When America Met Thich Nhat Hanh

.

by Jim Forest

I first met Thich Nhat Hanh in May 1966.

At the time Lyndon Johnson was America’s president. The steadily rising level of US troops in Vietnam reached 384,300 that year and within the next eighteen months would expand to half a million. But support for the war was shrinking. The nation had become deeply divided—never before had so many Americans opposed a war being fought by their own government. There were huge protest demonstrations in many cities. Conscientious objection was on the rise; thousands were refusing to serve in the military. Young men were burning their draft cards or crossing the border to Canada.

A significant part of the war’s opposition was religious. In America the ranks of protesters included many prominent Christians and Jews, while in Vietnam tens of thousands of Buddhists, many of them monks whose monasteries had been scarred by war, were engaged in antiwar activities. Their demonstrations had been brutally attacked by South Vietnamese police, and even display of the Buddhist flag was banned. In 1963, one leading Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, had stunned the world when he burned himself alive in response to anti-Buddhist repression by the US-backed Saigon government.

In July 1965, Al Hassler, executive secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR)—the oldest and largest peace organization in the US—had led a fact-finding mission to Vietnam that included meetings in Saigon with Buddhist leaders. The monk who most impressed Hassler was the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, and a friendship quickly took root between them that was to influence the rest of both men’s lives.

Hassler had realized that Thich Nhat Hanh had the potential to help pro-war Americans, including legislators, rethink their Cold War perceptions about what was happening in Vietnam. He wanted Nhat Hanh’s voice to be heard in America, and he set about arranging for Nhat Hanh to come to the States the following year.

I met Thich Nhat Hanh at the Fellowship of Reconciliation headquarters in Nyack, New York. This was in the spring of 1966; he was 39, and I was 24. I had just been appointed director of the Fellowship’s Vietnam program while also serving as co-secretary of the Catholic Peace Fellowship. In introducing him to the FOR staff, Al Hassler explained that Nhat Hanh was a leading figure in the development of “engaged Buddhism,” a movement of religious renewal that linked insights gained from Buddhist teaching to hands-on engagement in situations of suffering. He had also played a leading role in efforts to bring the several strands of Vietnamese Buddhism into greater harmony, resulting in the creation of the Unified Buddhist Church. In addition to these and other accomplishments, he was a widely read author in his homeland, though at the time none of his many volumes of poetry and other writings had yet been published in English or other Western languages.

Addressing the Fellowship staff, Nhat Hanh described the impact of the war on ordinary Vietnamese people, the obliteration of entire villages, and the actions of the Buddhist-led peace movement that allied itself with neither of the warring sides. His stress was not on politics but on war-caused suffering. “The fact that the war kills far more innocent peasants than it does Vietcong is a tragic reality of life in the Vietnamese countryside,” Nhat Hanh said. “Those who escape death by bombings are forced to abandon their destroyed villages and seek shelter in refugee camps where life is even more miserable than it was in the villages. In general these people do not blame the Vietcong for their plight. It is the men in the planes who drop death and destruction from the skies who appear to them to be their enemies. How can they see it otherwise?”

I was impressed not only by what Nhat Hanh had to say about his homeland but by his entire manner. He was as modest as the dark brown monastic robe he was wearing. When questions were raised, he looked at whomever he was addressing with alert, unhurried, attentive eyes. He spoke slowly, carefully, sparingly in Vietnamese-flavored English. His quiet voice reminded me of wind bells. There were restful silences between words and phrases. Afterward I said to Al Hassler, “I could listen to this guy for hours even if he were reading aloud from a telephone book.” Al laughed. “Me too!”

It did not cross my mind that day that Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings would one day circle the world or that his books would sell in the millions of copies. At the time, I saw him not as a religious teacher but as a peace advocate. But I left the meeting deeply impressed, aware that this young, soft-spoken monk from Vietnam was the sort of person who changes lives.

>> Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Thich Nhat Hanh speak at a Chicago news conference in 1966 | Photo by Edward Kitch / AP Photo

Thich Nhat Hanh’s first public appearance was on the first of June 1966 at a press conference in Washington, where he presented a Vietnamese Buddhist proposal for ending the war. He prefaced the plan with the reassurance that he was not anti-American. “It is precisely because I have a great respect and admiration for America that I have undertaken this long voyage to your country, a voyage that entails great personal risk for me upon my return to South Vietnam. Yet I assume this risk willingly because I have faith that if the American public can begin to understand something of what the Vietnamese people feel about what is happening in our country, much of the unnecessary tragedy and misery being endured by both our peoples might be eliminated.” The war in Vietnam, he said, “pits brother against brother, the Vietcong against the supporters of the Saigon government. Both sides claim to represent the Vietnamese people, but in reality, neither side does.” The proposal, which he characterized as offering a “third way” between the warring sides, called on the US to support the Vietnamese people in developing a government truly responsive to their aspirations. Among the principal obstacles to peace, Nhat Hanh said, was America’s support for “those elements which appear to be most devoted to US wishes for Vietnam’s future” rather than the wishes of the Vietnamese people themselves.

Following up on the press conference, the FOR staff arranged a series of meetings for Nhat Hanh with influential figures—key religious leaders, senators and congressmen, editors of major newspapers, and even Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. A cross-country lecture trip followed. By 1967, Nhat Hanh was becoming widely known as an independent Vietnamese voice representing not only Buddhists but all those who were victims of the war in Southeast Asia.

I left the meeting impressed, aware that this young, soft-spoken monk from Vietnam was the sort of person who changes lives.

Wherever he went, Nhat Hanh impressed and disarmed those he met. His gentleness, intelligence, and sanity, plus his fluency in English, made it impossible for most who encountered him to hang on to their stereotypes of what the Vietnamese were like. Not only did his peace proposals make sense, but the vast treasury of Vietnamese culture and Buddhism spilled over through his stories, poetry, and explanations. In the course of his lecture trips, he was able to help thousands of Americans glimpse the war through the eyes of Vietnamese peasants, neither Communist nor anti-Communist, who were laboring in rice paddies and raising their families in villages surrounded by ancient groves of bamboo. After an hour with Nhat Hanh, many who met him were filled with anguish at America’s military intervention in the tribulations of the Vietnamese people. No ideology could justify the horror of the skies raked with bombers, houses and humans burned to ash, and children left to face life without the presence and love of their parents and grandparents.

Predictably, Nhat Hanh’s peace activities were not appreciated by the US-backed government of South Vietnam. He was denounced as a traitor by several generals, while the Hanoi regime accused him of being pro-American. Warned by friends in Vietnam that he would be in grave danger should he return home, he found himself in exile. What was to have been a three-month absence made him an expatriate for more than forty years.

thich nhat hanh america

>> Thich Nhat Hanh (right) and the author (center) in Fontvannes, France | Photo courtesy Jim Forest

One of the persons Nhat Hanh had long hoped to meet while in the United States was Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk whose widely read books had done so much to revitalize contemplative spirituality. Merton was by then also known for his opposition to the war and also for his deep respect for Buddhism. In late May 1966, Merton welcomed Nhat Hanh, plus John Heidbrink of the Fellowship of Reconciliation staff, to the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky for a two-day visit.

The two monks stayed up late into the night in Merton’s hermitage, sharing the chants of their respective traditions, discussing methods of prayer and meditation, comparing Christian and Buddhist aspects of monastic formation, and talking about the war.

Afterward, Merton said to his fellow Trappists, “Thich Nhat Hanh is a perfectly formed monk,” and that he regarded his guest’s arrival as an answer to a prayer. “In meeting Thich Nhat Hanh,” Merton said, “I felt I had met Vietnam.” Merton also wrote of their visit, calling Nhat Hanh his brother: “He is more my brother than many who are nearer to me in race and nationality, because he and I see things exactly the same way.”

Another person who immediately bonded with Nhat Hanh was Martin Luther King Jr. Al Hassler arranged for the two to meet in Chicago during Nhat Hanh’s lecture tour. “Dr. King is not only a brave man but a gifted listener,” Nhat Hanh later told the Fellowship of Reconciliation staff. “As with Thomas Merton, you can say just a little and he understands a great deal. I told Dr. King that many people in Vietnam regard him as a bodhisattva. It was a new word for him. I explained that it means someone who is fully awake, like the Buddha.”

In January 1967, Dr. King nominated Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize, writing that “I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle monk from Vietnam,” and that the honor would “remind all nations that people of good will stand ready to lead warring elements out of an abyss of hatred and destruction. It would reawaken people to the teaching of beauty and love found in peace.” In April of that year, Dr. King delivered his famous Riverside Church speech, in which he first declared his opposition to US intervention in Vietnam.

Wherever he went, Nhat Hanh impressed and disarmed those he met.

Al Hassler was the staff person who most often accompanied Nhat Hanh wherever he went in America, but occasionally another Fellowship of Reconciliation staff member might have that privilege. One evening I was pressed into the job.

The event Nhat Hanh and I attended—a small gathering at a posh apartment on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan—turned out to be disappointing. Slipping away at the earliest possible moment, we returned to the street. I suggested perhaps a cup of tea wouldn’t be a bad idea. Nhat Hanh agreed. We found a fluorescent-lit Chinese café and settled into a candid and intimate conversation. I felt a deep sense of connection, an almost audible click. Nhat Hanh might have felt something similar, because he asked if in the future I would accompany him on his FOR-arranged travels whenever Al Hassler was unavailable. After that evening we traveled together a great deal, from the East Coast to West and back. During our travels, I began to refer to Thich Nhat Hanh as Thay (pronounced tie), the Vietnamese word for “teacher.” He was certainly a teacher for me.

In conversation Nhat Hanh would speak sometimes of the importance of what he called “mindful breathing,” a phrase that seemed quite odd to me at first. Yet I was aware that his walking was somehow different than mine and could imagine this might have something to do with his way of breathing and also his way of listening. Even if we were late for an appointment, he always walked in an attentive, unhurried way. “Better to be late,” Nhat Hanh said, “than breathless. What is most important is to be in the present moment.” It was from Nhat Hanh that I first became aware that walking with attention to breathing provided opportunities to repair the damaged connection between the physical and spiritual.

One evening at a large Protestant church in St. Louis where Thay was speaking, a man stood up during the question period and spoke with searing sarcasm of the “supposed compassion of this Mister Hanh.” He asked, “If you care so much about your people, Mister Hanh, why are you here? If you care so much for the people who are wounded, why don’t you spend your time with them?”

When the man finished, I looked toward Thay in bewilderment. What could he, or anyone, say? The spirit of war had suddenly filled the church. It was hard to breathe.

There was a prolonged silence. Then Thay began to speak—quietly, calmly, with a sense of personal caring for the man who had just bombarded him. Thay’s words seemed like rain falling on fire. “If you want a tree to grow,” he said, “it does not help to water the leaves. You have to water the roots. Many of the roots of the war in my country are here, in your country. To help the people who are being bombed, to try to protect them from this suffering, it is necessary to come here.”

The atmosphere in the room was transformed. In the man’s fury we had experienced our own fury. We had seen the world as through a bomb bay. In Thay’s response we had experienced an alternate option: the possibility—brought to Christians by a Buddhist and to Americans by an “enemy”—of overcoming hatred with love, of breaking the seemingly endless counterreactive chain of violence.

But after his response, Thay whispered something to the chairman and walked abruptly from the room. Sensing something was wrong, I followed Thay outside. It was a cool, clear night. Thay stood on the sidewalk at the edge of the church parking lot. He was struggling for air like someone who had been underwater and who had barely managed to swim to the surface before drowning. I had never seen him like this. It was several minutes before I dared ask him how he was or what had happened.

Thay explained that the man’s comments had been terribly upsetting, and he had been tempted to respond to the man with anger. Instead he had made himself breathe deeply and very slowly in order to find a way to respond with calm and understanding. But the breathing had been too slow and too deep.

“But why not be angry with him?” I asked. “Even pacifists have a right to be angry.”

“If it were just myself, yes,” said Thay. “But I am here to represent the Vietnamese peasants. I have to show those who came here tonight what we can be at our best.”

>> Thich Nhat Hanh in Hue City, Vietnam (2007) | Photo by Lu’u Ly / Wikipedia

As I gradually came to know Thich Nhat Hanh, I began to realize that I and many other peace activists tended to be prisoners on a conveyor belt of activity that often led to burnout, not only due to physical exhaustion but also because of compassion exhaustion. Being attentive to suffering on a daily basis is hard work. Many of us were overwhelmed by a sense of failure and futility. Nor was there much peace in the peace movement. It dawned on me that Thich Nhat Hanh could help me, and others like me, acquire a more sustaining form of social activism. So many of us were overlooking something as essential to our lives and work as breath itself.

It was, for me those many years ago, astonishing news that something as simple as attention to breathing—as breath itself!—could play a significant part in meditation and prayer. Over time, I began to be aware that one of the obstacles to entering a meditative state is that the opportunities are too close at hand, too ordinary, too prosaic: in the kitchen, in subways and buses, in supermarket waiting lines, on sidewalks, on staircases, on picket lines . . . literally everywhere. I came to think of mindful breathing as being a kind of secret, like a mystery novelist’s idea of hiding diamonds in a goldfish bowl put in plain view, hard to see precisely because they are right out in the open.

During our travels, Thay was often asked questions about Buddhism, and I was frequently surprised by his responses. One thing he was asked time and time again was some form of the question, “What is Zen?” On one occasion, Thay tapped the microphone in front of him. “Zen,” he said, “is perhaps this microphone, and if it is not this microphone I do not know what it is. To know what Zen is you must know what Zen is not, and I cannot answer that question. I do not know if it is possible to point out what is religious and what is not. I do not know if the microphone is religious or not religious.”

“The Buddha is truth, and the only thing that keeps you from finding truth is your conviction that you have already found it.”

Another time, a student of Buddhism whom we met in Santa Barbara, California, asked what it meant to seek the Buddha and what happens when you find him. Thay answered, “I am a Zen master—and, as you know, Zen masters always reply incomprehensibly. So I will say that you only find the Buddha by killing the Buddha whenever you find him.” Then he laughed and said, “But I am a nice Zen master, so I will tell you that the Buddha is truth, and the only thing that keeps you from finding truth is your conviction that you have already found it. So whenever you find truth, you must recognize it is a lie, kill it, and go on in the search for truth. Becoming a bodhisattva—someone fully awake—is not reached via methods or ideologies or study or fasting. Memorizing all the sutras is helpful but will not force open the door. You can sit a thousand hours on a meditation cushion and still be stranded. A diet restricted to green leaves will not assure your entrance into the Pure Land. If you think you have encountered the Buddha, it is more likely that it is only a concept of the Buddha—an idol, an illusion. To encounter the true Buddha, we have to kill that illusion.”

>> photo: Thich Nhat Hanh with manuscript, c. 1974 | Photo courtesy Jim Forest

It isn’t easy to describe the influence Thay had on me in the course of our travels. Partly his influence came simply as guidance about what I would call being in a state of prayer, and Thay would call mindfulness or being in the present moment. In contrast with the Catholic priests and prominent peace activists Dan and Phil Berrigan, good friends with whom I was also working closely, Thay exerted no pressure on me to do more than I was already doing to end the war in Vietnam. But because of Thay, Vietnam was no longer a distant country. It was as close as Thay’s voice. Its tragedies were mine. I had broken into what Thomas Merton called “the human dimension.”

When I was invited to be part of a community that was preparing to impede military conscription by burning draft records, with the probability of a long period in prison as a consequence, part of the reason I said yes was my love of Thich Nhat Hanh and the awareness that Vietnam—though I had never been there except through Thay—was part of my home.

In September 1968, I was one of a group of fourteen who burned thousands of draft files on a small square in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. During the trial the following spring, we attempted, with some success, to put the war on trial, but in the end we were found guilty, as we expected. While serving a year in prison—1969–70—I received a letter from Thay.

“Do you remember,” he asked, “the tangerine we shared when we were together? Your being there is like the tangerine. Eat it and be one with it. Tomorrow it will be no more.”

?

>> Adapted from Eyes of Compassion: Learning from Thich Nhat Hanh by Jim Forest, published by Orbis Books. Jim Forest is an American-born writer, theologian, and peace activist who lives in Alkmaar, the Netherlands. He cofounded the Catholic Peace Fellowship in 1964 and has served as secretary general of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. Among Forest’s previous books are Living with Wisdom: A Life of Thomas Merton; All is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day; and At Play in the Lions’ Den: A Biography and Memoir of Daniel Berrigan.

Tricycle / Winter 2021

When America Met Thich Nhat Hanh

A peace activist reflects on the Vietnamese Zen master’s earliest appearances in the States and the influence of his engaged Buddhism.

by Jim Forest

>> Left to right: Lewis Richmond, Richard Baker Roshi, and Thich Nhat Hanh at the March for Nuclear Disarmament on June 17, 1982 in New York City | Courtesy San Francisco Zen Center photo archives

I first met Thich Nhat Hanh in May 1966.

At the time Lyndon Johnson was America’s president. The steadily rising level of US troops in Vietnam reached 384,300 that year and within the next eighteen months would expand to half a million. But support for the war was shrinking. The nation had become deeply divided—never before had so many Americans opposed a war being fought by their own government. There were huge protest demonstrations in many cities. Conscientious objection was on the rise; thousands were refusing to serve in the military. Young men were burning their draft cards or crossing the border to Canada.

A significant part of the war’s opposition was religious. In America the ranks of protesters included many prominent Christians and Jews, while in Vietnam tens of thousands of Buddhists, many of them monks whose monasteries had been scarred by war, were engaged in antiwar activities. Their demonstrations had been brutally attacked by South Vietnamese police, and even display of the Buddhist flag was banned. In 1963, one leading Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, had stunned the world when he burned himself alive in response to anti-Buddhist repression by the US-backed Saigon government.

In July 1965, Al Hassler, executive secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR)—the oldest and largest peace organization in the US—had led a fact-finding mission to Vietnam that included meetings in Saigon with Buddhist leaders. The monk who most impressed Hassler was the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, and a friendship quickly took root between them that was to influence the rest of both men’s lives.

Hassler had realized that Thich Nhat Hanh had the potential to help pro-war Americans, including legislators, rethink their Cold War perceptions about what was happening in Vietnam. He wanted Nhat Hanh’s voice to be heard in America, and he set about arranging for Nhat Hanh to come to the States the following year.

I met Thich Nhat Hanh at the Fellowship of Reconciliation headquarters in Nyack, New York. This was in the spring of 1966; he was 39, and I was 24. I had just been appointed director of the Fellowship’s Vietnam program while also serving as co-secretary of the Catholic Peace Fellowship. In introducing him to the FOR staff, Al Hassler explained that Nhat Hanh was a leading figure in the development of “engaged Buddhism,” a movement of religious renewal that linked insights gained from Buddhist teaching to hands-on engagement in situations of suffering. He had also played a leading role in efforts to bring the several strands of Vietnamese Buddhism into greater harmony, resulting in the creation of the Unified Buddhist Church. In addition to these and other accomplishments, he was a widely read author in his homeland, though at the time none of his many volumes of poetry and other writings had yet been published in English or other Western languages.

Addressing the Fellowship staff, Nhat Hanh described the impact of the war on ordinary Vietnamese people, the obliteration of entire villages, and the actions of the Buddhist-led peace movement that allied itself with neither of the warring sides. His stress was not on politics but on war-caused suffering. “The fact that the war kills far more innocent peasants than it does Vietcong is a tragic reality of life in the Vietnamese countryside,” Nhat Hanh said. “Those who escape death by bombings are forced to abandon their destroyed villages and seek shelter in refugee camps where life is even more miserable than it was in the villages. In general these people do not blame the Vietcong for their plight. It is the men in the planes who drop death and destruction from the skies who appear to them to be their enemies. How can they see it otherwise?”

I was impressed not only by what Nhat Hanh had to say about his homeland but by his entire manner. He was as modest as the dark brown monastic robe he was wearing. When questions were raised, he looked at whomever he was addressing with alert, unhurried, attentive eyes. He spoke slowly, carefully, sparingly in Vietnamese-flavored English. His quiet voice reminded me of wind bells. There were restful silences between words and phrases. Afterward I said to Al Hassler, “I could listen to this guy for hours even if he were reading aloud from a telephone book.” Al laughed. “Me too!”

It did not cross my mind that day that Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings would one day circle the world or that his books would sell in the millions of copies. At the time, I saw him not as a religious teacher but as a peace advocate. But I left the meeting deeply impressed, aware that this young, soft-spoken monk from Vietnam was the sort of person who changes lives.

>> Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Thich Nhat Hanh speak at a Chicago news conference in 1966 | Photo by Edward Kitch / AP Photo

Thich Nhat Hanh’s first public appearance was on the first of June 1966 at a press conference in Washington, where he presented a Vietnamese Buddhist proposal for ending the war. He prefaced the plan with the reassurance that he was not anti-American. “It is precisely because I have a great respect and admiration for America that I have undertaken this long voyage to your country, a voyage that entails great personal risk for me upon my return to South Vietnam. Yet I assume this risk willingly because I have faith that if the American public can begin to understand something of what the Vietnamese people feel about what is happening in our country, much of the unnecessary tragedy and misery being endured by both our peoples might be eliminated.” The war in Vietnam, he said, “pits brother against brother, the Vietcong against the supporters of the Saigon government. Both sides claim to represent the Vietnamese people, but in reality, neither side does.” The proposal, which he characterized as offering a “third way” between the warring sides, called on the US to support the Vietnamese people in developing a government truly responsive to their aspirations. Among the principal obstacles to peace, Nhat Hanh said, was America’s support for “those elements which appear to be most devoted to US wishes for Vietnam’s future” rather than the wishes of the Vietnamese people themselves.

Following up on the press conference, the FOR staff arranged a series of meetings for Nhat Hanh with influential figures—key religious leaders, senators and congressmen, editors of major newspapers, and even Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. A cross-country lecture trip followed. By 1967, Nhat Hanh was becoming widely known as an independent Vietnamese voice representing not only Buddhists but all those who were victims of the war in Southeast Asia.

I left the meeting impressed, aware that this young, soft-spoken monk from Vietnam was the sort of person who changes lives.

Wherever he went, Nhat Hanh impressed and disarmed those he met. His gentleness, intelligence, and sanity, plus his fluency in English, made it impossible for most who encountered him to hang on to their stereotypes of what the Vietnamese were like. Not only did his peace proposals make sense, but the vast treasury of Vietnamese culture and Buddhism spilled over through his stories, poetry, and explanations. In the course of his lecture trips, he was able to help thousands of Americans glimpse the war through the eyes of Vietnamese peasants, neither Communist nor anti-Communist, who were laboring in rice paddies and raising their families in villages surrounded by ancient groves of bamboo. After an hour with Nhat Hanh, many who met him were filled with anguish at America’s military intervention in the tribulations of the Vietnamese people. No ideology could justify the horror of the skies raked with bombers, houses and humans burned to ash, and children left to face life without the presence and love of their parents and grandparents.

Predictably, Nhat Hanh’s peace activities were not appreciated by the US-backed government of South Vietnam. He was denounced as a traitor by several generals, while the Hanoi regime accused him of being pro-American. Warned by friends in Vietnam that he would be in grave danger should he return home, he found himself in exile. What was to have been a three-month absence made him an expatriate for more than forty years.

thich nhat hanh america

>> Thich Nhat Hanh (right) and the author (center) in Fontvannes, France | Photo courtesy Jim Forest

One of the persons Nhat Hanh had long hoped to meet while in the United States was Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk whose widely read books had done so much to revitalize contemplative spirituality. Merton was by then also known for his opposition to the war and also for his deep respect for Buddhism. In late May 1966, Merton welcomed Nhat Hanh, plus John Heidbrink of the Fellowship of Reconciliation staff, to the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky for a two-day visit.

The two monks stayed up late into the night in Merton’s hermitage, sharing the chants of their respective traditions, discussing methods of prayer and meditation, comparing Christian and Buddhist aspects of monastic formation, and talking about the war.

Afterward, Merton said to his fellow Trappists, “Thich Nhat Hanh is a perfectly formed monk,” and that he regarded his guest’s arrival as an answer to a prayer. “In meeting Thich Nhat Hanh,” Merton said, “I felt I had met Vietnam.” Merton also wrote of their visit, calling Nhat Hanh his brother: “He is more my brother than many who are nearer to me in race and nationality, because he and I see things exactly the same way.”

Another person who immediately bonded with Nhat Hanh was Martin Luther King Jr. Al Hassler arranged for the two to meet in Chicago during Nhat Hanh’s lecture tour. “Dr. King is not only a brave man but a gifted listener,” Nhat Hanh later told the Fellowship of Reconciliation staff. “As with Thomas Merton, you can say just a little and he understands a great deal. I told Dr. King that many people in Vietnam regard him as a bodhisattva. It was a new word for him. I explained that it means someone who is fully awake, like the Buddha.”

In January 1967, Dr. King nominated Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize, writing that “I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle monk from Vietnam,” and that the honor would “remind all nations that people of good will stand ready to lead warring elements out of an abyss of hatred and destruction. It would reawaken people to the teaching of beauty and love found in peace.” In April of that year, Dr. King delivered his famous Riverside Church speech, in which he first declared his opposition to US intervention in Vietnam.

Wherever he went, Nhat Hanh impressed and disarmed those he met.

Al Hassler was the staff person who most often accompanied Nhat Hanh wherever he went in America, but occasionally another Fellowship of Reconciliation staff member might have that privilege. One evening I was pressed into the job.

The event Nhat Hanh and I attended—a small gathering at a posh apartment on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan—turned out to be disappointing. Slipping away at the earliest possible moment, we returned to the street. I suggested perhaps a cup of tea wouldn’t be a bad idea. Nhat Hanh agreed. We found a fluorescent-lit Chinese café and settled into a candid and intimate conversation. I felt a deep sense of connection, an almost audible click. Nhat Hanh might have felt something similar, because he asked if in the future I would accompany him on his FOR-arranged travels whenever Al Hassler was unavailable. After that evening we traveled together a great deal, from the East Coast to West and back. During our travels, I began to refer to Thich Nhat Hanh as Thay (pronounced tie), the Vietnamese word for “teacher.” He was certainly a teacher for me.

In conversation Nhat Hanh would speak sometimes of the importance of what he called “mindful breathing,” a phrase that seemed quite odd to me at first. Yet I was aware that his walking was somehow different than mine and could imagine this might have something to do with his way of breathing and also his way of listening. Even if we were late for an appointment, he always walked in an attentive, unhurried way. “Better to be late,” Nhat Hanh said, “than breathless. What is most important is to be in the present moment.” It was from Nhat Hanh that I first became aware that walking with attention to breathing provided opportunities to repair the damaged connection between the physical and spiritual.

One evening at a large Protestant church in St. Louis where Thay was speaking, a man stood up during the question period and spoke with searing sarcasm of the “supposed compassion of this Mister Hanh.” He asked, “If you care so much about your people, Mister Hanh, why are you here? If you care so much for the people who are wounded, why don’t you spend your time with them?”

When the man finished, I looked toward Thay in bewilderment. What could he, or anyone, say? The spirit of war had suddenly filled the church. It was hard to breathe.

There was a prolonged silence. Then Thay began to speak—quietly, calmly, with a sense of personal caring for the man who had just bombarded him. Thay’s words seemed like rain falling on fire. “If you want a tree to grow,” he said, “it does not help to water the leaves. You have to water the roots. Many of the roots of the war in my country are here, in your country. To help the people who are being bombed, to try to protect them from this suffering, it is necessary to come here.”

The atmosphere in the room was transformed. In the man’s fury we had experienced our own fury. We had seen the world as through a bomb bay. In Thay’s response we had experienced an alternate option: the possibility—brought to Christians by a Buddhist and to Americans by an “enemy”—of overcoming hatred with love, of breaking the seemingly endless counterreactive chain of violence.

But after his response, Thay whispered something to the chairman and walked abruptly from the room. Sensing something was wrong, I followed Thay outside. It was a cool, clear night. Thay stood on the sidewalk at the edge of the church parking lot. He was struggling for air like someone who had been underwater and who had barely managed to swim to the surface before drowning. I had never seen him like this. It was several minutes before I dared ask him how he was or what had happened.

Thay explained that the man’s comments had been terribly upsetting, and he had been tempted to respond to the man with anger. Instead he had made himself breathe deeply and very slowly in order to find a way to respond with calm and understanding. But the breathing had been too slow and too deep.

“But why not be angry with him?” I asked. “Even pacifists have a right to be angry.”

“If it were just myself, yes,” said Thay. “But I am here to represent the Vietnamese peasants. I have to show those who came here tonight what we can be at our best.”

>> Thich Nhat Hanh in Hue City, Vietnam (2007) | Photo by Lu’u Ly / Wikipedia

As I gradually came to know Thich Nhat Hanh, I began to realize that I and many other peace activists tended to be prisoners on a conveyor belt of activity that often led to burnout, not only due to physical exhaustion but also because of compassion exhaustion. Being attentive to suffering on a daily basis is hard work. Many of us were overwhelmed by a sense of failure and futility. Nor was there much peace in the peace movement. It dawned on me that Thich Nhat Hanh could help me, and others like me, acquire a more sustaining form of social activism. So many of us were overlooking something as essential to our lives and work as breath itself.

It was, for me those many years ago, astonishing news that something as simple as attention to breathing—as breath itself!—could play a significant part in meditation and prayer. Over time, I began to be aware that one of the obstacles to entering a meditative state is that the opportunities are too close at hand, too ordinary, too prosaic: in the kitchen, in subways and buses, in supermarket waiting lines, on sidewalks, on staircases, on picket lines . . . literally everywhere. I came to think of mindful breathing as being a kind of secret, like a mystery novelist’s idea of hiding diamonds in a goldfish bowl put in plain view, hard to see precisely because they are right out in the open.

During our travels, Thay was often asked questions about Buddhism, and I was frequently surprised by his responses. One thing he was asked time and time again was some form of the question, “What is Zen?” On one occasion, Thay tapped the microphone in front of him. “Zen,” he said, “is perhaps this microphone, and if it is not this microphone I do not know what it is. To know what Zen is you must know what Zen is not, and I cannot answer that question. I do not know if it is possible to point out what is religious and what is not. I do not know if the microphone is religious or not religious.”

“The Buddha is truth, and the only thing that keeps you from finding truth is your conviction that you have already found it.”

Another time, a student of Buddhism whom we met in Santa Barbara, California, asked what it meant to seek the Buddha and what happens when you find him. Thay answered, “I am a Zen master—and, as you know, Zen masters always reply incomprehensibly. So I will say that you only find the Buddha by killing the Buddha whenever you find him.” Then he laughed and said, “But I am a nice Zen master, so I will tell you that the Buddha is truth, and the only thing that keeps you from finding truth is your conviction that you have already found it. So whenever you find truth, you must recognize it is a lie, kill it, and go on in the search for truth. Becoming a bodhisattva—someone fully awake—is not reached via methods or ideologies or study or fasting. Memorizing all the sutras is helpful but will not force open the door. You can sit a thousand hours on a meditation cushion and still be stranded. A diet restricted to green leaves will not assure your entrance into the Pure Land. If you think you have encountered the Buddha, it is more likely that it is only a concept of the Buddha—an idol, an illusion. To encounter the true Buddha, we have to kill that illusion.”

>> photo: Thich Nhat Hanh with manuscript, c. 1974 | Photo courtesy Jim Forest

It isn’t easy to describe the influence Thay had on me in the course of our travels. Partly his influence came simply as guidance about what I would call being in a state of prayer, and Thay would call mindfulness or being in the present moment. In contrast with the Catholic priests and prominent peace activists Dan and Phil Berrigan, good friends with whom I was also working closely, Thay exerted no pressure on me to do more than I was already doing to end the war in Vietnam. But because of Thay, Vietnam was no longer a distant country. It was as close as Thay’s voice. Its tragedies were mine. I had broken into what Thomas Merton called “the human dimension.”

When I was invited to be part of a community that was preparing to impede military conscription by burning draft records, with the probability of a long period in prison as a consequence, part of the reason I said yes was my love of Thich Nhat Hanh and the awareness that Vietnam—though I had never been there except through Thay—was part of my home.

In September 1968, I was one of a group of fourteen who burned thousands of draft files on a small square in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. During the trial the following spring, we attempted, with some success, to put the war on trial, but in the end we were found guilty, as we expected. While serving a year in prison—1969–70—I received a letter from Thay.

“Do you remember,” he asked, “the tangerine we shared when we were together? Your being there is like the tangerine. Eat it and be one with it. Tomorrow it will be no more.”

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>> Adapted from Eyes of Compassion: Learning from Thich Nhat Hanh by Jim Forest, published by Orbis Books. Jim Forest is an American-born writer, theologian, and peace activist who lives in Alkmaar, the Netherlands. He cofounded the Catholic Peace Fellowship in 1964 and has served as secretary general of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. Among Forest’s previous books are Living with Wisdom: A Life of Thomas Merton; All is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day; and At Play in the Lions’ Den: A Biography and Memoir of Daniel Berrigan.

Eyes of Compassion: Learning from Thich Nhat Hanh

“This appreciative portrait of a humble, devout leader should hold appeal across spiritual denominations.” — Publishers Weekly

Book: Eyes of Compassion: Learning from Thich Nhat Hanh by Jim Forest

Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the world’s most influential and revered spiritual teachers, but when Jim Forest met him in the mid-1960s, he was a little-known Vietnamese Zen monk touring the United States on behalf of the cause of peace in his homeland. Jim was asked to accompany him on his travels and speaking engagements and later lived with “Thay” (Vietnamese for teacher) in France. An enduring friendship emerged in which Jim learned, through conversations and daily life, about Nhat Hanh’s teachings on “mindfulness,” “interbeing,” and the inner peace that is necessary for promoting world peace. Jim Forest’s intimate portrait, which includes photos and other illustrations, some of them by Thich Nhat Hanh, is a unique introduction to the life and teachings of a modern spiritual master.

“A beautiful door into the life and vision of our friend Thich Nhat Hanh, one of the greatest peacemakers and spiritual teachers in history. This well-told, intimate look into his early life inspires us to deepen in mindfulness and nonviolence, see through the eyes of compassion, and live, like Thay, from now on, in the present moment of peace.”— Rev. John Dear

“Jim Forest, highly regarded Christian peace activist and well-known author, presents Zen Buddhist Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s core spiritual teachings from up close and personal, out of their many years of friendship and collaboration toward building a more peaceful, more compassionate world for all of us.” — Ruben L.F. Habito

“A moving memoir of another, roiling historical era and the influence of a Buddhist monk on a devout Christian, both of whom remain authentic voices for peace rooted in spiritual practice. Theirs are important voices these harsh times. In our harsh times, Jim Forest’s moving memoir of Thich Nhat Hanh is a gentle reminder of more placid ways of effecting change and of the continuing importance of the lives and writing of both men. In prose, poetry, and pictures this important record of a friendship is a gift to those seeking the “moon” of peace to which Thich Nhat Hanh’s and Jim Forest’s lives point. Highly recommended.” — Bonnie Thurston

“This exquisite and surprising book by Jim Forest brings us directly into the whole and remarkable life of the great Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. I read it with deep joy, as Forest’s words made me feel as though I had walked alongside Thay since his early years. It is full of dharma, tenderness, intimacy, and wisdom.” — Roshi Joan Halifax, Abbot, Upaya Zen Center

“Many of the recollections and anecdotes that Jim shares in this memoir are familiar to me, as I was either present at conversations or had similar encounters with Thay’s teaching. Those were rare years, darkened by the war’s ongoing devastation, and yet also blessed by a certain smallness. Thay had not yet become internationally renowned as a Zen teacher. He was, in fact, reluctant to even teach Buddhist practice to Westerners, expressing the thought that people might better benefit by renewing their own ancestral traditions. Yet visitors, Vietnamese as well as French and American, were always reminded to practice mindfulness. The breath, Thay pointed out, is available to everyone from any tradition…. Some of my most enduring memories of that time are when Jim Forest and his family came for visits. There was always thoughtful, serious discussion. But there was also playful teasing, and after we moved to Fontvannes, walks in fields of sunflowers and plucking ears of baby corn in a neighboring farmer’s field to make sweet soup. And singing, always singing.” — Mobi Warren

>> The book includes dozens of previously unpublished photos and drawings, many by Thich Nhat Hanh.

Peter Maurin: Prophet of The Green Revolution

The Forgotten Radical Peter Maurin: Easy Essays from the Catholic Worker

By Peter Maurin, edited by Lincoln Rice / Fordham University Press, 2020

Review by Jim Forest

In bringing out the complete writings of Peter Maurin, editor Lincoln Rice has put Peter Maurin back on the map of people who deserve widespread attention. The timing of the book’s publication is providential. As was the case when the first issue of The Catholic Worker was published, once again we are facing a great depression. It’s a time to rethink the problem of our ultra-urbanized culture in which environment and peace are less important than consumer spending and a militarized economy — a way of life that is in fact a way of death.

While the bulk of Maurin’s “Easy Essays” have been published from time to time in the past, not all of them have previously seen the light of day, nor were his writings annotated. The reader was often left in the dark about obscure names mentioned, books cited, and events referred to. Lincoln Rice has not only provided us with a definitive edition but includes several revealing interviews with Maurin. Rice also provides a compact biography of Maurin and lists the many books he referred to in his writings. Any reader who wants to know more about Maurin has the ideal resource.

Dorothy Day was the driving force in bringing the Catholic Worker movement into being and shaping it, yet there would have been no Catholic Worker had it not been for Peter Maurin. Dorothy Day always regarded him as the Catholic Worker’s co-founder.

The two met in December 1932 after Dorothy Day’s return from reporting on a “hunger march” in Washington, DC. “I am Peter Maurin,” the stranger said in a thick French accent. “George Schuster, editor of Commonweal, told me to look you up.”

“Peter talked as if he were taking up a conversation where it had been left off,” Dorothy recalled in Loaves and Fishes, her history of the Catholic Worker’s first three decades. “There was a gray look about him. He had gray hair, cut short and scrubby, gray eyes, strong features, a pleasant mouth, and short-fingered, broad hands, evidently used to hard work…. He wore the kind of old clothes that have so lost their shape and finish that it’s impossible to tell if they are clean or not.”

Peter chose the occasion to recite one of his “Easy Essays,” as Dorothy’s brother John christened them — a kind of rhythmic, blank-verse poem using repeated words and phrases arranged in short lines. Aware that Dorothy had just returned from Washington, his text was a challenge to her and to all those who believe that it is the task of government to solve our problems. It began:

People go to Washington

asking the government

to solve their economic problems,

while the Federal government

was never intended

to solve men’s economic problems.

Thomas Jefferson says,

“The less government there is,

the better it is.”

If the less government there is,

the better it is,

the best kind of government

is self-government…

Arguing for less government rather than more was an idea completely out of fashion with most of the radicals Dorothy Day knew and whose journals she had often written for and helped edit.

Their first meeting was relatively brief — Dorothy was tired and her daughter Tamar had the measles — but Peter was back the next day, eager to tell her about the three-point program he hoped she would embrace: founding a newspaper “for the clarification of thought,” promoting houses of hospitality for those in need of food and shelter, and organizing farming communities so that both workers and scholars could return to the land. “I did not think,” Dorothy recalled later in life, “that the second two had anything to do with me, but I did know about newspapers.”

While Peter was tireless in expounding his vision and philosophy, he was hesitant to talk about himself. It took years for Dorothy to gather together the main facts of his life. The eldest of twenty-two children, Peter had been born in 1877 into a family of peasant farmers in the French region of Languedoc, not far from Spain. He took pride in having a grandfather who lived to be ninety-four and who had still been working in the fields when he was eighty-five, after which he stayed home making baskets and praying the rosary. At sixteen, Peter entered a Catholic teaching order, the Christian Brothers, with whom he remained for nine years. In 1902, he left the order and became active in Le Sillon (The Furrow), a movement which advocated Christian democracy and which supported cooperatives and unions. But in 1908, with Le Sillon shifting from its early religious focus toward politics, Peter withdrew and soon after joined the stream of emigrants who were leaving France for Canada, where there was no military conscription and land was cheap. For two years, he homesteaded in Saskatchewan, then took whatever work he could find, first in Canada and then in the United States. By the time he met Dorothy, he had dug irrigation ditches, quarried stone, harvested wheat, cut lumber, laid railway tracks, labored in brickyards, steel mills and coal mines. He had been jailed for vagrancy and for “riding the rails.” He had never married. In Chicago, he had supported himself by teaching French and making a good living doing so. It must have been at the end of his Chicago days that he experienced a religious awakening that reoriented his life. In the five-year period leading up to his encounter with Dorothy Day, he had been the handyman at a Catholic boys’ camp, Mount Tremper, in upstate New York in exchange for meals, use of the chaplain’s library, living space in the barn (shared with a horse), and pocket money when needed.

He once confided to Dorothy that, in the rootless decade that preceded his job at the boys’ camp, he had become estranged from the Catholic Church. “Why?” she asked. “Because I was not living as a Catholic should,” Peter replied. “There was a finality about his answer,” Dorothy commented in retelling the story in 1952, “that kept me from questioning further. I understood that his difficulties had not been intellectual but moral…. I could only suppose that he had been living as most men do in their youth, following their own desires.”

By the time Dorothy met him, Peter had not only returned to the Catholic faith but had acquired an ascetic attitude toward both property and money: he had nearly none of either and, like Saint Francis of Assisi, rejoiced in poverty as if it were his bride. His poverty was his freedom. His unencumbered, possession-free life provided him with ample time for study, prayer and meditation, out of which a vision had taken form of a social order “in which it would be easier for men to be good.” He sought a new weaving together of “cult, culture and cultivation,” a synthesis he saw as being “so old that it seems like new.” Cult referred to religion, the foundation of life. Culture arose from religion and meant each person being as an artist or craftsman in his or her field of endeavor. Cultivation meant a life rooted in the land.

As often as his work at the camp allowed, he made his way to New York City. A “flop house” hotel on the Bowery provided austere lodging for forty cents a night. His days were spent either at the New York Public Library or on the streets — often at Union Square — expounding his ideas to anyone who showed a flicker of interest. After all, he reasoned, the way to reach the man on the street is to go to the street. No doubt his accent and threadbare suit convinced many that there was no need to listen. But Peter was a born teacher, lively and good humored, and had little difficulty in finding willing listeners — not only the unemployed and radicals with time on their hands, but bankers and professors.

During the days of Tamar’s recovery and for weeks afterward, Peter was nearly a full-time visitor, offering Dorothy an intensive course on the Church’s role in the world. He was one of the rare Catholics who knew what recent popes had written on pressing social issues, and could even recite by heart significant passages from the encyclicals Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno. He had studied so many authors that people who came to know Peter joked about him being a walking library.

Peter told Dorothy how saints, down through the centuries, had responded in radical ways to the social ills of their day. Emphasizing the “primacy of the spiritual,” Peter wanted Dorothy to acquire a view of life and history that centered on sanctity — to study the past with special attention to the lives of the saints and their impact on the world around them. “It’s better to know the lives of saints,” Peter insisted, “than the lives of kings and generals.” But studying history was also essential: “We must study history,” he said, “in order to find out why things are as they are. In the light of history, we should so work today that things will be different in the future.”

Peter had been praying for a collaborator and was certain Dorothy was the answer to his prayers. Her articles and what others had told him about her, as well as his own immediate impressions, convinced him that Dorothy had the potential of becoming a new Saint Catherine of Siena, the outspoken medieval reformer and peace negotiator who had counseled — and reprimanded — both popes and princes. What Saint Catherine had done in the fourteenth century, Peter believed Dorothy could do in the twentieth. She had the potential, he said, “to move mountains, and have influence on governments, temporal and spiritual.”

“There is no revolution without a theory of revolution,” Peter told Dorothy, quoting Lenin, but what is needed, he went on, is not a bloody “Red Revolution,” such as Lenin’s in Russia, built on mountains of casualties. Killing as a method of social reform only led to the cemetery. What was needed, Peter argued, was a bottom-up, peaceful, “Green Revolution.” For the theory of a Green Revolution to be made known and put into practice, a journal was needed, a radical Catholic paper that would publicize Catholic social teaching and promote the steps that could bring about the peaceful transformation of society. Dorothy, he said, should be the editor of such a publication.

It seemed to Dorothy that, if family roots, life experience and religious conviction had prepared her for anything, it was just such a task. It was obvious that the few Catholic publications willing to publish her writings had no revolutionary vision and no interest in reaching the down-and-out.

“But how are we to start it?” she asked. “I enunciate the principles,” Peter declared. “But where do we get the money?” “In the history of the saints,” Peter answered, “capital is raised by prayer. God sends you what you need when you need it. You will be able to pay the printer. Just read the lives of the saints.”

Dorothy had recently read Sorrow Built a Bridge, a biography of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter. At age forty, she had converted to Catholicism. Abandoning her social position, she rented a three-room tenement flat on the Lower East Side in New York and opened its door to penniless neighbors who were dying of cancer. From her hospitality to the terminally ill had sprung a religious order, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne. The story of what one woman in the same neighborhood had done only a few decades earlier gave Dorothy courage.

“Why not start a newspaper in the same way?” Dorothy asked herself. “I began to look on my kitchen as an editorial office, my brother as an assistant to write heads and to help with mechanical make-up. Tamar and I could go out to sell papers on the streets!” Editing a Catholic paper that promoted a new social order was a vision Dorothy could not walk away from. “It was impossible to be with a person like Peter without sharing his simple faith that the Lord would provide what was necessary to do His work,” Dorothy wrote in House of Hospitality.

The name Peter proposed for the paper was The Catholic Radical. Radical, he pointed out, came from the Latin word, radix, for root. The radical is someone who doesn’t settle for cosmetic solutions but goes to the root of personal and social problems. Dorothy felt that the name should refer to the class of its hoped-for readers rather than the attitude of its editors and so decided to name it The Catholic Worker. “Man proposes and woman disposes,” Peter responded meekly.

It took several months to move from uncertain interest to actual decisions, but by the spring Dorothy was beginning to envision, then work on the first issue. Peter knew a priest who, he thought, would allow the use of a mimeograph machine to get out the first issue, but nothing came of it, perhaps in part because Dorothy wanted a more enduring journal. She found that the Paulist Press was willing to set type for and print 2,500 copies of a letter-sized eight-page tabloid paper for $57, cash in advance. Dorothy calculated she could pay the bill with recent income from her writing and research work plus delaying payment of her gas and electric bills. “We would sell the paper, I decided, for a cent a copy,” Dorothy recalled, “to make it so cheap that anyone could afford to buy.” (The penny-a-copy price has never changed.)

She plunged into writing the first issue, preparing articles on labor, strikes and unemployment. Her own writing retained its usual highly personal style. In addition she selected six of Peter’s “Easy Essays.” These were an orator’s blend of manifesto and poetry. One of them included in the first issue protested the crippling grip of wealth on the Church:

Christ drove the money changers

            out of the Temple.

            But today nobody dares

            to drive the money lenders

            out of the Temple.

            And nobody dares

            to drive the money lenders

            out of the Temple

            because the money lenders

            have taken a mortgage

            on the Temple.

On the first of May, 1933, the radicals and workers who crowded Union Square to celebrate their revolutionary hopes were the recipients of the first issue. In it Peter Maurin’s name — misspelled Maurain — was listed with Dorothy’s as an editor, but he wasn’t among those distributing the new paper at Union Square. Apart from his own Easy Essays, which filled several columns, he found the new-born Catholic Worker a painful disappointment and had no desire to be considered co-responsible. “It’s everyone’s paper,” he said woefully after looking at the first issue, “and everyone’s paper is no one’s paper.” The “everyone” he referred to was Dorothy Day. It was her voice rather than his that was dominant and that would remain so the rest of her life.

Peter quietly left Dorothy’s apartment, where he had been an almost daily visitor for months. Weeks passed before she saw him again. Dorothy was so caught up with the needs of the infant paper that she may have felt some relief in his absence. Mailing out sample copies to nuns and priests, editors and friends, writing letters begging for support, all the while caring for Tamar, she would not have felt an immediate need for Peter’s indoctrination.

Peter returned while the second issue was being laid out. He had recovered from his initial disappointment and was ready to resume Dorothy’s education. He arrived daily in the mid-afternoon, often stayed until late at night, making his “points” — jabbing the air with his right index finger, an exclamation mark in motion, while Dorothy carried on with her chores and the care of Tamar.

It became clear that Peter’s objection to the first issue wasn’t simply that Dorothy’s voice rather than his own dominated its pages. Though Peter saw it as his role “to enunciate the principles,” Dorothy noted, he was remarkably free of the need for personal recognition and he admired Dorothy’s writing. What he found missing in the paper was a presentation of basic ideas and principles, a coherent strategy for a new social order, which he had hoped the paper would communicate on every page. He felt that Dorothy hadn’t really understood what he had been saying all those weeks. If the first issue were pruned of his Easy Essays and the occasional quotations from the Bible and papal encyclicals, it seemed to him that most of the surviving material — stories about strikes, trials, racism, child labor and economic exploitation — could have been published in any radical publication. As Peter saw it, the first Catholic Worker was simply one more journal of protest, different from others mainly because it was edited by Catholics rather than atheists and had some specifically Christian content.

Peter was a radical out of step with other radicals. He had little interest in protest, which he believed did almost nothing to bring about real change. The old order would die from neglect rather than criticism. He had never joined a union, he told Dorothy, because he didn’t want “to enlarge the proletariat.” What was needed first of all, Peter was convinced, was communicating a vision of a future society alongside an easy-to-grasp program of constructive steps with which to begin realizing elements of the vision — “building a new society within the shell of the old” — in one’s own life.

“Progress” was a word that summed up for many people the popular idea that history inevitably evolves upward, but Peter, like the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, saw too much evidence that civilization was moving downward, from the human to the subhuman, from decentralization to centralization, from freedom to slavery, from the divine to the demonic.

In “Modern Times,” a film released only three years later, Charlie Chaplin converted a similar insight into the image of his silent, benevolent tramp being ingested into the gears of a giant machine. It was machines that were getting better, Peter noticed, not human beings. “History has failed,” he wrote. “There is no such thing as hi§storical progress. The present is not an improvement on the past.” Left-oriented political movements that described themselves as “progressive” were, in Peter’s view, simply attempting to make superficial improvements to structures that were innately destructive. While sympathizing with factory workers striking for better pay and better hours, the basic structures of industrialism, Peter had learned as a factory laborer, were hostile to human beings and to creation itself. Peter saw no point in struggling for minor concessions in places where the work was fundamentally anti-human. He considered assembly lines no less brutalizing than prisons, except that, when the whistle blew, the prisoners of the factory were sent home for the night. It is time, Peter argued, to leave behind time clocks and shift labor and “fire the bosses.”

You didn’t fire the bosses by briefly withholding your labor and closing factories for a week or a month. “Strikes don’t strike me,” Peter said. His solution to industrial ruthlessness, injustice and joblessness was summed up in one sentence: “There is no unemployment on the land.” The Catholic Worker, Peter argued, should stand for a decentralized society, a society of cooperation rather than coercion, with artisans and craftsmen, with small factories that were worker-owned and worker-run. Agricultural communities would be the basic unit in which worker and scholar could both sweat and think together, developing what Peter called a “worker-scholar synthesis.”

Another central concept for Peter was voluntary poverty — a poverty that he distinguished from destitution. To him, voluntary poverty did not mean having nothing but living simply, with less rather than more, sharing rather than hoarding, owning only what was truly needed, “going without luxuries in order to have essentials.” Voluntary poverty enabled the person “with two coats to give one of them to the person with none.” Like Francis of Assisi and many other saints, Peter had been living on less rather than more for years and had found it freeing rather than limiting. He sometimes quoted a passage from Eric Gill’s writings: “The poor man, in the sense of the Gospel, in the meaning of Jesus, is not he who has been robbed but he who has not robbed others…. [The] poor man … is not he who has not been loved, but he who has loved others rather than himself.”

All this, of course, struck many people as utopian — an attractive vision but not something that could happen in the real world. “Utopian” was a word that was often hurled at Peter as if no other response was necessary. Peter Maurin, his critics said, was trying to restore the medieval past. His plan also lacked details or reliance on political structures. As Dorothy noted in The Long Loneliness, “The trouble was that Peter never filled in the chasms, the valleys in leaping from crag to crag of noble thoughts.”

But Peter had a point in noting that capitalist and communist had more in common than they liked to admit: both were looking with a similar uncritical gaze toward a horizon of smokestacks. Both communist and anti-communist were generally city people who liked to get their milk and eggs at a nearby store. Few of them aspired to the plow, the chicken coop, the dawn milking, the midnight calving, and the 365-day work year that the care of livestock and the raising of crops requires.

Following Peter’s return, Dorothy became more open to his critique of assembly-line civilization and his vision of moving toward a post-industrial society. Surely there must be something more to struggle for than improved, unionized or even worker-owned industrialism. Surely community was better than mass society. Surely it was better for children to grow up with space, air, and land — where the main color was green rather than gray. Surely life on the land wasn’t just for our ancestors. And would not a decentralized, farm-centered society provide a better base for a way of life that was shaped by religious faith? Surely others too were longing for a society more congenial to faith, hope and love.

Yet Dorothy’s approach and Peter’s were different, a difference Dorothy attributed in part to what she saw as a basic difference between man and woman. Men, Dorothy felt, tended to be preoccupied with the future and were generally more abstract, more idea driven, more idealistic, while women tended to be more centered in the present, more practical and more rooted, involved as they were, as mothers and grandmothers, with solving the immediate practical problems of running a home and caring for children. Drawing on her own experience, she felt that “woman is saved by child-bearing,” a role which imposes on her “a rule of life which involves others” and through which “she will be saved in spite of herself.” Men didn’t have to be so anchored. “Women think with their whole bodies,” it seemed to Dorothy. “More than men do, women see things as a whole.”

Even so, it was Dorothy, not Peter, who used ideological labels like “pacifist” and “anarchist” in describing herself. Pacifism meant for Dorothy an across-the-board rejection of war — while some wars might have more justification than others, no war was in fact good, no war was just, no war was praiseworthy, every war was a catastrophe. For her the term “anarchist” (literally, a person without a king) meant taking personal responsibility, not expecting the government to solve every problem. As she would later explain to a friend, Rosemary Bannon, her concept of anarchism was “a religious one stemming from the life of Jesus on earth, who came to serve rather than to be served.”

Peter, in contrast, avoided every label except Catholic and one other: “personalist.” A personalist, in Peter’s view, was a person seeking not to reform the state but to reform himself. Unhappy with the world? Then become yourself the person you want others to be. Do yourself what you wish others would do. “Don’t criticize what is not being done,” Peter said over and over again. “See what there is to do, fit yourself to do it, then do it.” (The modern concept of personalism had been developed by the French philosopher, Emmanuel Mounier, whose writings Peter translated and brought into the pages of The Catholic Worker.)

With the second issue of The Catholic Worker, Peter formally withdrew his name as an editor, announcing that henceforth he was responsible only for what he signed himself, yet from that issue onward, the paper as a whole, including Dorothy’s own writing, bore greater evidence of Peter’s influence. This wasn’t, however, at the expense of Dorothy’s preoccupation with the here and now. She continued to identify with anyone who was protesting injustice and struggling for even slight improvements in the existing social order. She continued to side with strikers and union organizers and to approve of much that those on the left were doing, even if they never questioned urbanization or industrialism. But she found ways to articulate a vision of a future with fewer smokestacks and smaller cities.

In the second issue Peter described his program in more detail: his call for discussion and study groups and for the foundation of houses of hospitality and farming communes. In essence, it was a call, he cheerfully admitted, for Christian communism. “I am not afraid of the word communism,” he wrote, but it was not something to be imposed on anyone — a green rather than a red communism. “I am not saying that my program is for everyone. It is for those who choose to embrace it.”

Readers were invited by Peter to the first “round table discussion,” an image suggesting a gathering in which all who take part have equal standing. A $3 deposit had already been paid — $7 was still owed — for a hall on East 4th Street, he announced to his readers. He must have been disappointed when only fifteen people showed up, but an enduring Catholic Worker tradition began that night. At the New York Catholic Worker, rarely has a week passed since then without a weekly public meeting, usually on Friday evenings. A similar practice is followed by many other Catholic Worker communities.

For Peter, teaching was a full-time job, not something to be done just one night a week but at every possible opportunity. By the summer of 1933, the young people drawn to the Catholic Worker began to gather at Dorothy’s apartment, or in the apartment’s backyard, for informal discussions with Peter. Dorothy did not always take part — by now she had a solid grounding in Peter’s ideas and also had work to do preparing the next issue as well as caring for Tamar.

Those participating in these exchanges, of course, had ideas of their own, often at odds with Peter’s. He listened with interest and patience to each person, but if it happened that someone came up with a thought or experience that connected with what he had been saying, Peter would exclaim, like a miner who had found a gold nugget, “See the point! See the point!”

Dorothy regarded Peter as a saint. “There are many saints,” she wrote, “here, there and everywhere and not only the canonized saints that Rome draws to our attention.” In fact saints should be common, she added, for after all, as Saint Paul had written, we are all called to be saints. Peter’s patient and tireless teaching reminded her especially of Saint Paul, “who talked so much that a young man fell off the window seat, out of the open window, and was picked up for dead — Saint Paul had to revive him.” (Acts 20:7-12)

By the fall, it was clear that the new paper, envisioned by Peter but edited with a firm grip by Dorothy, was meeting a real need. Few publications have experienced such rapid growth as did The Catholic Worker in its first year. Within the first six months, the number of copies printed rose from 2,500 to 35,000, thanks not only to many individual subscribers but also to bulk orders from parishes, schools and seminaries. Readers found a voice in The Catholic Worker that was unique among both religious and political journals. There were articles about principles and columns full of news. At the same time, the paper was written with a special intimacy and at-homeness, as if it were a letter between friends. The paper, rooted in a specific city and neighborhood, was full of local smells, sounds and small events that other national papers ignored, yet it appealed to readers living in distant places and different circumstances. Dorothy’s intensely personal approach to journalism was a major factor in the paper’s appeal. “Writing,” she explained in a 1950 column, “is an act of community. It is a letter, it is comforting, consoling, helping, advising on our part as well as asking it on yours. It is part of our human association with each other. It is an expression of our love and concern for each other.”

“By the mid-summer of 1933,” Dorothy recalled, “The Catholic Worker ceased to be just a newspaper but had become the voice of a movement.”

* * *

Jim Forest’s books include All Is Grace: a Biography of Dorothy Day and, most recently, a memoir, Writing Straight With Crooked Lines.

* * *

The Duty of Hope

By Jim Forest

The theme of this retreat is “Hope in Turbulent Times” but, as I think about it, for a great many people the times we’re living in are worse than turbulent — for many they engender hopelessness.

Right now we are surrounded by a ring of crises.

For starters, we’re meeting together on-line rather than face-to-face because this is a time of global pandemic. More than two-million people have died and more are dying every minute of the day.

[1 – climate change graphic: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/50938669996/sizes/o/ ]

In addition there is the environmental crisis with its melting ice caps, its multiplying extinctions, and our awareness of the awful slowness with which we human beings are making necessary changes in how we live on this vulnerable planet.

[2 – refugee crisis photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/50937978773/sizes/h/  ]

There is also the refugee crisis — for political, economic or environmental reasons millions of people are leaving their homelands and being met by walls rather than welcomes.

[3 – Nagasaki photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/49286403353/sizes/l/ ]

All the while there is the constant danger of nuclear war — thousands of nuclear-armed missiles are poised and ready for use.

There is a world-wide political crisis. Donald Trump is only one of many politicians who represent a fascist temptation that is so active a force in so many countries.

[4 – cross & flag graphic: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/50937981173/sizes/m/ ]

One can also speak of a spiritual crisis. Religiously-packaged nationalism is widespread. In many churches in America the cross, far from being a symbol of self-giving love, has been converted unto a flagpole.

One of the darkest signs of the times is the increased frequency of suicide, most notably among young people. Perhaps this particular crisis represents a crisis of meaning triggered   in some degree by the cumulative effect of all the other crises.

This is not a complete list of contemporary crises that make hope difficult, but the list at least sketches out why so many of us are dealing with a sense of living in the apocalyptic end times, which, in its secularized form, is a time with no light at the end of the tunnel.

It is not hard to feel hopeless. But what I want to say has to do with hope.

[5 – Dorothy Day photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/50937877278/sizes/l/ ]

Dorothy Day was one of the most hopeful people I’ve ever known. She used to speak matter-of-factly of “the duty of hope.” For her, hope had nothing to do with optimism. Hope was not a mood or a state of mind that arose like a wildflower when spring arrived. Hope was as obligatory as breathing. I think it was from Dorothy that I first heard the proverb, “Even if I knew the world was going to end tomorrow, I would plant an apple tree today.”

In the early Sixties, I was part of the Catholic Worker community in New York and for years after leaving remained close to Dorothy. In recent days I have been thinking about aspects of Dorothy’s approach to daily life, as I witnessed it, that helped keep her in a state of hope.

[6 – Dorothy Day at Mass: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/50937877318/sizes/h/ ]

One of the things that struck me was how disciplined was her spiritual life. Take it away and there is no Dorothy Day as we knew her. Her average day began with attending an early Mass in a neighborhood church. These were not necessarily Masses that were aesthetically wonderful, by the way. For most of her life, they were said hurriedly in barely audible Latin. She devoted time to the rosary at least once a day. Using booklets that had been given to us by Benedictine monks in Minnesota, she took part in daily praying the offices of Prime and Vespers. She kept lists of people, living and dead, for whom she prayed daily, enemies not excluded. She went to confession once a week. You’ll find a vivid description of what confession was like for her in the opening paragraphs of her autobiography, The Long Loneliness. She had no illusions about the serious faults of institutional Catholicism and from time to time put her criticisms in writing, but she was more interested in what was good about the Church than what was wrong with it. Her foundational attitude regarding the Church was gratitude.

[7 – profile view of Dorothy: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/50937877263/sizes/l/ ]

Another thing that surprised me about Dorothy was her appreciative attention to weeds and trees and blades of grass rising out of cracks in the sidewalk. If you read through her columns in the Catholic Worker, from its early years until she was too weak to leave her room on East Third Street, you will notice how often Dorothy took note of plant life. In her last “On Pilgrimage” column, printed in the October 1980 issue, she wrote: “The morning glories are up to the third floor of Maryhouse. I can see them grow each day!” Note the sentence ends not with a period but with an exclamation mark.

Among other things that helped her remain hopeful was music, especially opera. One was well advised not to knock on her door during the Saturday afternoon live broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. Such music was an immersion in beauty and, as he so often said, quoting Dostoyevsky, “Beauty will save the world.”

[8 – Dostoyevsky portrait: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/50938032348/sizes/l/ ]

There was also the place of books in her life. She returned to the novels of Dostoevsky again and again. So influential was he in shaping Dorothy’s understanding of  Christianity that I have come to think of Dostoevsky as a co-founder of the Catholic Worker. But her reading tastes were wide. In one of her last columns, she mentions she was reading a murder mystery, Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers, a favorite author of mine as well.

[9 – Dorothy talking with Pat Jordan: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/50938568041/sizes/l/ ]

It never ceased to amaze me how attentive Dorothy was to people she met over a cup of tea or coffee, whether in the city or at the farm. Though some, if they were aware who she was, were a bit intimidated at first, those she conversed with quickly found themselves at ease. In my first close encounter with her — I was  in the Navy and was not yet nineteen at the time — I found myself telling her about aspects of my family background that I never talked about with anyone. Dorothy was permanently interested in people, young and old. Her interest and attentiveness had nothing to do with social rank. She had a gift for seeing that, no matter how damaged a person might be by life’s hard blows, he or she was truly a bearer of the divine image.

I mention these aspects of Dorothy because it seems to me they help explain why she remained so hopeful. Hope may be a duty but the duty of hope stands on a foundation of prayer, love and gratitude.

[10 – Merton photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/2055118984/sizes/h/ ]

Recalling people who engendered hope, I also think of Thomas Merton, whom I began corresponding with when Dorothy gave me a letter she had just received from him and, to my total astonishment, asked me to answer it. It was a short letter having to do with a poem Merton was submitting for publication in The Catholic Worker. All I had to do was thank Merton and tell him the poem would be in the next issue.

Between the summer of 1961 and his death in December 1968, Merton and I carried on an intense correspondence. Just his side of it takes up more than 50 pages in a collection of Merton’s letters entitled The Hidden Ground of Love.

I want to discuss just one of his letters that played a particularly important part in helping me get through a time of serious discouragement, but first let me give a little background. While at the Catholic Worker, the idea had arisen of starting the Catholic Peace Fellowship, but it took a few years before the idea became a reality. By then the Vietnam War was rapidly expanding. It seemed to several of us — Dan Berrigan, Jim Douglass, Tom Cornell and myself — that it would be helpful if there was a group making known to younger Catholics the option of conscientious objection. It was an option that Pope John XXIII had endorsed in his encyclical Pacem in Terris and which was developed in greater detail in Gaudium et Spes, the last major text issued by the Second Vatican Council. The possibility of being a conscientious objector was official Church teaching, yet it was a well-kept secret. One never heard of conscientious objection from the pulpit or in the classrooms of Catholic schools. We wanted to find ways to let young Catholics know there were alternatives to taking part in war. We also wanted to protest the huge U.S. role in the war in Vietnam.

[11 – photo of Jim Forest & Tom Cornell in the CPF office: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/6887873593/sizes/h/ ]

We launched the Catholic Peace Fellowship in the fall of 1964, then opened a CPF office in January 1965. Our advisory board included Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. Within months we published a 32-page booklet with the title “Catholics and Conscientious Objection.” Amazingly it was given a theological green light by the Archdiocese of New York. On the inside cover was the archbishop’s imprimatur, the Latin word for “let it be printed.” God only knows how many doors that imprimatur helped open! Before the war ended in 1975, we had distributed more than 300,000 copies.

The work we were doing made a difference. It helps explain why so many thousands of young Catholics refused military service. We had CPF chapters from Massachusetts to California. The core of our work was draft counseling. At the CPF office in Manhattan, Tom Cornell and I plus several others were counseling on average fifty COs per week, some face-to-face, some by letter, some by phone. Tom and I were giving lectures on war and conscience all over the country.

[12 – Vietnam war photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/28958526353/sizes/l/  ]

There is a sense in which you could say what we were doing was a great success. But in another sense, like all peace groups, we were a huge failure. Despite the fact that opposition to the war was steadily growing, week-by-week the war was getting worse — troop numbers rising, more and more bombs falling, and ever more casualties, the vast majority of which were civilian. One of the cruelest weapons, “napalm,” had become a new word in many people’s vocabularies. Pictures were being shown on TV of American soldiers using cigarette lighters to set on fire flimsy peasant homes. Air Force general Curtis LeMay was urging the president “to bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age.” As far as the White House and Pentagon were concerned, I had the feelings of being no more significant than a flea on an elephant. Only years after the war did we learn the impact of our efforts.

Thinking about living in what seem like a hopeless time, I recall myself early in 1966, age 24, when I was struggling with a hurricane of depression. On the 15th of February, I wrote an anguished letter to Merton as follows:

[13 – another Merton photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/3144384043/sizes/h/ ]

Valentine’s Day has passed but no let up to the war in Vietnam. Love continues to find a different sort of expression there….

I confess to you that I am in a rather bleak mood…. For one thing, I am exhausted with ideological discussions. Earlier today I began to type out a few thoughts on your paper concerning protest…. But the question comes up, as I work on such a statement, Who is listening? Yes, you, for one — you will read my comments, and perhaps in some way they will alter your thoughts on some subject, or strengthen them. Perhaps it will even inspire you to write something. Yet even if you do, who is listening? Your words will be dutifully noted by some … those Christians who care about baptism and membership in the Body of Christ may be influenced by your meditations. But meanwhile murder goes on without interruption. This appalls me to such a degree that I get weary writing it down. Bomb after bomb after bomb slides away from the bomb bays. For every sentence in this letter, a dozen innocents will have died today in Vietnam. The end of the war is beyond imagination.

[14 – bombed VNese town; https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/50191760817/sizes/l/ ]

This morning I wrote a letter to the editor of [a Catholic magazine] in which I explained why a recent editorial … attacking the Catholic Peace Fellowship’s condemnation of the Vietnam war was poorly reasoned and didn’t come to terms with the reality of the situation in Vietnam…. I felt like a man in Germany in the 1930s trying to explain why Jews ought not to be sent to the concentration camps.

It all seems so utterly clear. You do not murder. You do not kill the innocent. You do not treat people like blemishes on the landscape, or communities as parcels of real estate, or nations as squares on a chessboard.

Yet no group seems more distant from these facts than Christian (and Catholic) Americans. I have all but given up talking to Catholic audiences about Christ; I simply talk about justice, raw basic justice. I think I’ve come to understand why natural law made its way into the Church. It was simply an attempt to ask us to be, if not holy, then just. At least that.

How is it that we have become so insensitive to human life, to the wonders of this world we live in, to the mystery within us and around us? And what can we do? What can be done? Who can we become that we are not? What can we undertake that we haven’t?

[15 – B-52 releasing bombs; https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/50188709051/sizes/o/ ]

I do not wish to sound despairing. I have by no means given up on this work of ours. But truly I feel like an ant climbing a cliff, and even worse, for in the distance there seems to be the roar of an avalanche. There is no exit, so I will not bother to look for one. I will continue to work, and there are the saving moments, the saving friendships, the artists, there is in fact the faith.

But I write this thinking perhaps you will have some thoughts which might help. But don’t feel you have to have any. I don’t wish to treat you as a spiritual irrigation system. But your insights have helped me gain perspective at past times.

[16 – Merton teaching: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/17050815818/sizes/k/ ]

Merton’s reply was the most helpful letter I’ve ever received. His theme was about being hopeful in hopeless times:

Dear Jim,

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

You are fed up with words, and I don’t blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes. I am also, to tell the truth, nauseated by ideals and with causes. This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean. It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it. And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make the meaning be there again by magic. Going through this kind of reaction helps you to guard against this. Your system is complaining of too much verbalizing, and it is right.

The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.

The next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and your witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. Think of this more, and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.

The great thing after all is to live, not to pour out your life in the service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths. If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ’s truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments. Because I see nothing whatever in sight but much disappointment, frustration and confusion….

The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do His will, we will be helping in this process. But we will not necessarily know all about it beforehand….[i]

Tom[1]

[17 – Merton in shed: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/16618373323/sizes/k/ ]

In the years following, what became known as “A Letter to a Young Activist” (the headline it was given when published in The Catholic Worker) was often reprinted and translated. It captures the heart of Merton’s advice to anyone in a burned-out state or close to it.

The key sentence was “Do not depend on the hope of results.” But what a challenge that is. Any action one embarks on is undertaken with the hope of positive, tangible results. One must have hope that what you do isn’t a waste of time. But to the extent you depend on some  degree of success, your capacity to persevere is undermined.

In his letter, Merton described peacemaking as “an apostolic work.” Before receiving Merton’s letter it had never occurred to me that peace work is of its nature an apostolic work — quite a dignity but also quite a responsibility. It was not an altogether comforting linkage. Few if any of Christ’s Apostles died of old age.

Merton challenged me “to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.” But it’s not easy getting used to the idea that what you are doing is probably going to crash against a stone wall. The shift from focusing not on quickly measurable results but rather on the value, rightness and truth of the work one is doing requires a major shift of perception.

One of the most helpful aspects of Merton’s letter was his stress on keeping one’s focus on specific people. “The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.” I know that sentence by heart and recite it often. It sums up what might be called incarnational theology. Words and slogans and theories are not nearly as important as how we see and relate to each other — the relationships we build — and not only with friends but with adversaries. In the context of peace work, it suggests getting to know, as best we can, the people and cultures being targeted by our weapons.

“You are fed up with words,” Merton wrote. He was himself, he confessed, “nauseated by ideals and with causes.” Ideas and slogans can so easily get the upper hand that you lose sight of what Merton called “the human dimension.” Of course social movements require words and often use slogans to sum up goals. These have their place, but it’s secondary. In a talk to his student novices, Merton — himself a master of words — once said, “He who follows words is destroyed.” Like arrows, words point but they are not the target. One of Merton’s main contributions to many people who were involved in peace efforts wasn’t his words, however brilliant, but the witness given by his monastic life in which prayer and meditation were integral elements of every activity. Each day had a liturgical and sacramental foundation.

[18 – Merton peace retreat: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/48243562091/sizes/k/ ]

A major point in his letter was that “the big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen … but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.” Personal satisfaction is certainly nice but isn’t the goal. Martin Luther King didn’t live to see the realization of his dream. Merton didn’t live to see the end of the war in Vietnam. But it’s not important that we personally get to see the results of our efforts, however worthy our goals may be.

Merton was suggesting what I have come to think of as a cathedral builder’s mentality. Notre Dame cathedral in Paris took nearly two centuries to complete — and now, due to fire, is being rebuilt once again. But even in cases in which construction took less than a century, those who helped lay the foundations of a great cathedral knew they had slight chance of living to see their building roofed. Perhaps they imagined their grandchildren or great-grandchildren might have that satisfaction.

In place of being dominated by causes, Merton advised, all that was needed was just to serve Christ’s truth. It is finally Christ’s truth that matters. Trying to live within Christ’s truth certainly doesn’t mean we will live a life without failure. There is a reason that Christianity’s main symbol is the cross. But it may help prevent frustration and disappointment from becoming despair.

The ultimate hope, Merton concluded, isn’t in something we think we can do but in God who is weaving gold out of the straw of our imperfect efforts, but doing this in ways we cannot see at the time.

[19 – icon of St Silouan: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/50937889653/sizes/z/ ]

One of the modern Orthodox saints who was admired by both Merton and Dorothy Day was Silouan the Athonite, a Russian peasant who came to the monastic peninsula of Mount Athos as a place of repentance after having very nearly killed a neighbor earlier in his life. He felt it was only by miraculous providence that he had not become a murderer. He famously said, “Keep you mind in hell and despair not.” I suggest it’s a sentence worth memorizing. It can help us remain hopeful in seemingly hopeless times. Yes, we are living in a world that for many people and creatures, ourselves included, is a kind of hell, a world in which there is less and less room in the inn and less and less room at the table, a world that provides many occasions to despair. But in fact every time our heart beats, every time we notice beauty, every time we notice beauty, every time we respond with love rather than fear, that moment becomes a Paschal moment.

[20 – Anastasis icon — Christ freeing the prisoners of hell: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/8386667037/sizes/l/ ]

There is an icon that presents our situation very accurately. It’s the main Paschal icon of the Orthodox Church. Its subject is the harrowing of hell. It shows Christ, after his crucifixion and before his resurrection, standing on the shattered gates of hell while freeing the parents of the human race, Adam and Eve, from their tombs. Meanwhile defeated Satan, the warden of hell, falls into a starless, bottomless night amidst a shower of broken locks and useless keys. The icon’s message is simple. It may not seem to us in our daily struggles and suffering, but the rule of death is over. “Risen from the dead are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

[21 – whole earth photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/32802208118/sizes/l/ ]

Let me end with a photo of where we live taken on the 11th of July 1969 by an astronaut on his way to the Moon. Hold it in your hearts. We all live at the same address. We’re all in each other’s care.

[1] Letter dated 21 February 1966; full text in my book, The Root of War is Fear: Thomas Merton’s Advice to Peacemakers (Obis Books).


[i]           Letter to Jim Forest, 21 February 1966; The Hidden Ground of Love, 294-97.

St Seraphim of Sarov

To the degree that love for the Lord warms the human heart, one finds in the Name of Jesus a sweetness that is the source of abiding peace.— Saint Seraphim of Sarov

It was Father Germann, a monk I met in the Russian city of Vladimir in 1987, who introduced me to Saint Seraphim of Sarov. He was showing me the local cathedral, still a museum in those days of Soviet rule. The tourists in the church were startled to see a living monk complete with long hair, full black beard and black monk’s cap — they couldn’t stop staring. It wasn’t only his appearance that attracted attention. He possessed a contagious joy and freedom. I mentioned to him that this church must have wonderful acoustics. Immediately he sang an unrestrained, banner-like, “Amen.” The church reverberated in an astonishing way.

I had traveled enough in Russia to be vaguely aware of Saint Seraphim, the icon of whose compassionate face seemed to grace the walls of every parish church and to have a place in many homes, but Father Germann was the first to tell me the saint’s life story.

“Saint Seraphim helped me to become a believer,” he said. Reaching into his pocket, he showed me a fragment of a large rock on which Saint Seraphim prayed for a thousand days. It was a gift from an old nun who knew a nun who knew a nun who had been in the Diveyevo convent near Sarov, a community closely linked with Saint Seraphim. The saint’s few possessions, among them the heavy cross he wore, were kept in the custody of the sisters at Diveyevo.

Father Germann explained that Seraphim was born in 1759, the son of a builder. He was still a baby when his Father died. His mother took over the business while raising her children. While still a boy, he had what should have been a fatal fall from scaffolding. Miraculously, he was unharmed, an event which prompted a local “holy fool” to say the boy must surely be “one of God’s elect.”

When Seraphim was ten, he had his first vision of the Mother of God. Nine years later he entered monastic life where he began the regular recitation of the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Later, following his ordination as priest in 1793, he was led to seek a hermit’s vocation in the forest, or, as he regarded it, his “Holy Land.” Here he lived alone, devoting himself to prayer, study and tending his small garden, with few aware he was alive apart from the community of nuns living nearby and the wild animals he befriended with gifts of food. The nuns who baked bread for Seraphim admonished him for sharing so much of his bread with a bear. Seraphim explained that, while he understood fasting, bears do not.

During this period of social withdrawal, he was nearly beaten to death by robbers who had heard there was a treasure hidden in his cabin. The injuries he suffered made him walk with a bent back for the rest of his life, a stance occasionally shown in icons. After recovering from his injuries, he spent a thousand days and nights in prayer on a large rock in the forest, sometimes standing, other times kneeling, leaving the rock only for brief periods.

After his long apprenticeship in solitude, people began coming to Staretz[i] Seraphim for confession and advice, a few at first, but finally they came in floods. One of the first pilgrims was a rich man, gravely ill, who was healed by Seraphim, so healed that he gave up all his wealth and embraced holy poverty.

During the last eight years of his life, Saint Seraphim spent many hours each day talking with those in need, some of whom had walked for weeks to reach him. Others came by carriage, among them Tsar Alexander I, who later gave up the throne and lived a pious life in Siberia — some say under the influence of Saint Seraphim.

Among many remarkable stories left to us about Seraphim’s life, one of the most impressive comes from the diary of Nicholas Motovilov, who as a young man came to Sarov seeking advice. At a certain point in their conversation, Seraphim said to his guest, “Look at me.” Motovilov replied, “I am not able, Father, for there is lightning flashing in your eyes. Your face has grown more radiant than the sun and my eyes cannot bear the pain.” The staretz answered, “Do not be afraid, my dear lover of God, you have also now become as radiant as I. You yourself are now in the fullness of the Holy Spirit. Otherwise you would not be able to perceive me in the exact same state.” Saint Seraphim asked him how he felt. “I feel a great calm in my soul, a peace which no words can express,” Motovilov replied. “I feel an amazing happiness.”[ii]

At the heart of Saint Seraphim’s teaching was use of the Jesus Prayer and continuing inner struggle to “acquire the Holy Spirit, the one eternal treasure which will never pass away.” He reassured those who came to him that there is nothing selfish about seeking to save your soul. “Acquire the Spirit of peace and thousands of souls around you will be saved.”

Without a vital spiritual life, he said, we cannot love. “God is fire that warms and kindles the heart and inward parts. And so, if we feel in our hearts coldness, which is from the devil — for the devil is cold — then let us call upon the Lord and He will come and warm our hearts with perfect love not only for Him but for our neighbor as well.”

He was an apostle of the way of love and kindness. “You cannot be too gentle, too kind. Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other. Joy, radiant joy, streams from the face of him who gives and kindles joy in the heart of him who receives. All condemnation is from the devil. Never condemn each other. We condemn others only because we shun knowing ourselves. When we gaze at our own failings, we see such a swamp that nothing in another can equal it. That is why we turn away, and make much of the faults of others. Instead of condemning others, strive to reach inner peace. Keep silent, refrain from judgment. This will raise you above the deadly arrows of slander, insult and outrage and will shield your glowing hearts against all evil.”

No matter what season of the year it was, he greeted visitors with the paschal salutation, “Christ is risen!” As another paschal gesture, he always wore a white robe.

Before his death, Saint Seraphim said to the sisters: “My joys, come as often as you can to my grave. Come to me as if I’m alive and tell me everything, and I will always help you.”

On January 2, 1833, Saint Seraphim was found dead in his cell, kneeling with hands crossed before an icon of Mary.

“Saint Seraphim is a unique saint,” Father Germann told me. “In him and his character, in his spirituality, we find the principal Christian characteristics — love for all people without exception, and a readiness to sacrifice. That’s why people love him so much.”

“We live in a time that pays special homage to advanced education and intellectual brilliance,” Father Germann added. “But faith isn’t just for the clever. Seraphim didn’t graduate either from university or seminary. All his ideals were gifts from God revealed through prayer and deeds. And so through Saint Seraphim many different people are drawn to belief — the intellectuals, the simple, and now not only people in the Russian Orthodox Church but other churches.”

“Saint Seraphim is the face of the Church,” said Father Germann.

Living in a period in which iconography had been influenced by western art, old icons of Saint Seraphim often resemble portraits while more recently made icons are usually in the simpler, more symbolic Byzantine style. The one reproduced here, showing Saint Seraphim praying on the rock, was made in 1992 by the iconographer Philip Zimmerman closely following an icon made earlier in the century in France by the monk Gregory Kroug. In all icons of Saint Seraphim, there is a prayer rope in his hands, a reminder of his devotion to the Jesus Prayer.]

 [a chapter from “Praying With Icons” by Jim Forest (Orbis Books)]


[i]. Staretz, the Russian word for elder, has come to mean a person with a rare spiritual authority arising from the inner life of the elder himself, enabling him to provide spiritual direction to many people, even though they may be strangers. Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, portrays such a person in the character of Father Zosima.

[ii]. The full text of Motovilov’s conversation with Saint Seraphim, found and published only after Saint Seraphim’s canonization in 1903, is included in A Treasury of Russian Spirituality, compiled and edited by George Fedotov, first published in 1950 by Sheed & Ward and reissued in 1975 by Nordland. I am aware of three biographies of the staretz in English: Saint Seraphim of Sarov by Valentine Zander (Crestwood, NY: Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1975); St. Seraphim of Sarov: A Spiritual Biography by Archimandrite Lazarus Moore (Blanco TX: New Sarov Press, 1994); and Flame in the Snow by Iulia de Beausobre (London: Collins, 1945, reissued in as a Fount paperback in 1979). A collection of the saint’s writings has been published in English as the first volume of The Little Russian Philokalia: Saint Seraphim (Platina, CA 96076: Saint Herman of Alaska Monastery Press, 1991).

The Road

by Jim Forest

Consider well the highway, the road by which you went. — Jeremiah 31:21

The road was the most imperative and first of our necessities. It is older than buildings and than wells. — Hillaire Belloc, The Old Road

Now my body seemed to walk itself, the road walking my body. — an American pilgrim recalling his journey to Santiago de Compostela

One could spend long hours making a list of great human achievements, from the wheel to the great cathedrals to the discovery of DNA and the development of computers, and yet leave out one of the important attainments because it is too obvious, too ordinary and too ancient: the road.

Roads are the circulatory system of the human race, and the original information highway. From times long before the written word, roads have linked house to house, town to town and city to city. Without roads there are no communities. Roads not only connect towns but give birth to them. They pass beneath all borders, checkpoints and barriers, connecting not only friend to friend but foe to foe. Far older than passports, the road is an invitation to cross frontiers, urging a start to dialogue and an end to enmity. Each road gives witness to the need we have to be in touch with each other.

There was a time before roads when the world was pure wilderness, but even before Adam and Eve there would have been countless tracks and paths created by animals that moved in packs or herds, following their prey or migrating with the seasons. With the arrival of human beings, many of these pre-human pathways would have become roads for hunters, here and there providing ideal sites for encampments and villages.

Supreme collective endeavor that they are, roads reveal the cultures that made them. Roman roads tend to run straight as Roman laws, but in many cultures roads take many turns as they search out fords, avoid marshes, find higher ground, touch wells and pubs, and seek holy places.

Roads are life giving. They provide the primary infrastructure of social life. Without them, there is no commerce. Without roads and the delivery systems they support, we would starve to death. Even more important than safeguarding weights and measures and punishing those who watered down the beer, it was the primary task of kings and queens to maintain and keep safe the highways.

Human history is the history of roads. Empires have been ranked according to the quality of their highways. Roman highways were so well built that even today, two millennia later, portions of them not only survive but remain in use.

Roads mark the way to safety. Paths tell the traveler how to get round a chasm or find a fording place in the river. They point the way through marshes and around quicksand.

If roads sometimes speed armies on the path of destruction, more often they guide pilgrims toward encounters with the sacred. They connect not only capital cities and great cathedrals but remote churches that house the relics of saints. A saint’s relics have many times widened a road or even created a new one.

Roads not only take us toward each other but, when we need to be rescued from society, they lead us to solitude. The same road that leads to Rome is, in reverse and at its furthest reaches, a route to the desert.

Roads have a sacramental aspect: a road is a visible sign of a hidden unity. Roads are a map of human connectedness.

The road is a primary metaphor. In the Gospel Christ speaks of choosing the narrow path rather than the broad highway. Early Christians called themselves “followers of the way.”

The road has often been a place of religious breakthroughs: Two disciples walked with the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus, unaware of who he was. Later they took the same road back to Jerusalem where they related how Christ revealed himself to them in the breaking of the bread.

Paul — Christianity’s first great pilgrim — encountered Christ on the road to Damascus. Traversing the highways of the Roman Empire, Paul became one of history’s great men of the road.

Old roads still exist, in some cases quite visible and still in use, in some hidden under modern highways, in other cases grassy pathways once again, in places hardly more than faint indentations in the soil.

The old pilgrim road from Winchester to Canterbury is in turn all of these. A road as old as England, some parts are now rarely walked while other sections have become major motorways. Yet, in part thanks to a steady trickle of pilgrims still making their way to the church where St. Thomas Becket was murdered in 1170, the pilgrim path still exists from end to end. In 1904 Hillaire Belloc published his book The Old Road[i] in which he managed to stitch together the road’s fragments into a continuous whole, which he himself walked in one of his many acts of pilgrimage.

One of the pilgrims of recent years, Shirley du Boulay, walked from Winchester to Canterbury in the early nineties and has left us one of the best contemporary memoirs of pilgrimage, The Road to Canterbury. Old roads, she writes

are hallowed by time and the footsteps of men and animals. … We respond to old roads as to old buildings. Even their names — Watling Street, Ermine Street, the Fosse Way, the Maiden Way, Stane Street — echo in the imagination. I remember as a child being told, as we walked the Berkshire Downs, that we were on a Roman Road called Icknield Street. I remember too my pride thereafter in recognizing a long straight road as Roman. … A road does not just appear. It is the fruit of long years of trial and error. It is the supreme collective endeavor, a long experiment in which the individual can only be subsumed.[ii]

It’s a special feeling walking an old road. The pilgrim may see no one else behind or ahead and yet be profoundly aware of not being alone. Hundreds of thousands of others have passed this way, generation after generation. At times the multi-generational river of travelers seems almost visible. If a file of medieval pilgrims were to appear before us on small horses, Chaucer himself among them, it would hardly be surprising.

Among those who walked or rode before us, not all were pilgrims heading toward a shrine. But many were, and even those on more prosaic errands may have traveled with the God-alert attitude of a pilgrim. Many were people aware that each step they took was an act of prayer. Roads that have been intensively used by people at prayer seem afterward to hold a rumor of prayer. The road itself becomes a thin place.

One of the celebrators of the road was the Oxford don, J.R.R. Tolkien, through whom an invented history of Middle Earth made its way into the modern world. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are celebrations of roads. For Tolkien it wasn’t roads in the plural but simply The Road, singular. However many intersections, however many forks along the way, however many rarely walked paths reach out from it, all the tracks human beings walk are connected and form a single system, like the body’s capillary system through which a single river of blood makes its way away from the heart to the remotest cell and back again.

Tolkien’s Bilbo sang the song of the road as he made his first step along a path that led at last to the edge of death in his encounter with a dragon. Bilbo’s heir, Frodo, sang it as he stepped out the door of his snug burrow on his way to overthrow a kingdom of evil, though at the time all he was aware of was his hope of delivering a magic ring to a place of safety: Rivendell.

The core text of Tolkien’s tales is Bilbo and Frodo’s song that celebrates stepping out the door into the unknown without the certainty that one will ever see one’s home again.

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way

Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.[iii]

>> This is a chapter from The Road to Emmaus: Pilgrimage as a Way of Life (Orbis Books).


[i]           Hillaire Belloc, The Old Road, London: Constable, 1904 (with subsequent printings).

[ii]          Shirley du Boulay, The Road to Canterbury: A Modern Pilgrimage, London: Morehouse Group, 1995.

[iii]         J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, “The Long Expected Party.”

photo caption: A section of General Wade’s Military Road near Melgarve below Corrieyairack Pass. Looking west up towards the hills of Corrieyairack Forest (not wooded). Wikipedia.

Join the Navy and See the World

[extracts from Writing Straight With Crooked Lines: A Memoir]

By Jim Forest

Like many teenagers before me, I found myself gazing at military recruiting posters. “Join the Navy and see the world” was a slogan that had immense appeal. See the world? Yes! The local recruiting office was located in the basement of the Post Office. I went in and loaded up on colorful folders with photos of ships at sea and distant ports of call.

In April 1959, age seventeen, I joined the Navy.

I felt drawn to the sea, and thus to the Navy, much as had been the case with Ishmael in Moby Dick, who “had little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore” and so sought refuge “in the watery part of the world” as a way of coping with “a damp, drizzly November in my soul.”

As things turned out, I was fated to remain on dry land. While in a sailor’s uniform, I never boarded a ship or submarine or even a rowboat. I had joined the Navy to see the world and instead saw a bit of Illinois, a fragment of New Jersey, and a great deal of Washington, DC.

Strangely enough, for someone who has spent his entire post-military life opposing militarization and war, joining the Navy was just what I needed and also excellent preparation for what was yet to come. At that point in my life, the Navy met many needs. To a major degree I was on my own, yet in a stable structure that provided for life’s necessities along with many challenges and much to think about.

My first eight weeks in uniform — June 1st through August 4th, 1959 — were spent at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station (sometimes referred to by its graduates as Great Mistakes Naval Training Station) on the northern outskirts of Chicago and the western shore of Lake Michigan. My head was shaved, I learned to march, make my bed in just the right way, and to peel potatoes with assembly-line efficiency. I became adept at assembling a rifle and hitting the target, at the same time doubting I could ever shoot to kill.

While I can’t claim to have enjoyed boot camp, for me it was mainly an adventure, even a time of occasional mild mischief. For many others it was harder. I recall a few recruits in my barracks who wept themselves to sleep and two sad boys who suffered breakdowns; they were given early discharges and sent home.

I quickly found myself in a slightly responsible position. Despite being a high school dropout, as a result of test scores I was appointed “intelligence officer” of my company. This meant that I had to coach the forty or so young men in the company, especially those who were failing to check the right circle in response to multiple-choice questions that were beamed on a screen in a testing room. The problem was that a number of people in my company were barely literate. In principle the illiterate never get into the Navy in the first place, but clearly some recruiters were willing to cut corners in order to meet their quotas. Ten or twelve men in my company couldn’t answer the questions because they couldn’t read them. Remedial education was not an option — there was no time or material for a literacy program in the evenings.

Under pressure from the first-class petty officer in charge of our company (our performance reflected on him), I came up with a Plan B. It might also have been called Plan Bilko, in honor of Sergeant Bilko, the central figure in a popular fifties TV comedy who cheerfully swindled both his senior officers as well as the Army itself. Before being marched into the room where the closely-monitored tests were given, with a competing company filling alternate rows, I was able to place myself at exactly the right spot in line to sit at a front-row-center desk from which several people seated further back on either side of me could see how I was holding my pencil: if I held it straight up, this meant the answer was A; if I held it horizontally to the left and right, I was signaling the answer was B; if I pointed it forward, check C; while covering the pencil with both hands meant D. Several pre-assigned people who could see my pencil replicated the signal so that everyone in the company, no matter where they were sitting, got the message.

The only problem was that it hadn’t occurred to me that the system would work as well as it did. On the first test we took using my pencil-signaling method, the entire company got a perfect score. Apparently this was unprecedented. An investigation followed. It was finally reluctantly accepted that I, as intelligence officer, had done an amazing job of tutoring the company that week.

Surviving that near disaster put me briefly under a cloud of suspicion but without punishment. I realized I had to create a credible bell curve, high enough to put us ahead of the competing companies in the same week of training, but not so high as to set off another alarm. I assigned a number of mistakes to each person in the company, with only a few getting all the answers correct and with some variation from week to week.

The result was that the competing companies won flags for marching, marksmanship and other competitive achievements, but we got to carry the “I” flag — “I” for intelligence — as we marched down the parade field on the day of graduation while the Navy band played “Anchors Aweigh.” It was our company’s one and only flag, and we felt immensely proud of it even though it had been achieved by cheating. I thought to myself that all’s fair in love and war, and that passing multiple choice military tests fell under the war heading — an exercise in survival in battle. We had played and won a mouse-beats-cat, Tom-and-Jerry game. The officer in charge of our company was delighted we had played it so well.

In fact being integrated into military life involved learning all sorts of tricks, not the least of which was applying a certain brand of underarm deodorant pads to our shoes to obtain the mirror shine required whenever there were inspections.

Our company commander had a way with words. Here is the guidance we were given about the Navy way of taking showers, which each company of recruits did together in one large shower room. “Watch where you put your wash cloth. Do your privates last. I repeat, do your privates last. Otherwise you’ll be giving yourself a blow job by proxy.”

But the most memorable lesson in boot camp wasn’t so funny. During the first week of training, the middle-aged chief petty officer responsible for turning us from kids off the street into spic-and-span sailors who could march in step and change directions in a flash had us stand at attention as he told us, “The Navy owns you. In case you didn’t get that, I’ll say it again. The Navy owns you. For the hard of hearing, let me repeat: The United States Navy owns you. You are the property of the US Navy. You are owned and operated by the Navy. Have I made myself clear? We issue the orders and you obey the orders or there will be hell to pay. Any questions?” There were no questions. It dawned on me that being in the military had a great deal in common with slavery.

True north

When I enlisted, I had signed a contract that guaranteed me, once out of boot camp, a place at the Navy School of Journalism. It turned out that the promise had been a recruiter’s carrot. In the latter weeks of Boot Camp I was told a mistake had been made — I didn’t meet the journalism school’s minimum-age requirement — and therefore I would have to choose a different vocational path. After spending half an hour looking through a catalog of specialized Navy schools, I opted for Weather School. This meant that I would become an “aerographer’s mate” working, either on land or sea, with Navy meteorologists. Was I disappointed? Not at all. By then I had met several Navy journalists stationed at Great Lakes, and I knew that much of the work a military journalist does is filling in the blanks on boiler-plate texts sent to hometown newspapers about how sailor John Jones had been assigned to serve on the USS Coral Sea — basically public relations work promoting the Navy. Meteorology, on the other hand, meant engagement in an important aspect of environmental studies.

In July 1959 I arrived at the Weather School, located on the grounds of the Naval Air Station in Lakehurst, New Jersey, a place best known as the site of the Hindenburg airship disaster thirty-two years earlier when a huge, swastika-decorated German zeppelin had burst into flames while landing. Thirty-six people died. The base still housed several Navy dirigibles and also served as a training center for parachutists, one of whom died during the months I was there when his chute failed to open.

Far from “seeing the world,” I was less than an hour’s bus ride from Red Bank. But if the location was not exactly exotic, I felt challenged by the studies that awaited me.

Our small school accommodated about forty students for an intense, five-month program. Besides learning the basics of meteorology (what constituted a warm or cold front, the types of clouds and what they indicated, how to read and draw a weather map, how to translate weather data into five-digit groups of standard code, etc.), we were trained in touch-typing and took part in occasional military drills. The day started with inspection, all of us lined up and given a quick once-over. Following breakfast, classes began.

My one and only fistfight occurred on the Lakehurst Naval Base. Early on, a fellow student had borrowed a dollar from me but, despite my sporadic requests, never got around to paying it back. He had the job of distributing the mail, a chore with an ounce of power among people starved for letters from home. Wearing his role as if it were a crown, he was not above delaying delivery of a letter addressed to anyone who annoyed him. Within weeks everyone in our unit came to regard him with loathing.

One morning I demanded the return of my dollar. He looked at me with contempt, reached into his shirt pocket, took out a dollar bill, held it in front of my face, then let it drop to the floor. Leaving the money where it fell, I grabbed him under the arms, lifted him off the floor and hurled him against the nearest wall. It still amazes me to recall how light he felt and how easily I made his body fly across the room. He came back with his fists flying. Far from being alarmed, I rejoiced in the combat, hammering away, hardly aware of the crowd that quickly gathered around us. The fight might well have lasted until one of us had done real harm to the other, but luckily a bell summoned us to inspection. As we stood at attention outside the barracks, I remember taking great pride in his bloodied lip and bruised face. Fortunately, when the inspecting officer noticed the state of his face and asked what had happened, he told the classic prescribed lie — he had tripped on the stairs.

This battle won me a good deal of admiration from my classmates. I was immensely pleased with myself — I sensed I had successfully passed a manhood test. At the same time I was alarmed to discover what strength and deadly will I possessed when my anger was sufficiently aroused, and the exhilaration that battle can awaken. This was a side of myself that I had not previously known about.

Perhaps that encounter with my own violence was a contributing factor in the spiritual awakening that occurred in that period of my life. There had been a great deal of veiled unhappiness and desperate searching that past year, much of it centered on my failed attempt to live with my father. I had dropped out of school, returned for several months to my mother’s home, then — like so many confused kids down through the centuries — plunged into the military. I was now trying to make of myself both a sailor and a weatherman and doing well at both, but finding that neither role gave me a sense of real meaning. I sought deeper waters.

In this searching state of hyper-alertness, that Saturday night I went to see the film that was being screened at the base theater. It happened to be “The Nun’s Story,” in which Audrey Hepburn played the part of a young Belgian woman who embraced monastic life in a Flemish convent but years later, during the German occupation of Belgium, left to join the resistance movement in the uncloistered world. Between these two events the film provided a compelling portrait of a nun’s rigorous religious formation, a later episode in which her obedience was abused by a superior, and a near love affair with a physician working at the same hospital where the Hepburn character was serving as a nurse. It was a complex story that took pre-Vatican II Catholic Christianity, warts as well as bells, quite seriously. Hepburn played the part of someone wholeheartedly attempting to live a Christ-inspired life. At a key moment early on in the film a Gospel text was read aloud: “If you would be perfect, go sell what you have, give it to the poor … and come follow me. “The Nun’s Story” is about one person’s struggle to translate that sentence into her own life.

It’s a bit embarrassing to say one has had a mystical experience, and more embarrassing to say that what set the stage for that experience was a movie. But that’s what happened. I left the theater, went for a walk, and under a clear moonless sky, thick with stars, experienced — how to put it into words? — the presence, the reality, the all-connectingness of God, a God who somehow was aware of me despite my near-nothingness. The old question, “Is there a God?”, evaporated. I would never again begin a prayer, “Oh God, if there is a God…”

Words fail — attempting to describe a mystical encounter is like putting lead boots on a ballerina. I was both absurdly happy and deeply silent. God said not a word, and yet somehow there was an overwhelming sense of being submerged in love, an intimate love and a love that excluded no one and nothing. I had never been so overwhelmed with joy. My compass had been adjusted to true north.

Well after midnight I got back in my bunk, but hardly slept. I thought more about the film and decided that the thing to do when I got out of bed that Sunday morning was to go to Mass at the base’s Catholic chapel. Mass as celebrated in a Gothic Belgian chapel had been one of the beauties of the film. I wanted to take part in the real thing. But the real thing was hugely disappointing. The base chapel resembled a shoebox. The pre-Vatican II liturgy was said by a priest whose unintelligible Latin was whispered at breakneck speed to Mass attenders, mainly women, many of whom appeared to regard Mass as a time for saying the rosary or, in the case of the men who were there, something to be stoically endured from the back of the church. I left at the end with no urge to return the following Sunday.

Yet the sparks ignited during my midnight walk were not put out by the contrast between what Mass can be in Flanders and what, on a US military base and in many parishes, it so often was in 1959.

I had a friend in my class, one of my roommates, whom I had noticed reading a Bible that he kept in his locker. He also made use of a copy of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. I told him that I had been baptized in the Episcopal Church five years earlier and was thinking about reconnecting. We talked about the film, which he also had seen. In the weeks that followed he and I managed to find time to have conversations about Christianity, to read some prayers together on a more or less daily basis, and to follow the biblical lectionary. When I told him I would love to visit a monastery, he told me about Holy Cross, a community of Episcopal monks in the Hudson Valley near West Point. Encouraged, I wrote to the prior asking if I might come for a visit at Christmas, after graduating and before reporting for my next assignment. I received a positive response.

Early in our studies we had been asked to fill out a form indicating our three preferred assignments following graduation. At the same time we were told that the better we did with our exams, the better our chance of getting one of our three choices. Hoping I might be stationed in the Mediterranean, I put the Sixth Fleet at the top of my list and studied hard to get grades that would make my wish come true. The result was that I graduated first in my class, but far from being sent to Europe, I received orders to report to a Navy unit that worked at the US Weather Bureau (today the US Weather Service) headquarters in Suitland, Maryland, just outside of Washington, DC.

I was off to meteorology’s Vatican. But first came my visit to Holy Cross Monastery.

A bus ride up the Hudson

Fresh out of the Navy Weather School and following a brief visit with my Red Bank family, I set out to spend Christmas at Holy Cross Monastery. Not the least important part of the journey, it turned out, was waiting at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan for a bus that would take me up the west side of the Hudson River to the town of West Park. With time on my hands, I was browsing a carousel full of paperbacks at the waiting room’s newsstand and came upon a book with an odd title, The Seven Storey Mountain, by Thomas Merton. The author’s name meant nothing to me. It was, the jacket announced, “the autobiography of a young man who led a full and worldly life and then, at the age of 26, entered a Trappist monastery.” There was a quotation from Evelyn Waugh, who said this book “may well prove to be of permanent interest in the history of religious experience.” Another writer compared it to St. Augustine’s Confessions. I cheerfully paid seventy-five cents for a copy.

It proved to be a can’t-put-it-down read for me. In the bus going up the Hudson Valley, I recall occasionally looking up from the text to gaze out the window at the heavy snow that was falling that night. Merton’s life story has ever since been linked in my mind with the silent ballet of snowflakes swirling in cones of light beneath streetlights.

While still in Lakehurst, I had been reading D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which certainly held my eighteen-year-old attention — a long-suppressed book in which love-making was vividly described in almost sacramental terms. In The Seven Storey Mountain I was surprised to discover that Merton, when he was precisely my age and also on the road, in his case in Italy, had also been reading Lawrence. In the shadow of his father’s recent death, he too was on a desperate search, while having no clear idea what it was he was seeking. It was while in Rome that a mosaic icon over an altar in one of the city’s oldest churches triggered in Merton an overwhelming awareness of the presence of God and even the reality of the risen Christ. “For the first time in my whole life,” he wrote, “I began to find out something of who this Person was that men call Christ. It was obscure, but it was a true knowledge of Him. But it was in Rome that my conception of Christ was formed…. It is Christ God, Christ King.”

It was an experience I immediately connected with, having had an equivalent encounter not many weeks before.

Did I get as far as that passage in Merton’s thick book while on the bus? I don’t recall. Perhaps. Certainly I got that far and much further within a day or two of my arrival.

By the time the bus stopped at the monastery gate, the snow was deep. I crunched my way down a buried driveway to the massive oak door of a handsome stone-and-brick building that I could see was linked to a church. I rang the bell but had to wait a bit, as a service was in progress. At last the door swung open revealing an elderly monk in white robes. “Ah, you must be Jim Forest! We were a little worried. Thank heaven the snow didn’t prevent your coming.” Then he led me into the church to take part in what was left of Compline. The monks — there must have been twenty of them — were divided into two groups that faced each other in the choir on either side of the altar and were singing in plainchant. I was overjoyed.

The week passed quickly, during which I took part in all the services, finished reading The Seven Storey Mountain, and was given a rosary by the prior and taught by him how to use it. He also suggested, once I was settled in Washington, that I make contact with the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.

I felt so at home at Holy Cross, and at the same time so impressed by Merton’s journey to monastic life, that I began to think this might be the place to come once I was out of the Navy. The fact that it was an Episcopal rather than a Catholic monastery seemed to me of minor importance. I knew nothing about the divisions within the Episcopal Church and hadn’t given any thought to the Anglican Communion’s Thirty-Nine Articles and the fact that Church of England’s roots were in the bedroom of King Henry VIII.

Before leaving I made arrangements to return for Easter.

Navy weatherman

I never “saw the world” while in the Navy, but during the seventeen months that began in January 1960 I had the blessing of seeing a great deal of Washington, D.C. — its museums, libraries and monuments, its churches and cathedrals, its cafés and bookshops plus a few of its jazz nightclubs. I was a frequent visitor to the National Art Gallery.

I also had a fascinating job and liked the people I was working with. Within the vast building that housed the US Weather Bureau, the technology was astonishing. It was as if I had stepped onto the set of a science fiction film. Just one floor below our Navy offices a massive computer was housed within an air-conditioned glass enclosure that, using robot fingers located in an adjacent room, drew graceful isobars on large maps. It was hypnotizing to watch. Images of entire weather systems were made fuzzily visible by cameras placed on early satellites; the first weather satellite, Vanguard 2, had been launched by NASA on February 17, 1959, ten months before my arrival. (Vanguard 2 is still up there and is expected to continue functioning until 2259.) While a full decade would pass before there were photos of the entire earth, meteorologists were among the first who were privileged to see portions of our planet from above the atmosphere.

Adjacent to our suite of offices was a noisy room with sound-absorbing doors and walls in which ranks of automated typewriters churned out up-to-the-minute weather data from hundreds of far-flung locations — temperature, air pressure, humidity, visibility, precipitation, type of precipitation, depth of rainfall, wind speed and direction, cloud cover, cloud types and cloud height — all the fragments of information that, when placed on a map, make possible the creation of a portrait of how things are in the atmosphere at any given moment and provide essential clues in predicting what to anticipate in the hours and days ahead.

One element of our work had an apocalyptic edge. As a training exercise in the meteorological aspects of nuclear war, each week we drew a series of maps predicting fallout patterns at twelve-hour intervals over a three-day period if a twenty-megaton nuclear weapon exploded at noon that day over the center of Washington, DC. It was clear that none of us would be among the survivors.

Despite this doomsday reminder, I enjoyed my work and did well in the Navy. Within a year-and-a-half of enlisting, I had been promoted to third class petty officer, the Navy equivalent of an Army sergeant. I had also gotten a high school equivalency diploma, doing so with such good results that I had to take the test a second time to prove I hadn’t cheated the first time.

There were some funny moments. One of them happened on an overcast day at the end of January 1961 soon after the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. The Navy attaché at the White House called our unit seeking assurance that there would be no rain that afternoon as he was planning to take the president for a ride on the Potomac in an experimental open-top vehicle that floated over water on a cushion of air. The hitch was that the craft didn’t function well in wet weather. Several officers gathered round what was called the Weather Table and, using the latest reports from airports and other weather stations in and around the capital, quickly agreed that there would be no rain before nightfall. With that prediction to relay, the senior officer on duty called the Navy attaché to report the good news. I was close enough to hear laughter on the other end of the line. The attaché asked, “Great! Just one thing. Have you looked out the window?” That was the one source of information that had been neglected. In fact rain was falling over both the White House and the Weather Bureau. It was a cautionary lesson about the blind spots of experts. None of us had looked out the window.

The works of mercy

That first year in Washington was a time of rapid religious evolution as I sought to find my place and direction within the complex world of Christianity.

Soon after arrival in Washington I went to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, as had been recommended by the prior of Holy Cross Monastery, introduced myself to the rector and became active in the parish. In many ways it was similar to a Catholic parish, even having an occasional evening Benediction service for adoration of the Blessed Sacrament: a consecrated wafer set in a sun-like gold monstrance was placed on the altar while those present, on their knees, contemplated this potent sign of God’s presence. Week by week, however, I became aware that, among Episcopal parishes in Washington, St. Paul’s was the sole local bastion of what Episcopalians regarded, often dismissively, as “high church,” in contrast to “middle church” or “low church.” High church was for a minority who were drawn to elaborate eucharistic liturgies and what most Protestants viewed as “empty ritual” — incense, bells, the rosary — things regarded by iconoclastic critics as “Roman” or, still worse, as “papist.”

It struck me that, no matter now hurried Mass might be in many Catholic parishes, each parish was solidly anchored in the Mass. No one spoke of a Catholic parish being “high church” or “low church.” I found myself, somewhat guiltily, slipping into Catholic churches simply to pray. A hallmark of the Catholic Church was that the Blessed Sacrament — the consecrated eucharistic bread — was reserved in a small tabernacle near the altar awaiting anyone who came in. Somehow its presence helped raise the curtains that usually obscure God from consciousness. In that now distant time, during the day and often at night, the doors of Catholic churches always seemed open.

Negative events also played a part in pulling me away from the Episcopal Church. The most consequential was an experience at Holy Cross Monastery during my second visit there at Easter 1960. All went well until the last day, when one of the monks asked to see me in the visiting room. Once the door was shut, he embraced and kissed me with sexual passion, his stubbly unshaven face pressed against mine. I struggled free of his grasp, exited the room, and soon afterward left the monastery in a state of great confusion. Back in Washington, I wrote to the prior, telling him what had happened. His reply wasn’t helpful. He might have pointed out that monks, like everyone else, sometimes suffer severe loneliness and have sexual longings of one sort or another which they sometimes don’t manage very well. I had hoped he would say that steps were being taken to make certain that in the future similar events would not happen to guests like myself. What he wrote instead was that homosexuality was often a sign of a monastic vocation. This wasn’t good news for me — my erotic fantasies were focused on women. After his letter, which said not a word about safeguarding future guests from sexual assault, I had no desire to return. Despite many positive experiences at Holy Cross and much to be thankful for, the milk had been soured. (Of course the same sort of thing could have happened in a Catholic setting, but in my case never did.)

Yet I still had hesitations about becoming Catholic, and so began to explore the varieties of Christianity in Washington, visiting various churches. Among them was a Greek Orthodox cathedral, but I sensed one had best be Greek to be made welcome there. With my positive memories of the black church near our home in Red Bank, several times I attended services at the church on the campus of Howard University, a friendly place with wonderful singing and powerful sermons, but felt that, as a white person, I would always be an outsider. Also, as much as I appreciated the spirited singing and fine preaching, it was too Protestant for me; the center point was the pulpit, not the altar.

For a time I was part of a small Bible study group that met in the apartment of an Episcopal priest whose wife, I discovered after noticing a photo on the wall, was the daughter of Bertrand Russell, British philosopher and prominent atheist. I wondered what the father made of his daughter’s Christian faith. (One of the books I was struggling with at the time was Russell’s History of Western Philosophy.)

As the weeks went by, I came to realize that the Catholic churches in which I so often stopped to pray were places in which I always felt welcomed, both spiritually and intellectually. It was time to knock on the door. One afternoon I rang the rectory doorbell of the parish of St. Thomas Apostle, in northwest Washington, and began a series of weekly meetings with one of the priests who lived there, Father Thomas Duffy. We often had our free-wheeling conversations in a hotel coffee shop across the street. For reading, he gave me an English translation of a recently published German catechism, Life in Christ, which took a thematic route rather than the cut-and dried, question-and-answer) approach of The Baltimore Catechism — “Who made the world? God made the world.” Apart from the fact that I never made sense of what were regarded as the preconditions for a sin to be mortal (does anyone ever achieve full awareness or full intentionality?), nothing we talked about stopped me in my tracks.

During those same months I had come increasingly to realize that a basic element of ordinary Christian life was practicing the works of mercy: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, providing hospitality to the homeless, caring for the sick, visiting the prisoner and burying the dead. When the opportunity arose to do some spare-time work at a home for children whose parents weren’t able to function as such, I volunteered. For about half a year I helped out in a woodworking shop and sometimes took part in the sports program, fracturing my right arm during a baseball game one afternoon while sliding into home base. On Sundays when I wasn’t on duty, I often had the happy chore of accompanying the Catholic children at the institution to Mass at nearby Blessed Sacrament Church.

Blessed Sacrament was an unusual parish that had embraced what was called a “dialogue Mass.” Not just the acolytes assisting the priest at the altar but everyone in the church made the required Latin responses; for example when the priest addressed the congregation with the words “Dominus vobiscum” (the Lord be with you) the whole congregation responded, “Et cum Spiritu tuo” (and with your spirit). Nearly everyone present was engaged in saying and singing the liturgy, not just witnessing it.

The parish had a substantial library on the ground floor of a house next door. It was here, on a table by a window, that I first saw copies of The Catholic Worker, in fact a whole stack of them going back several years. I picked up the issue on top with a mixture of curiosity and caution — the name made me think warily of the Communist paper, The Daily Worker. But looking through the articles and the artwork reassured me. Here was a truly Catholic journal that wove together theology, community and liturgy with the works of mercy, while raising urgent questions about a social order that produced so many marginalized people in desperate need of help. I borrowed the entire stack, took the issues back to my base, and read each one closely.

Several books that I found in the library helped expand my understanding of Christianity — more of Thomas Merton’s writing but also G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, Dorothy Day’s autobiography The Long Loneliness, and Eric Gill’s Autobiography. In combination with The Seven Storey Mountain, The Long Loneliness opened doors which have helped shape the rest of my life.

The next step was a two-night visit to the Catholic Worker. Sometime in the late summer of 1960, I hitchhiked to Manhattan, at the time not an uncommon way to travel for a young man with very little money in his pocket, and made my way to the address that I had found in the paper. Spring Street turned out to be on the north edge of Little Italy in the Lower East Side and the Catholic Worker dining room and office were located in a loft at the top of a long flight of stairs. My arrival happened to coincide with moving day — I joined a parade of people carrying boxes to the Worker’s new address a few blocks to the east, a dilapidated three-story building at 175 Chrystie Street.

One of the volunteers, Jack Baker, offered me hospitality — floor-space and a thin mattress and blanket near the front window of his two-room-plus-kitchen apartment. An unframed print of a Modigliani nude was tacked on one wall, a face of Christ by Roualt on another. The floor sagged and the air in that old, neglected building left a bitter taste. Jack was part of an outer ring of people who weren’t on the Worker staff but who occasionally helped out. Not long before, Jack explained, he had been a prisoner at Sing Sing Penitentiary. While “behind the walls” he had made contact with the Catholic Worker.

I was deeply impressed by the people I met and what they were doing: their community life, morning and evening pauses for prayer, meals cooked and served for men and women who lived much of their lives on the street, and occasional acts of protest against both racism and preparations for nuclear war. By now it was clear to me that a Christianity that was unresponsive to suffering and injustice was Christian in name only.

Returning to Washington, ideas about my post-Navy future had a new focus. Monastic life still beckoned, but so did the Catholic Worker.

One of my companions in my search was a member of the fulltime staff at the home for children, Jim Durso, a sturdy Italian from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, who possessed a wonderful balance of common sense, good humor, a contagious enthusiasm for “the faith,” a no-bullshit intellect, and an eagerness to serve the community. He had only recently left a Catholic seminary, having realized not long before ordination that the celibate life would be, for him, unbearable.

Nearly every week we managed to have a meal together at which a good deal of beer was drunk while we talked theology, the writings of various Catholic authors, monasticism, the Catholic Worker movement, the classical conditions required for a war to be regarded as just, church history, the Italian-American sub-culture, and whatever else was on our minds. If ever I get access to a time machine, I’d love to go back and listen to one of those sessions of intense dialogue. Our guardian angels must have enjoyed our exchanges.

There was also the friendship with Father Thomas Duffy. After several months of instruction and conversation over many a cup of coffee, on November 26, 1960 he received me, by conditional baptism, into the Catholic Church. Jim Durso was my godfather.

This border-crossing moment was a joyous one for me, though it did cost me some inconvenience. The otherwise hospitable Episcopalian family with whom I had been lodging in a house not far from the National Cathedral, where my host was responsible for maintaining its magnificent organ, wanted no papists under their roof.

I was shown the door.

Conscientious objection

I hadn’t seen it coming, but my relationship with the Navy was fast approaching a crisis. While I was no longer considering a career in uniform and devoting my professional life to meteorology, my intention was to serve out my enlistment contract in the eighteen months remaining. My work involved nothing that needed absolution. Events in Cuba changed all that.

The suite of rooms used by our Navy unit included a small television studio that was connected to the War Room of the Pentagon, officially designated as the National Military Command Center. Standing before a circular, rotating map of the northern hemisphere, twice a day one of the officers would present an overview of world weather developments, then answer questions from those at the viewing end. During the late winter and spring of 1961, I was aware that the questions often had to do with the weather in and around Cuba. Though I had read about the recent Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro, I gave the matter little thought.

In that same period we had a visit from senior officers of the Organization of American States, each in the gold-braided uniforms of a particular Latin American country. I was given the chore of entering the conference room to bring in coffee from time to time. I became aware that Cuba was an item on their agenda but failed to sense the political earthquake that was about to occur.

On April 13, 1961, 1,400 paramilitaries under CIA direction set sail for Cuba. Two days later, eight CIA-supplied bombers attacked Cuban airfields. The next day the invasion force landed at Playa Girón, the Bay of Pigs. The Cuban army’s counter-offensive, led by Fidel Castro, quickly resulted in a Cuban victory. On April 20, the invaders surrendered.

Only after the failed invasion did I connect the dots. Despite the immediate denial by President Kennedy that the invasion was a US undertaking — initially it was blamed on unaided Cuban exiles — I knew the Navy, and even our tiny unit, had played a role in it. It made sense — the timing of military beach landings is best planned with an eye on the weather. (To his credit, within days Kennedy reversed his initial denial, regretting what had happened and admitting that the invasion was planned, organized and funded by the CIA with US military involvement. He lamented having given the operation its go-ahead.)

I was profoundly naïve about the US role in the world. Despite my parents’ left-wing views, in that period of my life it never occurred to me that my government would seek to overthrow other governments. I knew nothing about the US role in arranging regime change in Guatemala and Iran. Back in 1952, age eleven, I had worn “I Like Ike” buttons in support of Eisenhower’s presidential campaign. After Eisenhower won the election I had sent him a photo of myself proudly holding a paint-by-numbers portrait I had made of him and was thrilled to receive a note of appreciation signed by the president on White House stationery. Eight years later, in 1960, I was strongly in favor of Kennedy’s election. From an apartment just a mile from the capitol building, I had watched his inauguration with pride and soaring expectations. I was deeply stirred when Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” For all the nation’s flaws, past sins and unsolved problems, I was passionately proud to be an American.

US culpability for the Bay of Pigs invasion hit me like a torpedo. I felt implicated in a collective sin. When I read in The Washington Post that a daily silent protest was taking place in front of a CIA building in southwest Washington, and that Catholic Workers were among the participants, I decided to take part. It turned out to be a life-changing event.

After work and out of uniform, I joined twenty or so people carrying placards that bore such texts as “There is no way to peace — peace is the way” and “Nonviolence or Non-survival.” The climate of the silent protest was prayerful. We were on one side of a wrought iron fence, beyond which was a wide green lawn leading up to a mansion that reminded me of the Tara plantation in “Gone with the Wind.” This wasn’t the CIA’s headquarters, but CIA director Allen Dulles plus other senior staff had offices inside. The demonstration was sponsored by the Quaker Peace Center, the War Resisters League and the Committee for Nonviolent Action, with Catholic Worker involvement.

I had no sense that I was putting myself or my job in the Navy at risk. As I say, I was naïve. Freedom of speech, freedom to dissent and freedom to protest peacefully were principles at the core of American identity. I took it for granted that those rights belonged to everyone, those in military service included.

I noticed that two or three men in suits inside the fence were taking photos of us. It amused me that they were using cameras with telephoto lenses. No one in the demonstration would have objected to close-up photos. Any of us would have been quite willing to identify ourselves and explain why we were there.

A few days later I was summoned to the office of Captain Cox, our unit’s commanding officer, and found him so angry that his hands shook. He had a hard time assembling a sentence. On his desk were several eight-by-ten, black-and-white photos of the demonstration in which I was clearly visible. “Is this you?” “Yes.” “How dare you! How dare you give support to enemies of the United States?” “I wasn’t supporting any enemies,” I replied, “I was protesting the invasion of Cuba.” Captain Cox was speechless. Previously he and I had enjoyed an excellent relationship, but after that day the only communication we had was when he handed me a letter from the Office of Naval Intelligence ordering me to report for an interview.

In preparation for that meeting I was required to fill out a detailed security questionnaire. One of the questions was: “Are there any incidents in your life which may reflect on your suitability to perform the duties which you may be called upon to take?”

I read the question with dread, realizing that I could not find a way to answer honestly in a manner that would be acceptable to the Navy. Getting back to the base along the Potomac where I was then living, I went to the Catholic chapel to pray, read the New Testament and think. Skipping supper, I must have remained there until midnight. For months I had been aware that the serious application of Catholicism’s just war doctrine would condemn any modern war, if only because non-combatants had become war’s main casualties. Also how could any Christian, in or out of the military, promise automatic obedience to each and every future order? I thought of the many Germans who justified their obedience to the demonic demands of the Hitler regime with the words: “I was only following orders.” I thought of Anne Frank and the Holocaust and all the obedient soldiers who herded captives into concentration camps and gas chambers. But at the same time I was apprehensive about what would happen to me if I failed to commit myself to unqualified obedience. What would my colleagues think? How would they treat me? I was wading in fear, struggling not to drown in it.

The simple wisdom of a Russian proverb I had encountered as a child while contemplating the Family of Man photo exhibition in New York came to mind: “Eat bread and salt and speak the truth.” It was a relief to realize that my task was simply to tell the truth and let the consequences take care of themselves.

Finally I composed this paragraph:

“I would have to refuse to obey any order or fulfill any duty which I considered to be immoral, contrary to my conscience or in opposition to the teaching of my Church, as a Catholic. It is highly conceivable that there are duties that would be imposed on me during war time which I could not accept. Though I would participate in the actual and just defense of our country, I would not assist in any attack or war effort which necessarily involved the death of innocent non-combatants. I would obey no order in conflict with my convictions.”

On May 11, I passed through the doors of the Naval Intelligence Service and spent most of the day in a narrow interrogation room being aggressively cross-examined by two Navy officers while magnetic tape traveled from reel to reel through a recorder. It was a scene not unlike ones I had seen in countless crime movies. There was even a large one-way observation mirror built into one wall, though whether anyone was watching from the other side I never discovered.

I was presented with two choices: “cooperate” or be sent to the brig, the Navy term for prison. “Cooperate” meant not only answering questions about the demonstration I had taken part in — I was more than willing to explain what I knew about it and why I was there — but to become active with groups that organized such protests and report what I heard and observed to the Naval Intelligence Service. My family was also on the agenda. Many of the questions put to me centered on my Communist father. The word “spy” wasn’t used, but it was clear that this was what I was being invited to become. Otherwise the brig. “If it’s one or the other,” I said, “I’ll take the brig.” I was surprised how easily the declaration exited my mouth. The fear that I had been struggling to keep at bay evaporated. It helped me to recall that my father had been imprisoned and not only survived the experience but enjoyed telling stories about it.

Only later did I realize that what exactly I would be charged with wasn’t explained. In fact, so far as I was aware, there were no Navy regulations that I had violated, nor was I told of any. Nevertheless I took their threats seriously, having no idea what might be possible. My attempt to explain my religious motives and Catholic teaching regarding war seemed to baffle the interrogators, who may well have been Catholic themselves. They seemed convinced that only those driven by left-wing ideology would take part in such activities. “Can you name one Catholic bishop who agrees with you?” they asked. “Any bishop,” I replied, “can tell you about the Church’s just war requirements.”

All in all it was a nightmarish encounter, but at the end of the day, having rejected their proposal “to cooperate,” I told them I would apply for an early discharge as a conscientious objector. I was asked to put in writing what I had said and agreed to do so, as long as I could make a carbon. I still have my copy, all twelve pages. I left the Naval Intelligence Service building feeling stronger and freer than when I had walked in.

I was amazingly fortunate. The next morning I discovered that the director of a Quaker-linked group called the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, George Willoughby, was speaking that night at the Quaker Meeting House in Washington. I attended his lecture and talked with him afterward. He told me chapter and verse what the Navy’s regulations were regarding early discharge for conscientious objectors. My parish priest, Father Thomas Duffy, a graduate of the Vatican’s prestigious North American College in Rome, wrote a letter testifying that I was active in his parish, was a member of the parish choir, and affirming that one could be both a faithful Catholic and a conscientious objector. On a visit to the Catholic Worker in New York, I had learned from Dorothy Day that there was a theologian on the faculty of Catholic University in Washington, Father Robert Hovda, who had himself been a conscientious objector before entering the seminary. Using university stationery, Fr. Hovda wrote a supportive letter for inclusion with my application for discharge. He also loaned me several books that treated war from a theological perspective. Even my military chaplain, though bewildered that I had such “an unusual conscience,” backed me up, crediting his support to a street-corner encounter he had had many years earlier with Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin.

Significant support also came from within my unit, most notably from my executive officer, Commander John Marabito, a devout Catholic who had almost been ordained a priest but instead opted for marriage and ended up with a career in the Navy. “Jim, I know you’re sincere,” he told me, “but I have to tell you I never heard a word about conscientious objection during the years I was in seminary. Can you give me anything to read that would help me understand your views from a Catholic point of view?” Providentially I had with me one of the books Father Robert Hovda had loaned me, War and Christianity Today, and gave it to him, explaining that the author, Franziscus Stratmann, was a German Dominican priest who had been condemned to death by Hitler’s regime for his anti-war activity but managed to escape into Switzerland and survived the Nazi period.

The next morning, while having a quick breakfast in the Weather Bureau cafeteria, I noticed Commander Marabito approaching my table, a broad smile on his face and his right hand extended. He shook my hand vigorously while saying, “Jim, I read the book last night and I just want you to know I’m proud of you, very proud, and I will back you up.” Which he did. Given the ire of Captain Cox, who regarded me as having betrayed both him personally as well as the nation, I’ve often wondered if Commander Marabito sacrificed promotion to captain as a result of his support. Captain Cox may have seen to it that his executive officer paid a higher price than I did.

Originally worried about the possible hostility I might face within my unit, I was astonished at how much support I received from my colleagues. While a few superficial relationships went into the deep-freeze, the rest of my co-workers remained friendly. Working one night in the enclosure where our unit received and sent weather data, Captain Cox paid an unexpected visit. As he stepped into the code room, he found all four or five of us singing the black spiritual, “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More.” We stopped instantly but there was no taking back what he had heard.

There was one other official expression of military backing for my discharge, though its author was hostile to my views. I was sent to the Pentagon for an interview with a Navy psychiatrist. Arriving at his office, instead of saluting him I made the mistake of reaching out to shake his hand. He refused a handshake — the border between officer and enlisted man had to be maintained. The meeting that followed was chilly. All I can now recall about it are two sentences from the report he filed: “Forest admits to having had nightmares as a child…. It is recommended that he be discharged from the Navy as expeditiously as possible.”

In June the discharge was approved. Within a day of permission being given, I was “processed out” and was on my way, at Dorothy Day’s invitation, to become part of the Catholic Worker community at St. Joseph’s House of Hospitality in New York.

* * *

Refusing to Take Shelter

By Jim Forest

[an extract from All Is Grace,  a biography of Dorothy Day (Orbis Books) / the photo was taken in City Hall Park in 1955]

In the spring of 1955, the press reported that a civil defense drill, “Operation Alert,” was scheduled for June 15. The news came with a warning: anyone refusing to take shelter — going into subways or basements, crouching in designated hallways or under desks in schoolrooms — risked up to a year in prison plus a $500 fine. The message underlying the drill was that, should nuclear war occur, if the right steps were taken beforehand, many could survive. A national shelter industry sprang to life despite warnings from those familiar with the effects of nuclear explosions that all the average buyer could reasonably hope to obtain for his investment was a larger-than-average coffin, while those who did survive underground confinement would find themselves in a radioactive wasteland better suited to insect than human life. One peace group, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, responded by launching a “Shelters for the Shelterless” campaign, as a result of which thousands of small houses were built for homeless people in India. The same group printed a sign which families brave enough to risk being called “Communist dupes” put on their front doors:

THIS HOUSE HAS NO FALLOUT SHELTER. Peace is our only protection.

News of preparations for New York City’s first air raid drill caught Ammon Hennacy’s eye. He proposed to those at the Catholic Worker house and to other pacifists in New York that this was a foolish law that was well worth breaking. On June 15, Dorothy, Ammon and twenty-seven others met in met in the park in front of City Hall in lower Manhattan. “In the name of Jesus, who is God, who is Love, we will not obey this order to pretend, to evacuate, to hide,” a Catholic Worker leaflet declared. “We will not be drilled into fear. We do not have faith in God if we depend upon the Atom Bomb.” When the air raid sirens began to wail, cars and buses pulled to the curb and New Yorkers drained into cellars and subway stations. Within minutes, New York, playing war rather than business, seemed like a ghost town — except at City Hall Park, where Dorothy and the other pacifists (not only from the Catholic Worker but from the War Resisters League and the Fellowship of Reconciliation) stayed where they were, looking more like picnickers than protesters. While cameras filmed their quiet witness, police escorted ten of the lawbreakers into vans and drove them off.

“As 679 warning sirens wailed,” The New York Sun reported the next day, “millions of New Yorkers took shelter in the city’s greatest air raid drill — an exercise marred only by 29 arrests and, in spots, by errors, lethargy and defiance, but hailed nonetheless as a ‘complete success’ by authorities. An imaginary H-bomb fell at the corner of North 7th Street and Kent Avenue in Brooklyn, ‘wiping out’ vast areas of the city and claiming 2,991,185 ‘fatalities.’ Another 1,776,899 men, women and children were listed as ‘injured’ as imaginary flames roared through the area. Robert Condon, [New York] City Civil Defense Director, called the drill ‘a complete success as far as public reaction goes.’”

To most Americans, the handful of people who had openly refused to take shelter must have seemed out of touch with reality. Not only is the law the law, but surely such drills were only for everyone’s ultimate safety? The Russians were ruthless atheists, people with no principles and no respect for human life, and now they were armed with nuclear weapons. Was it not common sense to try to save as many lives as possible in the event of war?

This was not Dorothy’s view of what was going on. She saw such rehearsals as making nuclear war seem survivable and winnable and therefore not an option to be rejected. For her, refusing to take shelter was also “an act of penance” undertaken by an American whose country “had been the first to drop the atom bomb and to make the hydrogen bomb.”

At eleven o’clock that night the ten in the group who had been arrested appeared in night court. One of them, the actress Judith Malina, laughed out loud in the courtroom as the bailiff mispronounced prisoners’ names. When the judge summoned her to the bench for making the disturbance, Judith explained that she was giddy because she hadn’t had anything to eat all day. He asked if she had ever been in a mental institution. “No,” she replied, “have you?” Those in the courtroom laughed, but not the judge, who ordered that Judith be taken for observation at the Bellevue psychiatric ward. For the others he set $1,500 bail, a sum associated with crimes far more serious than sitting quietly on park benches. (“Well, it was a serious crime,” said one member of the Catholic Worker community. “We were defying the White House. We were defying the Pentagon. We were defying the governor. We were defying the national mood. We were defying the habit of war. We were refusing to get ready for war.”)

Dorothy and the others refused to provide bail, but after twenty-four hours were sent home without sentence or fine by a friendlier judge. “All we got was a slap on the wrist,” one of them said. But even a day in jail had given Dorothy time to kneel on the floor of her cell — “a bare, stark cell that would outdo the Carmelites in austerity” — and “thank God for the opportunity to be there, to be so stripped of all that the earth holds dear, to share in some way the life of prisoners, guilty and innocent, all over the world.”

A year later, the drill was repeated, as was the protest, this time in Washington Square Park. This time the demonstrators were ordered to pay a fine or serve five days in jail. (One of those who opted for the fine was David Caplan, a physicist, who tried to convince the judge that civil defense preparations in a prime-target city like New York were dishonest: one would need to be far deeper — not in a subway tunnel just under the street — to have any hope of survival.)

Dorothy chose jail. The poor couldn’t pay fines, she said, which was one of the reasons the jails were full of the poor. Also, Jesus had said, “I was a prisoner and you came to be with me.”

Dorothy was jailed again in 1957. By then her disobedience seemed a kind of annual urban ritual, like painting a green stripe down Fifth Avenue on Saint Patrick’s Day. In a leaflet, Dorothy sought to explain the Catholic Worker’s small act of witness: “We know what we are in for, the risk we run in openly setting ourselves against this most powerful country in the world. It is a tiny Christian gesture, the gesture of a David against a Goliath in an infinitesimal way. We do not wish to be defiant, we do not wish to antagonize. We love our country and are only saddened to see its great virtues matched by equally great faults. We are a part of it, we are responsible too. With this small gesture we want to atone in some small measure for what we did in Hiroshima, and what we are still doing by the manufacture and testing of such weapons.”

The press, in greater numbers than ever, came to watch the pacifists get loaded into paddy wagons, not at City Hall Park this time but on Chrystie Street, the Catholic Worker’s own neighborhood. The judge, a Catholic, advised Dorothy to read the Bible and said that those who disobeyed the civil defense laws were a “heartless bunch of individuals who breathe contempt.” He imposed a thirty-day sentence.

Putting Dorothy Day in jail was akin to throwing a rabbit into the briar patch. “It is good to be here, Lord,” Dorothy wrote from her cell in the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village, not far from the saloon where, in earlier times, she had spent many an hour with Eugene O’Neill. “We were, frankly, hoping for jail,” Dorothy admitted to readers of The Catholic Worker. Being in jail, one could come closer to real poverty. “Then we would not be running a house of hospitality, we would not be dispensing food and clothing, we would not be ministering to the destitute, but we would be truly one of them.”

Her month-long jail stay was a shocking, grinding experience — “crushing, numbing and painful at the same time.” It wasn’t just the abrasive, sack-like clothing, the constant assault of the mind by noise, the small and crowded cells, or the sexual harassment being suffered by so many of the younger inmates. What was most difficult was the deep sadness and despair that filled the prison. So many prisoners could look toward the future only with dread.

Dorothy left prison in a state of mental, physical and even spiritual exhaustion, she told her readers, yet grateful for the experience and ready to face the same consequences again next year. “It is a gesture, perhaps, but a necessary one. Silence means consent, and we cannot consent to the militarization of our country without protest. Since we believe that air raid drills are part of a calculated plan to inspire fear of the enemy, instead of the love which Jesus Christ told us we should feel, we must protest these drills. It is an opportunity to show we mean what we write when we repeat over and over that we are put here on this earth to love God and our neighbor.”

The longer jail term made Dorothy think again of the need for a completely different response from society to those convicted of crimes. She had witnessed the ways in which prisons damage those who live or work in them, making many inmates only more angry and dangerous than they were before, while reducing others to an awful, passive brokenness, and harming the guards as well. Would not much more be accomplished in small, more homelike settings in which prisoners were recognized as persons of value and promise? In prison, staff was mainly hired to guard inmates, “not to love them.” She envisioned rural centers at which the inmates raised much of their own food, baked their own bread, milked cows, tended chickens, engaged in creative activity and shared responsibility for the institution so that it wasn’t a static environment but was, “in its own way, a community.” Prison as it exists, she found, was the opposite of community. The prisoner is simply an object which can be stripped and searched in the crudest possible ways — in the case of women prisoners, “even to the tearing of tissues so that bleeding results.”

Why, she asked, were Christians so blind to Christ’s presence in the people it locked away and regarded without compassion? “Christ is with us today, not only in the Blessed Sacrament and where two or three are gathered together in His Name, but also in the poor. And who could be poorer and more destitute in body and soul than these companions of ours in prison?”

In 1958, Dorothy and Ammon, with seven others, again stayed above ground as an imaginary nuclear explosion occurred above New York. This time the judge suspended sentence. In 1959 there were fourteen. Ammon, Dorothy, and her friend and co-worker Deane Mower were sentenced to fifteen days in jail. The judge was a kindly man, but found that they were failing to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. “Caesar has been getting too much around here,” Ammon replied. “Someone has to stand up for God.”

For Dorothy, among the benefits of taking part in an act of civil disobedience was the opportunity it gave for practicing one of the most neglected of the works of mercy, visiting the prisoner, and doing so not just for a short time but for days on end, and not as a visitor but as a fellow-prisoner.

In the diary entries she kept while back at the Women’s House of Detention that spring, Dorothy reflected on the struggle it is “trying to see Christ in our sisters and loving them in their suffering… [In doing so,] we are not oblivious to their faults, their sins. This is true love because primarily we love them because Jesus loved them — He came to call sinners, to find the lost sheep…. [Many of them] are beautiful, young, tall, of good carriage, strong, graceful, etc. [Here in jail they] are also sober. Outside, stupefied with drugs or ugly with drink, they would be hard to love. They showed [Deane Mower and me] pictures of their children and their faces were alive with love and longing. Afterwards, they lay sorrowful on their beds. But many times too they were triggered by some affront or injustice, screaming or flaring into temper or foul language, and their rage was such that others kept silent until their mutterings died down like the thunder of a summer storm. Arguments, shouting, cursing, laughter. Some nights the arguments on the ward were hideous, sometimes there was wild gaiety, and most vulgar humor.”

Imprisonment confronted Dorothy not only with the clandestine sexual activity that occurred among her fellow prisoners in the shadows of jail, but made her reflect on her own sexual past. “I felt myself assaulted by memories of my own sex life, my life with Forster, of the sins of my past life,” she wrote “I suddenly realized that this was in the air and if I, a woman of 61, felt this at a time of life where … temptations are of the mind more than of the flesh, how much more so in these young ones, whose flesh must cry out fiercely for consummation and fruition.”

One of the early hints that the sixties were going to be very different than the fifties was the crowd that gathered with Dorothy in front of City Hall on May 3, 1960. When the air raid sirens howled, five hundred stood in the park and another five hundred on the sidewalks across the street. Laughter greeted police orders to take shelter. In the arrests that followed, it seemed obvious they were under orders not to arrest Dorothy Day. The twenty-five who were arrested were punished with five-day sentences. This time the demonstrators were no longer a subject for editorial ridicule. The New York World Telegram said that the war drills were “an exercise in futility.” Civil defense would work, the paper added, only if “the enemy’s plan is to drop marshmallow puffs.” An article in The New York Post was headlined, “Laughter in the Park.” Clearly the politicians were increasingly uncomfortable with this annual spectacle. Being scolded is one thing, being laughed at another.

The following spring a good two thousand people gathered in cheerful disobedience at City Hall Park. The police arrested a symbolic forty. The protest was not only in front of the mayor’s office. All over New York there were individuals and groups refusing to take shelter. The air raid sirens seemed to call people onto the streets rather than underneath them. For Civil Defense officials and politicians, it was a stunning defeat. Not only in New York but elsewhere in America, there were no more compulsory drills. (It happened that Dorothy missed the final round; at the time she was traveling in the Southwest on a speaking trip.)

While the New York press gathered annually to watch Dorothy and others sitting quietly on park benches during air raid drills, no journalist had been present to witness an act of unauthorized sitting on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. On December 1, 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks, a seamstress and a devout Christian much respected in Montgomery’s black community, declined to give up her seat to a white man in a segregated bus in which blacks were required to sit in the back. Tired from her day of work and tried of all the rituals of racism, she stayed where she was. The driver summoned a policeman, a man who seemed embarrassed at the job which had come to him. “Why didn’t you stand up?” he asked Mrs. Parks. “I don’t think I should have to,” she replied. “Why do you push us around?” “I don’t know,” said the policeman, “but the law’s the law, and you are under arrest.” He drove Mrs. Parks to the jail, where she was then locked up. “I don’t recall being extremely frightened,” she said afterward, “but I felt very much annoyed and inconvenienced because I had hoped to go home and get my dinner, and do whatever else I had to do for the evening. But now here I was sitting in jail and couldn’t get home.”

I Had a Dream

By Jim Forest

[clipped from Writing Straight With Crooked Lines]

In 1967, with the war in Vietnam getting worse by the day and civilian casualties mounting steadily, I had a soul-changing dream that helped me overcome the bitter tide that was rising within me. At the time, anti-war demonstrations were turning in a hate-driven, self-righteous direction, with President Lyndon Johnson the focal-point of growing rage. Protesters in front of the White House were often chanting such mantras as “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Crude caricatures of Johnson were being carried in parades. Writing about it in a letter to Merton, I added:

“’Nor do I want to sound self-righteous about the problem, for it afflicts me too. For a while I had a photo of the president at the center of the dartboard that hung on the kitchen wall and found it amusing to throw darts at the image. No more. The other night I had a dream about getting on a public bus and discovering LBJ was one of the passengers and that there was an empty seat next to him. I sat down and introduced myself and we got into a conversation about the war. We didn’t agree — he said the same kinds of things that I had heard him say at press conferences — but it was a real if troubled human exchange. Then, at his suggestion, we got off the bus and went for a walk in the countryside, at this point saying nothing. Gazing downward, I watched our shoes as we kicked up the golden fall leaves that were thick on the ground. We were both silent, just the sound of our shoes plowing the leaves. At that point I woke up and the dream ended. I got out of bed, my mind momentarily blank, and stepped into the kitchen, where I saw the dartboard. The photo of Johnson looked like it had been sprayed with bullets. I just made it back to the bed, collapsed and wept. I felt like a murderer. So you see I’m not talking about problems others have but my own problem, my own sin.”

That dream marked a turn. Whatever I might do about peacemaking in the years to come, it had better not be fueled by hatred and dartboard fantasies of homicide.

* * *

Praying for Enemies

by Jim Forest

“But I say to you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”[1] In a single sentence Jesus links love of enemies with prayer for them. In fact prayer is the essential first step without which love of enemies would be hardly possible.

If we have any interest in attempting to love our enemies, a necessary starting point is to admit we have enemies and, insofar as we can, to be able to identify them by name. Once I have admitted to myself that I have enemies, I have a starting point. Until then, the Gospel commandment to love one’s enemies and pray for them is a dead letter.

Situations of enmity exist in everyone’s daily life: at home, at work, at school, between neighbors. If you have teenage kids, surely you’ve experienced them looking at you with eyes that explode with hatred, an animosity that could well be mirrored in your own eyes. Pick up a newspaper — page after page contains vivid reminders of how much enmity and violence surrounds us. In the same pages we see what the cost is in suffering, despair and death. You find conflict even in monasteries. I once watched two young Benedictine novices silently battle with each other by arranging and rearranging the salt-and-pepper shakers that stood on the refectory table between them. Those small containers became warring chess pieces.

We don’t need to travel far to find adversarial relationships, yet most of us are reluctant to use the word “enemy” in describing people who are part of our daily lives.

I have an exercise for you. You’ll need a piece of paper and something to write with.

Stop for a few minutes and think about people you know who make you feel anger or fear, persons you dislike and whose company you avoid, individuals in your family, neighborhood, workplace or church whom it distresses you to see, individuals who have hurt you or hurt those in your care. Think of politicians whose words and policies outrage you. Think of people you would prefer not to pray for. People you find outrageous.

Also think about groups or categories of people you think of by national, racial, political or religious label. Think of people who are the current or potential targets of weapons and armies that in some way you support, passively or actively, willingly or unwillingly, through your work, political alignments, payment of taxes or other activities.

As names occur to you, pause to write them down. Do so even if you think the word “enemy” is too strong. In instances in which you haven’t got a name, use a label.

Okay, now you have a first-draft of a prayer list. Try to refer to it on a daily basis.

Look again at what you have written down. Think about each name or label.

In each case, picture an individual face or, in the case of labels, an appropriate image. Give yourself at least a minute for each name or label.

Insofar as you are able, consider in each case how the enmity began. Consider incidents or reasons that explain or justify your feelings. Consider ways in which the enmity involved has shaped, limited, damaged or endangered your life or the lives of people dear to you.

Next step. Try and take the point of view of those you have listed. Are they actually your enemies? Or might it be truer to say you’re their enemy? Or is it half-and-half? In either case, what have you done or failed to do that might explain or justify their hostility?

Now a potentially embarrassing question: You’re a Christian. Christ has told you to pray for your enemies. When have you prayed for any of the people on your list? Regularly? Occasionally? Rarely? Never?

Have you searched for points of common ground and possible agreement? Have you allowed yourself to be aware of qualities that are admirable in those you have listed or have you preferred to see only what, from your perspective, is flawed in them?

Consider what might happen to you, to others, if this enmity continues: separation, divorce, court battles, children caught in the crossfire, shattered friendships, division in your parish, division among co-workers, misery in the work place, loss of employment…

In the case of differences between nations, think of ways in which you participate in enmities that, if they worsen, could explode into war. In a world in which there are thousands of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, consider what war might mean in the worst case. Are you doing anything that might make war less likely or helping bring to an end a war in progress?

Prayer that doesn’t influence your own actions means little. Why should God pay attention to a prayer that has little or no influence on your own behavior? What steps have you taken to change relationships with those on your list? Have you talked to others who might help or intervene in a constructive way? Can you imagine what you could do that might help bring to an end any of the enmities you have listed. What can you do that might help convert enmity to friendship?

The Church, in recognizing saints, places before us many models of sanctity — people who, in a wide variety of ways, also had to deal with enemies. By taking time to study the lives of particular saints, we are likely to find helpful models.

Here’s an example. One of the masters of the spiritual life in the past century was Saint Silouan the Athonite, an uneducated Russian peasant who was born in 1866 and died in 1938. In his youth he was an immensely strong man who had a volcanic temper. During a feast day celebrating the patron saint of his village, he was playing a concertina when two brothers, both cobblers, began to tease him. The older of the brothers tried to snatch the concertina from Silouan and a fight broke out between them.

“At first I thought of giving in to the fellow,” Silouan told another monk later in his life, “but then I was ashamed at how the girls would laugh at me, so I gave him a great hard blow in the chest. His body shot away and he fell backwards with a heavy thud in the middle of the road. Froth and blood trickled from his mouth. All the onlookers were horrified. So was I. ‘I’ve killed him,’ I thought, and stood rooted to the spot. For a long time the cobbler lay where he was. It was over half an hour before he could rise to his feet. With difficulty they got him home, where he was bad for a couple of months, but he didn’t die.”[2]

For the rest of his life Silouan felt that there was only the slightest difference between himself and a murderer. He had yielded to a murderous impulse. It was only by chance that his powerful blow hadn’t been deadly. Perhaps it’s not surprising that, as time passed, he found himself drawn towards a life of prayer and penance. After becoming a monk on Mount Athos, a Greek peninsula dotted with monasteries that juts into the Aegean Sea, he thought long and hard about violence and its causes, in the course of which he developed a profound sense of human inter-connectedness. He realized that “through Christ’s love, everyone is made an inseparable part of our own, eternal existence … for the Son of Man has taken within himself all mankind.”

One need not be a contemplative monk in a remote monastery to be overwhelmed by a sense of human inter-connection. I often think of the astronauts who participated in the first moon landing in July 1969. As he looked through a window in his spacecraft, one of them, Russell Schweickart, was able to put into words a similar sense of human oneness that hit him:

You see the Earth not as something big … [but] as a small thing out there. And the contrast between that bright blue and white Christmas tree ornament and the black sky, that infinite universe, really comes through, and the size of it, the significance of it. It is so small and fragile and such a precious little spot in that universe that you can block it out with your thumb, and you realize that on that small spot, that little blue and white thing, is everything that means anything to you — all of history, and music and poetry and art and death and birth and love, all the tears, joy, games, all of it on that little spot out there that you can cover with your thumb. And you realize from that perspective that you’ve changed, that there’s something new there, that the relationship is no longer what it was.[3]

Saint Silouan had no spaceship window and probably could not have imagined anyone flying to the moon, but the life of prayer provided him with the same discovery: there is one Earth, the borders drawn on maps are invisible to the birds that fly over them, we really are God’s children, it really is one human family, and in God’s eyes the earth is no bigger than a kitchen table.

Little by little Silouan came to the realization that love of enemies is not simply an option of Christian life, a possibility that few will attempt and fewer still achieve, but is “the central criterion of true faith and of real communion with God, the lover of souls, the lover of humankind.” Or, as he said on other occasions, “No one has ever known God without having loved his enemies.”

There is nothing new in this. The Gospel author Saint John said the same: “Whoever says he loves God but hates his neighbor is a liar.”[4] Could anyone say it more simply or more plainly? Hatred of anyone blockades communion with God.

But without prayer for enemies we are ill prepared to love them. There is no starting point. Prayer itself is an act of relationship. The moment I pray for someone, however reluctantly, I establish an intimate connection with that person. Even the smallest act of caring that prayer involves is a major step toward love, an act of participating in God’s love for that person. Prayer gives us a point of access to God’s love for those we would otherwise regard with disinterest, irritation, fear or active hostility.

If love of enemies begins with prayer for them, it may be that we need to think freshly about the nature of prayer.

Among books that have helped me in the endless struggle to become more compassionate, collections of photos such as The Family of Man have been of special value. Meditating on images in The Face of Prayer, I was impressed by the comments of the photographer, Abraham Menashe:

Prayer is a deeply personal act through which we commune, petition, reach out, and give thanks…. Prayer is present in all aspects of life…. When we attend to prayer, its nature becomes known to us. We take refuge in stillness, and in our most naked state become receptive to a life force that nourishes, heals, and makes us whole again. To the extent that we have the courage to seek moments of solitude and listen to our inner voice, we will be guided by a light that lives in us. We will come to know a love that does not disappoint — peace the world does not offer.[5]

Prayer is something that reveals itself only through prayer. Like the taste of an orange, we can know it only from the inside. As Menashe put it, “When we attend to prayer, its nature becomes known to us.”

While the recitation of sacred texts is important in every religious tradition, an early discovery each person makes is that, while words help, prayer is far more than reciting words. It often involves no words at all, only an attentive silence.

Prayer is placing ourselves in the presence of God — so easy to say but often so hard to do. The mystery we identify as “God” is more than a word and no definition of God (creator, sustainer, savior, ground of being, higher power, lover of humankind) is adequate. Biblical and theological texts depend on metaphors, the essential verbal tool for touching the borders of the unexplainable.

One of the metaphors for God used by Saint Symeon the New Theologian[6] was water:

God can be known to us in the same way that a man can see an endless ocean while standing at the shore at night and holding only a dimly lit candle. Do you think he can see much? In fact very little, almost nothing. Even so, he can see the water very well. He knows there is a vast ocean before him, the limits of which he cannot perceive. The same is true of our knowledge of God.[7]

Yet an ocean is less than a drop of water compared to God. Many metaphors are helpful, no metaphor is adequate. God is simultaneously both close and distant, both merciful and demanding, both just and forgiving, father but also mother, ever new yet ageless, unchanging and yet the fountainhead of change, a God both of deserts and waterfalls. Words and images can only help in our pilgrimage toward God. “He who follows words is destroyed,” Thomas Merton told the novices in his care.

Using another metaphor, we might think of God as a weaver, in fact the weaver. All creation, from the book in your hand to the most remote galaxy, is part of that endless and ongoing weaving. You and I are part of the fabric and so are our enemies. To approach God is to discover connections, including the ways that I and my enemy are bound together like crisscrossing threads in the same tapestry. The moment we turn toward God the weaver, we turn toward a divine love that connects everyone, whether a nun caring for a dying beggar or a psychopath who has just raped and murdered a stranger. This is the economy of grace that Christ is describing when he speaks of rain and sunlight being given to all, not just the virtuous. We are part of an inter-connected human unity in which our worst enemy also exists. This doesn’t mean that God is indifferent to the sins we or our enemies commit, but we are nonetheless objects of God’s life-giving love and benefit from the divine hope that we might yet become what God intended us to become.

A starting point in prayer is being honest with God: presenting ourselves as we are, not as we wish we were or as we think God wants us to be, not dressing up for God but standing before God as naked as Adam and Eve. As a passage in the Philokalia (a venerable Orthodox collection of texts on prayer and other aspects of Christian life) puts it:

If we truly wish to please God and to be friends with the most blessed of friendships, let us present our spirit naked to God. Let us not draw into it anything of this present world — no art, no thought, no reasoning, no self-justification — even though we should possess all the wisdom of this world.[8]

If we’re going to present our spirits naked to God, there is no need to pretend to God that we love an enemy in an affectionate sense. Better to communicate our actual feelings. Perhaps something like this:

God, you must know I can’t stand [the name of whomever you are at enmity with]. I often wish him dead or at least wish he were miserable and far away. But I pray for him because you commanded me to pray for my enemies. Personally I don’t actually want to do it but I do want to be one of your disciples and I am trying to be obedient to your words. Help me to see him as you see him. Let me glimpse your image in him. May I live in such a way that both of us can lay aside our hostility and forgive each other. May I at least not be an obstacle to his salvation. I admit I find it hard to want anything good for him — help me to want it, help me to pray for him.

The simplest of prayers can also be used. You may find it helpful to recite the Jesus Prayer — “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me” — or a variation of it: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on [the name of someone on your enemies list].”

By the way, be patient. Expect no quick results or even slow results. You may pray for years for a person or group and see no changes at all, at least none that you were hoping for. (In fact prayer for a change even in one’s own behavior requires persistence.) In prayer for an enemy, at the very least there is a change in you — the creation of a bond of care for the other.

We are told by Christ to pray for our enemies, but prayer itself can be difficult. No matter what its focus, prayer sometimes reminds us of the undercurrent of our own religious doubts. Among the prayers in the Gospel for which I have a particular gratitude is this one: “Lord, I believe — help my unbelief.”[9] The man who first said that at least had the advantage of standing face-to-face with Jesus. We live twenty centuries later, in a time when who Jesus was has become the subject of countless books about the “historical Jesus,” books whose authors rarely agree with each other. Some even dismiss the Jesus of the New Testament as a legend or invention. Among authors who admit he must have existed, some regard Jesus as a vagabond rabbi who was executed for his radical ideas and was resurrected only in the sense that his stories and teachings survived and became the basis for a new religion.

Many writers have vandalized the Jesus of the Gospels. The most successful recent revision of Jesus’ life is Dan Brown’s novel, The DaVinci Code, in which we find a cloak-and-dagger Catholic Church that has spent twenty centuries using any means necessary to suppress the fact that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and became a father, numbering the kings of medieval France among his descendants. (Not much of an achievement.) Brown’s book has sold millions of copies and was made into a big-budget film. Sadly, many have taken the author’s bogus history seriously.

On top of all the misinformation about Jesus, for many people the word “God” is far from easy to use. Pronouncing these three letters produces a sound that is often without content rather than a bridge into the depthless reality of a mysterious creator “in whom we live and move and have our being.”[10] The word “God,” so often ill-treated and carelessly used, can also trigger recollections of the grave sins committed in God’s name by people in responsible positions in religious structures: inquisitions, torture, heretics burned, Crusades and other religious wars, priests and nuns who abused children, bishops who protected child-abusers, etc. Christians have often betrayed Christ’s most basic teachings. It can be an ongoing struggle to develop a sense of God that isn’t stained by ecclesiastical abuses of the word “God.”

Yet so much draws us toward the God who, as one prayer used throughout the Orthodox Church reminds us, “is everywhere present, filling all things, the treasury of blessings and the giver of life.”[11] Beauty itself opens a door toward heaven. All beauty, from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic, bears witness to God. At the base of our souls is a tilt toward God. Saint Augustine was right in proclaiming, “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”[12]

To pray whole-heartedly can become the most vital force in life, not only empowering us in countless ways, but, like an underground spring flowing through hidden channels, reaching others, including those we view as enemies.

In praying for enemies, we are not hurling holy thoughts at them or petitioning God to make them into copies of ourselves. Rather we are bringing our enemies into that part of ourselves which is deepest and most vulnerable. We are begging God for the good of those whom, at other times, we wished ill or wished to harm. In praying for enemies, we are asking God to use us for the well-being of those we fear.

At the same time, we are asking to see ourselves as we are seen by those who fear us, so that we can see enmity not only from our side but from the other side, for we not only have enemies — we are enemies. We would do well to pray not only for the conversion of our adversaries but for our own conversion. We ourselves may be harder to convert than our adversaries. The most needed conversion may be my own.

[This is a chapter from Loving Our Enemies: Reflections on the Hardest Commandment by Jim Forest, published by Orbis Books.]


[1] Matthew 5:44

[2] Archimandrite Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite (Essex: Monastery of St. John he Baptist, 1991), 14-15.

[3] Russell Schweickhart, “No Frames, No Boundaries”: www.context.org/iclib/ic03/schweick

[4] 1 John 4:20

[5] Abraham Menashe, The Face of Prayer (New York: Knopf, 1980)

[6] Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022) is one of three saints of the Orthodox Church to have been given the title of Theologian; the others are Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Gregory Nazianzen. Born in Galatia and educated at Constantinople, Symeon became abbot of the monastery of Saint Mamas. “Theologian” was not applied to Symeon in the modern academic sense of theological scholarship, but to recognize someone who spoke from personal experience of God. One of his principal teachings was that humans could and should experience theoria — literally “contemplation,” or direct experience of God.

[7] Saint Symeon the New Theologian, Oration 61, Works, quoted in Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon, Vol. 1 (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992), 33.

[8] Saint John of Karpathos, from section 49 of “For the Encouragement of the Monks in India,” included in The Philokalia: The Complete Text, compiled by Saint Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth, Volume One, p 309-10 (London: Faber & Faber, 1979).

[9] Mark 9:24

[10] Acts 17:28

[11] The full text of the prayer: “Oh Heavenly King, the comforter, the spirit of truth, who is everywhere present, filling all things, the treasury of blessings and the giver of life, come and abide in us and cleanse us from every impurity and save, oh gracious one, our souls.”

[12] Confessions, Book I.