Spending innumerable hours traversing it before moving to New York, I know every inch of the New Jersey Turnpike better than I would like. Northbound near Exit 8A is the Joyce Kilmer Rest Stop, where countless travelers have filled up with gas and Starbucks over the years, and where I’d bet relatively few have taken the time to reflect on the important Catholic author for whom it and so many other things in the state are named.
Alfred Joyce Kilmer was born in New Brunswick and attended Columbia. He began to spend time praying for his seriously ill daughter in the beautiful Church of the Holy Innocents while working in Manhattan. He felt a call to Catholicism and converted. Many of his poems reflect his newfound religious imagination and its impact on his interpretation of life. For instance, his poem “Thanksgiving,” less famous than his ubiquitous one “Trees,” turns the tables on what one would expect given the title. It’s not a litany of blessings where Kilmer gives testimonial to his gratefully accepting the positive things in his life, but rather a reflection on his grace-fully accepting the reverse:
“The roar of the world is in my ears. Thank God for the roar of the world! Thank God for the mighty tide of fears/Against me always hurled! Thank God for the bitter and ceaseless strife, And the sting of His chastening rod! Thank God for the stress and the pain of life, And Oh, thank God for God!”
Such a poem clarifies that there is a difference in the Christian life between enduring the cross and embracing it. While we are all called to the former, the saints and mystics somehow bring themselves to practice the latter. They do not merely suffer with Christ because it is unavoidable, but rather realize his presence with them in difficulty, trauma and sadness is manifest in a unique way which would not be so in a life of contentment and tranquility. They do not endure the cross so much as embrace it. If the teachings of Christ did not challenge, upset and agitate their readers, the Gospel wouldn’t be good news at all, but a soporific lullaby rocking us gently into greater spiritual lethargy. Those with the eyes of faith are able not only to accept, but even to thank God for “the sting of His chastening rod.”
C.S. Lewis calls pain God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world, claiming “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.” He’s indescribably present there. Josemaria Escriva puts the same notion this way: “Don’t drag your cross. Carry it squarely on your shoulders…. Don’t bear your cross with resignation. Resignation is not a generous word. Love your cross.” Kilmer recasts Escriva’s sentiments expressed by the Spaniard: “With you, Jesus, how pleasurable is suffering and how luminous darkness.”
Kilmer ended up serving in World War I and was killed by a sniper’s bullet before his 32nd birthday. Despite the tragedies of his life and death, anyone who reads Kilmer finds a whimsical zest for life and astonishment for his surroundings and for other people in nearly every verse. He has been called an “elfin sprite,” one whose poetic genius was able to capture in the limited medium of language the compelling and dynamic world in which he and we live.
Because he was mortally wounded during a battle in France, he is buried in an American military cemetery there. His family was, however, given the supreme honor of his posthumous Croix de Guerre by the French government.
Michael M. Canaris of Collingswood is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.
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