our duties to a new generation.  (Paraphrasing some thoughts expressed four years ago by an American Archbishop I hope I have not strayed too far from his intent.) 

In a piercing exactness, Denise Levertov paints for us the madness of our falling into distractions and thus our alienation from God. 

What does it take to repent?