A brief comment on Seraphim Rose’s “Letter to Thomas Merton”

I’ve just re-read Fr Seraphm Rose’s “Letter to Thomas Merton,” written in 1962 but apparently never actually sent to Merton. Sometime after Rose’s death in 1982, the text was discovered and published as a booklet and eventually posted to the web where it remains available:


http://deathtotheworld.com/articles/a-letter-to-thomas-merton/

Rose’s letter is regarded by some as a strong patristic response to Merton’s alleged “aberrations”, notably his writings on such controversial topics as war and peace.

What strikes me most in rereading Rose’s letter is that it is, by the later standards of his writing, an immature work. Much of it is written in a sarcastic tone, with many words set in quotations marks where there is no need for them. More important, Rose seems to have read very little of Merton’s writing and misunderstood a good deal of what he had read.

Rose’s letter was written in the same year as his reception into the Orthodox Church, when Rose was new to Orthodoxy and in the thick of convert zeal. It may be that Rose came to regard his letter as flawed and intemperate and abandoned it.

It’s a pity, however, that Rose never made contact with Merton. He would have found that in fact they shared much common ground. Merton too was a student of the Church Fathers. Merton also had an aversion to utopian ideologies no less intense than Rose nor was Merton any more optimistic about the future than Rose. Rose would have helped Merton clarify what he meant by such phrases as “total peace” — for Merton nothing less than living the evangelical life.

For Rose, a dialog with Merton, a fellow monk living on the edge of a diseased society, might have led to a greater appreciation of the place of public witness and even protest on issues such as nuclear war. In 1962, many Americans, including Catholic and Orthodox Christians, favored a unilateral nuclear attack on Russia. We now know such an attack had the support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Many millions of people would have died. As a popular slogan in those days put it, “The only good red is a dead red.” Monks, Merton believed, should see the moral issues of the world around them with heightened clarity. He felt it essential to raise a voice of opposition. In fact his writing on this topic had a significant impact. According to the pope’s secretary, John XXIII’s remarkable encyclical “Pacem in Terris” (Peace on Earth) was in part influenced by Merton’s writings on peace. The fact that there was no nuclear war in the 1960s can partly be credited to the lonely prophetic voice of Merton — and still more to John XXIII.

Readers of these comments might find of interest a lecture I gave several years ago on this aspect of Merton’s life:

https://jimandnancyforest.com/2009/02/sheds-no-blood/

Jim Forest

16 July 2014

* * *

Sister Mary Evelyn Jegen: On Benevolent Glancing

Mary Evelyn Jegen
Sister Mary Evelyn Jegen, SND
This is an extract from an interview I did with Sister Mary Evelyn Jegen, SND, sometime in the mid-80s and published (not sure of the date) in “Reconciliation International,” the journal of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. Mary Evelyn died on July 4, 2014. An obituary is attached.– Jim Forest

A news item about Pope John Paul’s visit to Southeast Asia a few years ago provided an opening in my search to integrate prayer and peace work. It was reported that, in meeting the Supreme Patriarch of the Buddhists of Thailand, protocol required that they first sit together in absolute silence while “exchanging benevolent glances.” The story intrigued me. I wondered what it was like to exchange benevolent glances with a stranger. Did Pope John Paul have to practice in advance? What was the difference between just plain looking and benevolent glancing?

As I do not drive, I spend much of my life in buses. What better place, I thought, to experiment with benevolent glancing? At first I felt a bit awkward. I did not try to engage anyone’s eyes, so benevolent glancing was strictly a unilateral initiative.

A strange thing happened. I found I was praying. I don’t mean saying prayers. I was being attentive, alert and aware in a way impossible to describe. I was very much “with” a mysterious depth of reality. I was looking at others not merely with curiosity but with love. After all, love is what benevolence is all about: the word means “to wish another well.”

After a year of practice, I happened to meet a Buddhist priest. In his family he was of the fortieth consecutive generation of Buddhist priests. He said that the Buddhist way of seeing is different than the western approach. Westerners want to extract data, to “take” what they can from what they see, while a Buddhist tries simply to be present, to allow reality to present itself, to wait for it to come forward to meet the eye.

What has this got to do with peace? Very much. Benevolent glancing is an art of attentiveness. Paying attention to what is before us is a way of prayer, even a definition of prayer. We know by faith that God is everywhere. Benevolent glancing is relishing God by being attentive to what is before us.

My experience has been that persons who would be uncomfortable in considering contemplative prayer as something for themselves can nevertheless become enthusiastic about benevolent glancing. It seems to correspond to an unexpressed desire. A person who would shy away from contemplative prayer, through benevolent glancing, will in fact practice it.

Peacemaking and contemplation are so intimately related that one can hardly exist without the other. This truth can be appreciated by recognizing that violence depends on distorting the object or the victim of violence, turning the victim into an impersonal object which can then be injured or even killed. An army officer told me that killing in war is much easier now that soldiers don’t have to see the faces of the enemy. In modern war we are able to describe the death of people as “collateral damage.” Psychologically, it would be impossible to kill anyone on whom one had just been casting a loving glance. The day we teach people to look at persons behind the abstractions, to glance benevolently at them, the military-industrial complex will have a serious problem.

There is a huge difference between staring and benevolent glancing. To practice benevolent glancing is to experience deeply stirred emotions–from embarrassment and fear to compassion and love. Fear of invading the privacy of another person causes the embarrassment, but this initial feeling can be shaped into what we traditionally call modesty, a way of respect, reverence, even awe to be in the presence of the splendor of the human person who is “little less than the angels…crowned with glory and honor.”

To practice benevolent glancing is to expose oneself to pain and suffering. To take a bus ride is to come into direct contact with the embodiment of suffering: to see the deep lines in a face, the sag of the shoulders. I look carefully at one person at a time, allowing that person’s truth to come home to me. It is not always an older person whose body bears the marks of a life of endurance. It can be a high school student. In these cases I often have to deal with my own irritation and impatience at the behavior of teenagers. Before long I find myself seeing someone beautiful.

People who ride the bus are often poor, but, poor or not, one thing we have in common is that we are not in change. We are dependent on others and know our dependence. This group atmosphere tends to make the atmosphere less assertive than in other places.

I have discovered that benevolent glancing often has a ripple effect. I have the impression that I am not alone in the exercise. I can testify that if one seeks it, gently and attentively, there is often a profound sense of God’s presence in a bus.

Appreciation and admiration for others evokes a more active benevolence, a desire for the good of the other persons. While this rarely translates into a particular act at the time, it does affect the deep structure of the personality of the one practicing benevolent glancing. When the occasion arises, I find I am more apt to act constructively.

To be attentive to a suffering person is quite different than attention to a merry child. A benevolent glance toward a suffering person is an act of compassion. It is compassion that acts as a bridge from attentiveness to action, an action that can be healing and liberating.

Caring is essential to peacemaking. Peace is the goal of the universal longing for order in relationships, with the earth itself, with others, with God. To care is to be in peace while one is peacemaking. Pablo Casals once wrote: “I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance.”

The gospel accounts show us Jesus looking with keen attention. This appears to have been his habitual way of seeing. How else to account for his easy and spontaneous use of imagery to carry home a point! Jesus didn’t go through life with his eyes closed, uninterested in the homey events of daily experience. He saw each face. Think of the encounter with the rich young man. Mark says, “Jesus looked steadily at him and loved him.”

I have never minded riding in a bus, but since that first experiment of benevolent glancing a few years ago, I look forward to bus riding as a great adventure. If the day ever comes when I have no need to ride the bus in order to get somewhere, I will ride the bus anyway simply for the joy of benevolent glancing.

* * *

http://obits.dignitymemorial.com/dignity-memorial/obituary.aspx?n=Sister+Mary-Jegen&lc=7360&pid=171655105&mid=6039108

Sister Mary Evelyn Jegen
February 15, 1928 – July 4, 2014

Marilyn Jegen was the second of five children in a family that encouraged creativity and learning, love of the grandeur of nature and deep faith. Her desire to give herself totally to God led her to religious life. She wanted to enter an apostolic Institute and perhaps it was a resonance with Saint Julie’s desire that her daughters have “hearts wide as the world” that helped draw her to the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur where she received the name Sister Mary Evelyn.

Sister Mary Evelyn taught at the elementary and secondary levels for eleven years before being missioned to St. Louis University for her doctoral studies. Those studies took her to London, England for her first international experience of Notre Dame and the world outside of the United States. After completing her doctorate she began teaching at the college and university level.

It was while serving as an assistant professor in the History Department at the University of Dayton that she had an experience that changed her life. Some students asked her to help them file for conscientious objection. That request led her to take issues to prayer that raised new questions and insights, and opened her heart to a new call. She later said: “They converted me. I remember the date and hour of my decision. I was on retreat, and said to myself: ‘This is where I stand. From now on I work for peace.'”

Sister Mary Evelyn began her work for peace in Rome at Regina Mundi Institute. While teaching there she also designed and carried out an international research project for the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace. The area of research was the emergence of the peace and justice movement during the Second Vatican Council, and the subsequent development of the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace and its ecumenical offspring. This research took her to other parts of Europe, to India, and to the United States. She returned to the United States and taught Catholic Social Teaching and Christian Spirituality courses at Mundelein College, Creighton University and the Education for Parish Service Program at Trinity College, Washington, D.C.

Starting in 1976, Sister Mary Evelyn combined teaching with board and staff positions in national and international religious peace and justice movements. She served as the first executive director of the Bread for the World Educational Fund, as the first director of Mundelein’s Center for Women and Peace, helped establish the U.S. branch of Pax Christi, and served as Pax Christi USA’s first national coordinator.

Under her direction Pax Christi USA grew to be a major factor in the religious peace movements in the U.S. Her work went beyond the borders of the U.S. During this period she made nine trips to Europe to coordinate the work of the U.S. branch with other national branches of the Pax Christi movement. She was appointed to the Pax Christi Human Rights Commission. In 1984 she was elected to the executive committee of Pax Christi International, and also elected vice president. Sister Mary Evelyn introduced the Pax Christi movement in India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand. She served as a representative for Pax Christi International at the United Nations from 1992-2001, and continued work on Pax Christi International’s Peace Spirituality Project. In addition Sister Mary Evelyn began working at both the international and the national levels with a new interfaith movement, Global Peace Services in 1989.

Sister Mary Evelyn lectured extensively on peace and justice issues at numerous workshops, conferences and symposiums at home and abroad. She served as editor of proceedings for some of the symposiums, and edited several books. She also wrote prolifically: articles for newspapers and magazines, book reviews, pamphlets and books. Some of the publications of her work appeared in Fellowship Magazine, New Catholic World, and The National Catholic Reporter. Her books included Following the Nonviolent Jesus, How You Can be a Peacemaker: Catholic Teaching and Practical Suggestions and Just Peacemakers.

Sister Mary Evelyn also witnessed for peace. Praying for peaceful solutions to the First Gulf War, she asked others to join her as she began a 24-day prayer vigil outside the White House in response to a “personal call to generate a prayerful presence around the White House.” In 2006 she was one of four anti-war demonstrators arrested at the Cincinnati office of a U.S. House Representative.

In community Sister Mary Evelyn took an individual interest in each Sister. She shared her gifts of bread making (which for her was a prayer experience) and cooking, planning and leading prayer and gently facilitating community meetings. She brought joyful energy to relationships, the concerns of the world to the intentions of community prayer, thoughtful insights to all levels of community discussions, and beauty into her surroundings through her gift for gardening. During her years at Mount Notre Dame Sister Mary Evelyn faithfully visited her Sisters in the Health Center, often bringing a flower from her garden. She would share tea with them, take them for walks, share poetry with them and often discuss something she had just read or heard on the news. She appreciated the time she spent with each Sister-friend.

She valued her relationships with her family and friends. She treasured visits with her family, delighting in each generation. She enjoyed time spent with her sisters who answered calls to other religious congregations: Sister Evelyn Jegen and Sister Carol Frances Jegen. She made friends and made herself at home wherever her work took her. She appreciated the diversity of cultures and religions. She was gifted with the ability to maintain friendships across distance and time, her heart continually expanding to embrace new people and new experiences.

Sister Mary Evelyn accepted the illness that marked her last months with the simplicity and openness to God’s presence that marked her entire life. A woman who lived what she taught, a paraphrase of Proverbs 3:17 might summarize her life: “Her ways were pleasant ways, and all her paths were peace.” The Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur mourn her loss and join her family and many friends in thanking God for her life, so full of God’s goodness.

* * *

Loving Our Enemies: Reflections on the Hardest Commandment

Loving Our Enemies cover (medium)

 

Few passages in the Gospel are more familiar yet more ignored than this one:

“You have heard that it was said you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I say to you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even tax collectors do the same?” (Gospel of Matthew 5:43-46)

Not everything Jesus taught must be regarded as a commandment. Counsels of absolute poverty or celibacy, for instance, have been seen as an option for a small minority of Christ’s followers. The same cannot be said about the love of enemies. This does not fall in the “if you would be perfect” category. It is, instead, basic Christianity, which Jesus taught through direct instruction, through parables, and by the example given with his own life. And yet it is undoubtedly the hardest commandment of all, one that runs counter to our natural inclinations. It is a commandment that calls for prayer, discernment, and constant practice. Along with reflections drawn from scripture, the lives of the saints, and modern history, Forest offers “nine disciplines of active love,” including “praying for enemies,” “turning the other cheek,” “forgiveness,” and “recognizing Jesus in others,” that make the love of enemies, if not an easier task, then a goal worth striving toward in our daily lives.

Read the book’s first chapter here: https://jimandnancyforest.com/2014/07/changing-course/

Loving Our Enemies: Reflections on the Hardest Commandment was published by Orbis Books in September 2014; orders can be placed at bookshops and various online sites. Support your local book seller.

 

Pre-publication recommendations and reviews:

“A statement of the Gospel challenge and the Gospel hope so clear that it is frightening: this is real, this is possible, this cannot be written off – and this demands change here and now in me. A book to be deeply grateful for.”
— Rowan Williams
retired Archbishop of Canterbury, now Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge University

“With the profound wisdom gained from a life devoted to peacemaking, Jim Forest examines the dark nature of our enmities and suggests ways of breaking down walls of hatred and of learning to forgive — for the sake of world peace and our own personal healing. This is a book to challenge, inspire, and transform. A major contribution.”
— Veronica Mary Rolf
author of Julian’s Gospel: Illuminating the Life & Revelations of Julian of Norwich

“Jim Forest reflects on the most difficult of all Jesus’s sayings, and he does so in his trademark style: with wisdom, compassion and courage. Using insights from his own life, and from those of great Christians like Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and Fyodor Dostoyevski, he shows us that while it may be a “hard teaching” it is also a liberating one. For forgiveness liberates not only the one forgiven but the one who forgives.”
— James Martin, SJ
author Jesus: A Pilgrimage

“Jim Forest’s reflections peel back all the ideologies we Christians rely on to justify violence and war and reveal the peace that lies at the heart of the Gospel. Jim is a superb storyteller, a master of the anecdote, a witness to the quiet power of peacemaking in the world. These reflections and meditations should be read slowly, carefully, prayerfully, again and again.”
— Michael Baxter
Associate Professor of Catholic Studies, DePaul University

“One emerges from this inspiring volume persuaded by Martin Luther King, who taught that ‘this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization,’ and by Forest, who guides us to dare to believe that we are capable of such love in our lives.”
— Rabbi Amy Eilberg
author,  From Enemy to Friend: Jewish Wisdom and the Pursuit of Peace

Jim Forest’s new book is on the discipline of “active love” in overcoming obstacles within ourselves, the barriers that are erected by our socialization in families, schools and cultural media so that we hate our enemies. It is a book of timely and perennial interest for all of us living in a culture of perpetual war and violence. He has a journalist’s gift for clear prose and using stories from personal experience to illuminate his insights.

He is a veteran peace activist, a colleague of Dorothy Day’s at the Catholic Worker who went to jail for his actions on behalf of peace and is today the secretary of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship. His book is full of humanity and compassion for the hard inner work required to become persons of peace and nonviolence ourselves as we join with others in effecting political and social change.

This book is deeply radical as it points to Jesus’ commandment to love our enemies as foundational to being a Christian. Whoever is not doing the work of loving our enemies is not a disciple of the Lord. What is most valuable in his book is his description of the practice of “active love,” an inner work that will always be a long slog, never fully accomplished, but does not accept that loving our enemies is inevitable and “just the way things always were and are,” so it’s useless to struggle for an impossible goal of loving those we perceive as against our best interests.

One of Forest’s descriptions of “active love” is sourced from Doestoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” spoken by the monk Zossima: “Active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, rapidly performed and with everyone watching. Indeed it will go so far as the giving even of one’s life, provided it does not take long and everyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and perseverance.” This is to say, Forest points out, that working for peace internally and politically is more like “building a cathedral,” not seeing a final result which might be long in coming.

Part II of the book is most useful for spiritual practice and for teaching nonviolence in classrooms. The author identifies “nine disciplines of active love,” and dedicates nine chapters to show how each activity of “active love” can be pursued in individual or communal meditation settings.

Jim Forest has written a book of clear, well-written and useful instruction for striving to fulfill Jesus’ hardest commandment in our violent and perilous times. Highly recommended.
–Jonathan Montaldo
author; former director of the Thomas Merton Center

* * *

reader responses:

Thank you for writing Loving Our Enemies. I guess for me, on a personal level, the nearest I’ve come to incarnating “enemy love,” was when I was called upon, in 2013, to be the caregiver for my step-father during the final weeks of his life, after he chose not to be hospitalized for his illness. There was a part of me that wanted to see him suffer being alone for all the years of emotional trauma he caused my Mom, my siblings (including his own children), and myself. But, I couldn’t do it – I could not let that happen. Something deep within kept telling me that “Love never fails,” “Love always wins.” And so I took care of him, and it was hard, but it was good, in that he died not alone, and knowing that he was loved. I loved him by being there with him and for him in his time of great need. I think I now have a better understanding of what “loving one’s enemy” is all about.
— Judy Gale, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

cover of the Greek edition

* * *

Where Love is Never Treason

Loving Our Enemies cover (medium)[This is the first chapter of Loving Our Enemies: Reflections on the Hardest Commandment by Jim Forest. The publisher is Orbis.]

One day Jesus asked the question, “Do people gather figs from thistles?” The answer is of course no — you harvest what you plant. Plant thistles and thistles take root and thistles they become. If you want to grow figs, you need to start with fig seeds. With this question, Jesus implicitly ridicules the idea that good can be brought about by evil means. Violence is not the means of creating a peaceful society. Vengeance does not pave the road to forgiveness. Spousal abuse does not lay the foundation for a lasting marriage. Rage is not a tool of reconciliation.

Yet, while figs do not grow from thistles, in the world of human choice and action, a positive change of attitude and direction is always a possibility. Sinners are the raw material of saints. The New Testament is crowded with accounts of transformations.

Chora mosaic marriage at Cana (detail 2)In the Church of the Savior in the Chora district of Istanbul, there is a fourteenth-century Byzantine mosaic that, in a single image, tells a story of an unlikely transformation: the conversion of water into wine for guests at a wedding feast in the village of Cana. In the background Jesus — his right hand extended in a gesture of blessing — stands side by side with his mother. In the foreground we see a servant pouring water from a smaller jug into a larger one. The water leaves the first jug a pale blue and tile-by-tile becomes a deep purple as it reaches the lip of the lower jug. “This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana, in Galilee, and manifested his glory; and his disciples believed in him.”

This “first sign” that Jesus gave is a key to understanding everything in the Gospel. Jesus is constantly bringing about transformations: blind eyes to seeing eyes, withered limbs to working limbs, sickness into wellbeing, guilt into forgiveness, strangers into neighbors, enemies into friends, slaves into free people, armed men into disarmed men, crucifixion into resurrection, sorrow into joy, bread and wine into himself. Nature cannot produce figs from thistles, but God is doing this in our lives all the time. God’s constant business in creation is making something out of nothing. As a Portuguese proverb declares, “God writes straight with crooked lines.”

The convert Paul is an archetype of transformation. Paul, formerly a deadly adversary of Christ’s followers, becomes Christ’s apostle and his most tireless missionary, crisscrossing the Roman Empire, leaving behind him a trail of young churches that endure to this day. It was a miracle of enmity being turned to friendship, and it happened in a flash of time too small to measure, a sudden illumination. Witnessing the first deacon, Stephen, being stoned to death in Jerusalem must have been a key moment in setting the stage for Paul’s conversion.

Peter is another man who made a radical about-face. Calling him away from his nets, Christ made the fisherman into a fisher of men. At the Garden of Gethsemane, the same Peter slashed the ear from one of those who had come to arrest Jesus. Far from commending Peter for his courage, Jesus healed the wound and commanded Peter to lay down his blood-stained weapon: “Put away your sword for whoever lives by the sword shall perish by the sword.” For the remainder of his life, Peter was never again a threat to anyone’s life, seeking only the conversion of opponents, never their death. Peter became a man who would rather die than kill.

How does such a conversion of heart take place? And what are the obstacles?

It was a question that haunted the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, who for years struggled to turn from aristocrat to peasant, from rich man to poor man, from former soldier to peacemaker, though none of these intentions was ever fully achieved. As a child Tolstoy was told by his older brother Nicholas that there was a green stick buried on their estate at the edge of a ravine in the ancient Zakaz forest. It was no ordinary piece of wood, said Nicholas. Carved into its surface were words “which would destroy all evil in the hearts of men and bring them everything good.” Leo Tolstoy spent his entire life searching for the revelation. Even as an old man he wrote, “I still believe today that there is such a truth, that it will be revealed to all and will fulfill its promise.” Tolstoy is buried near the ravine in the Zakaz forest, the very place where he had sought the green stick.

Were we to discover it, my guess is that the green stick would probably turn out to bear a three-word sentence we have often read but have found so difficult that we have reburied it in a ravine within ourselves: “Love your enemies.”

Twice in the Gospels, first in Matthew and then in Luke, Jesus is quoted on this remarkable teaching, unique to Christianity:

You have heard that it was said you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I say to you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even tax collectors do the same?

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and to him who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your coat as well. Give to everyone who begs from you; and of him who takes away your goods, do not ask them again. As you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.

Perhaps we Christians have heard these words too often to be stunned by their plain meaning, but to those who first heard Jesus, this teaching would have been astonishing and controversial. Few would have said “amen.” Some would have shrugged their shoulders and muttered, “Love a Roman soldier? You’re out of your mind.” Zealots in the crowd would have considered such teaching traitorous, for all nationalisms thrive on enmity. Challenge nationalism, or speak against enmity in too specific a way, and you make enemies on the spot.

Nationalism is as powerful as an ocean tide. I recall an exchange during the question period following a talk opposing the Vietnam War that I gave in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, back in 1968. I had recently been involved in an act of war resistance that would soon result in my spending a year in prison, but for the moment I was free on bail. During the question period, an angry woman holding a small American flag stood up and challenged me to put my hand over my heart and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I said that flags ought not to be treated as idols and suggested instead that all of us rise and join in reciting the Our Father, which we did. Her anger seemed to recede a bit but I suspect in her eyes I was a traitor. I had failed her patriotism test.

We tend to forget that the country in which Jesus entered history and gathered his first disciples was not the idyllic place Christmas cards have made of it, a quiet pastoral land populated with attractive sheep, colorfully dressed shepherds and tidy villages crowning fertile hilltops. It was a country enduring military occupation in which most Jews suffered and where anyone perceived as a dissident was likely to be executed. In Roman-ruled Palestine, a naked Jew nailed to a cross was not an unfamiliar sight. To Jesus’ first audience, enemies were numerous, ruthless and close at hand.

Not only were there the Romans to hate, with their armies and idols and emperor-gods. There were the enemies within Israel, not least the tax collectors who extorted as much money as they could, for their own pay was a percentage of the take. There were also Jews who were aping the Romans and Greeks, dressing — and undressing — as they did, all the while scrambling up the ladder, fraternizing and collaborating with the Roman occupiers. And even among those religious Jews trying to remain faithful to tradition, there were divisions about what was and was not essential in religious law and practice as well as heated arguments about how to relate to the Romans. A growing number of Jews, the Zealots, saw no solution but violent resistance. Some others, such as the ascetic Essenes, chose the strategy of monastic withdrawal; they lived in the desert near the Dead Sea where neither the Romans nor their collaborators often ventured.

No doubt Jesus also had Romans and Rome’s agents listening to what he had to say, some out of curiosity, others because it was their job to listen. From the Roman point of view, the indigestible Jews, even if subdued, remained enemies. The Romans regarded this one-godded, statue-smashing, civilization-resisting people with amusement, bewilderment and contempt — a people well deserving whatever lashes they received. Some of those lashes would have been delivered by the Romans in blind rage for having been stationed in this appalling, uncultured backwater. Judaea and Galilee were not sought-after postings for Roman soldiers — or for the Roman Prefect at the time, Pontius Pilate.

Jesus was controversial. Not only were his teachings revolutionary, but the more respectable members of society were put off by the fact that many drawn to him were people who had lived scandalous lives: prostitutes, tax collectors and even a Roman officer who begged Jesus to heal his servant. The Gospel says plainly that Jesus loved sinners, and that created scandal.

Many must have been impressed by his courage — no one accused Jesus of cowardice — but some would have judged him foolhardy, like a man putting his head in a lion’s mouth. While Jesus refused to take up weapons or sanction their use, he kept no prudent silence and was anything but a collaborator. He did not hesitate to say and do things that made him a target. Perhaps the event that assured his crucifixion was what he did to the money-changers within the Temple precincts in Jerusalem. He made a whip of cords, something which stings but causes no wounds, and set the merchants running, meanwhile overturning their tables and scattering their coins. Anyone who disrupts business as usual will soon have enemies.

Many devout people were also dismayed by what seemed to them his careless religious practice, especially not keeping the Sabbath as strictly as many Pharisees thought Jews should. People were not made for the Sabbath, Jesus responded, but the Sabbath made for people. Zealots hated him both for not being a Zealot and for drawing away people who might have been recruited. Those who led the religious establishment were so incensed that they managed to arrange his execution, pointing out to the Romans that Jesus was a trouble maker who had been “perverting the nation.” It was the Romans who both tortured Jesus and carried out his execution.

Any Christian who believes Jesus to be God incarnate, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, who entered history not by chance but purposefully, at an exact moment and chosen place, becoming fully human as the child of the Virgin Mary, will find it worthwhile to think about the Incarnation happening just then, not in peaceful times but in a humiliated, over-taxed land governed by brutal, bitterly resented occupation troops. Jesus was born, lived, crucified and rose from the dead in a land of extreme enmity.

Transposing Gospel events into our own world and time, many of us would find ourselves alarmed and shocked by the things Jesus said and did, for actions that seem admirable in an ancient narrative might be judged unwise and untimely, if not insane, if they occurred in equivalent circumstances here and now. Love our enemies? Does that mean loving criminals, murderers and terrorists? Call on people to get rid of their weapons? Apprentice ourselves to a man who fails to say a patriotic word or wave a single flag? Many would say such a man had no one to blame for his troubles but himself.

It was a big step, and a risky one, to become one of his disciples. Had you lived in Judaea or Galilee when the events recorded in the Gospel were happening, are you sure you would have wanted to be identified with him?

Who Was Thomas Merton and Why He Still Matters

Thomas Merton (photo by John Howard Griffin)

Let me start with the first question — Who was Thomas Merton? — and hope that my answer will also explain why he still matters.

I think it is accurate to say that Thomas Merton was the most widely read and best-known Christian monk of the 20th century and one of the rare Christian writers whose readers include many non-Christians. If you were to gather together all the people who would say Thomas Merton had played a direction-changing role in their lives, you would probably fill a sports stadium.

Merton had a rare gift with words and also a talent for stepping out of the box. He has become hugely famous, but fame was not a fate he intended. At age 26, when he began his monastic life, he intended to disappear from view. He had, after all, opted to belong to the most silent — some would say the most medieval — of monastic brotherhoods, the Trappists.

But I am jumping ahead. Let’s start at the beginning. Thomas Merton was born in the town of Prades in the south of France on the 31st of January 1915. Here’s how he describes that event in his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain:

On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers. Not many hundreds of miles away from the house where I was born, they were picking up the men who rotted in rainy ditches among the dead horses … in a forest without branches along the river Marne.

It’s a remarkable opening, poetry as much as prose, with the horror of war a major theme. The leitmotif of war became still more intense in the last decade if his life, making him a man of controversy.

His parents were artists who had met in 1911 while art students in Paris. His mother, Ruth, was American, his father, Owen, came from New Zealand. They married three years later — 1914 — and moved to Prades, a cheaper place to live and thus attractive to artists. Unfortunately the First World War had started just months before their son’s birth. Living in France suddenly presented a problem for Owen. Even though not a French citizen, merely being a resident in France made him subject to the draft. The three of them took refuge in the U.S., living not far from Ruth’s parents in Douglaston, Long Island.

Tragically Ruth’s life was cut short by cancer — she died when Tom was six. There were frequent moves for Tom and his father in the years that followed — Cape Cod, Bermuda, back to Long Island, back to France, then some years in England. Tom, an exceptionally bright student, went to good schools. All seemed to be going well in his life until, when Tom was 14, it was discovered that his father had a brain tumor.

As his father lay dying in London, Tom read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and labored over Greek verbs at a school in Oakham north of Cambridge. The chapel life at school that had blossomed for him earlier in his student life abruptly perished. The chaplain, a man who liked to insert the word gentleman into biblical texts, didn’t help. In one of his sermons the first verse of chapter 13 of First Corinthians became: “If I talk with the tongues of men and angels, and be not a gentleman, I am become as sounding brass.” This celebration of the English class system had nothing to offer a boy about to become an orphan.

“St. Peter and the other Apostles would have been rather surprised,” Merton wrote in The Seven Storey Mountain, “at the concept that Christ had been scourged and beaten by soldiers, cursed and crowned with thorns and subjected to unutterable contempt and finally nailed to the Cross and left to bleed to death in order that we might all become gentlemen.”

Tom couldn’t stomach the vacuous theology behind such a vandalizing of the New Testament. For him the real questions had to do not with class and manners but with human suffering. How could any God worth worshiping allow first one and then another parent to suffer such horrible deaths? In the school chapel, while other students recited the Creed, Tom kept a tight-lipped silence. His counter-creed was now “I believe in nothing.”

Tom’s father had lost the ability to speak but still managed to communicate. Visiting the hospital in London one day, Tom discovered Owen was drawing again, expressing in images what was on his mind. The drawings, Merton later wrote, “were unlike anything he had ever done before — pictures of … Byzantine-looking saints with beards and great halos.” In his months of desperate illness, it seemed Owen had found his way to an earlier Christianity in which wordless icons played a major role. The drawings made clear to Tom that his dying father was a religious man. “Behind the walls of his isolation, his intelligence and his will … were turned to God, and communed with God…. [My father was finding a way] to understand and make use of his suffering for his own good, and to perfect his soul.” The small icons Owen had drawn proved to be his last words. On January 18, 1931, Owen Merton died. Tom was eleven days short of his sixteenth birthday.

Merton continued his education, doing well academically but feeling abandoned. He also did some solo traveling. In 1932, on one of his school holidays, he had a near-death experience while on a hike along the Rhine River in Germany. His excursion happened to coincide with Hitler’s campaign for the German chancellorship. Along the way he witnessed villagers hurling bricks and fighting with pitchforks as political passions spilled over. The trip reached its nadir one morning when, while walking down a country road lined with apple orchards, he was nearly run down by a car full of young Nazis waving their fists. Tom dived into a ditch in the nick of time, injuring his foot, while the car’s amused occupants showered him with Hitler leaflets as they passed.

One of the most important events in Tom’s young life occurred soon after his 18th birthday. Following graduation from high school and before beginning his studies at Clare College in Cambridge, in 1933 Merton went to Rome. At first he was bored — the city’s top guidebook attractions left him cold. But when he began to visit the city’s most ancient churches, some of which went back to the fourth century, he found himself amazed. “I was fascinated by these Byzantine mosaics. I began to haunt the churches where they were to be found….. Without knowing anything about it, I became a pilgrim.”

The mosaic icons served as windows through which he felt Christ’s gaze. “For the first time in my whole life I began to find out something of who this Person was that men call Christ…. It is the Christ of the Apocalypse, the Christ of the Martyrs … the Christ of St. John, and of St. Paul…. It is Christ God, Christ King.”

Decades later icons continued to play a vital role in Merton’s spiritual life. In letters written in 1967 and 1968 to a Quaker friend, he said that he wasn’t drawn to a Christ who was merely a historical figure possessing “a little flash of the light” but to “the Christ of the Byzantine icons” who “represents a traditional experience formulated in a theology of light, the icon being a kind of sacramental medium for the illumination and awareness of the glory of Christ within us…. What one ‘sees’ in prayer before an icon is not an external representation of a historical person, but an interior presence in light, which is the glory of the transfigured Christ, the experience of which is transmitted in faith from generation to generation by those who have ‘seen,’ from the Apostles on down…. So when I say that my Christ is the Christ of the icons, I mean that he is reached not through any scientific study but through direct faith and the mediation of the liturgy, art, worship, prayer, theology of light, etc., that is all bound up with the Russian and Greek tradition.”

Alone one night in his pensione room, trying to record in his journal his thoughts about the churches and iconography that impressed him so much, he suddenly sensed his father’s invisible presence “as real and startling as if he had touched my arm or spoken to me.” The experience was over in a flash, but “for the first time in my whole life,” he wrote later in life, “I really began to pray … praying out of the very roots of my life and my being, and praying to the God I had never known.” The Byzantine mosaic icons he had been searching out must have reconnected Tom to the icon drawings of Byzantine saints Owen had been drawing at the end of his life.

The next day, Tom climbed the Aventine Hill to visit the Church of Santa Sabina, one of Rome’s most ancient churches. Once inside, he knew that he had to pray there. It was impossible to play the guidebook-studying tourist any longer. Yet public prayer was intensely embarrassing. All he could manage was to cross himself with blessed water as he entered the church and to recite the Our Father over and over again as he knelt down at the altar rail. “That day in Santa Sabina,” he recalled, “although the church was almost empty, I walked across the stone floor mortally afraid that a poor devout old Italian woman was following me with suspicious eyes.” For all his fears, he walked out feeling reborn. His final week in Rome was a time of joy such as he hadn’t known since his father’s death.

The joy didn’t last long. Once at Cambridge, he was drawn into the darker, more self-destructive side of student life. He drank a great deal and, becoming sexually active, fathered a child with one of the local women. Tom’s guardian, a well-to-do London physician, had to make financial arrangements to provide for the single mother. Washing his hands of Tom, he was sent him packing to his grandparents’ home on Long Island.

Being back with family seems to have been a factor for the many positive things that happened to Merton in the next few years. He became a student at Columbia University and loved it. The friendships he developed and the classes he took opened new doors for him. He partied hard, as he had in Cambridge, but he also studied hard. In 1936, when his grandfather died, the religious spark that had been struck in Rome gradually began producing a fresh flame. He began reading books that in past he would hardly glanced at, for example Etienne Gilson’s The Spirit of Medieval Christianity. Aldous Huxley’s Ends and Means made him take mysticism and asceticism seriously. A Hindu monk from India convinced Merton to read The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a’Kempis and also St. Augustine’s Confessions. Going on to do his master’s degree, he decided to write his thesis on the poet, artist and mystic William Blake. In his own time Blake had stood in opposition to those who saw nothing more in the mystery of life than the puzzles of chemistry and who regarded mysticism as madness. With the searing conviction of a biblical prophet, Blake rejoiced that

The atoms of Democritus
And Newton’s particles of light
Are sands upon the Red-Sea Shore
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.

The religious skepticism that had been so deeply rooted in Merton since his father’s death was giving way to a deep sense of the presence of God and a need to worship. One weekend in August 1938 it struck Merton that he had “been in and out of a thousand Catholic cathedrals and churches, and yet I had never heard Mass.” On those occasions when he happened to a find the liturgy was being celebrated, he had fled, as he put it, “in wild Protestant panic.” Now he began to feel “a sweet, strong, gentle, clean urge in me which said: ‘Go to Mass! Go to Mass!'” He did so, and it quickly became part of the pattern of his life. Three months later he was received into the Catholic Church by baptism.

Had we time, it would be worthwhile to take a closer look at the next three years of his life (teaching, dating, partying, writing, doing volunteer service at a house of hospitality in Harlem), but let me cut to the chase. On the 10th of December 1941, Merton began monastic life at the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky. He had expected to give up writing, but his abbot noticed Merton’s ability to write and also knew of the exceptional life Merton had lived before becoming a monk. With the abbot’s encouragement Merton began to write an autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. The title was inspired by the seven-tiered mountain of purgatory that Dante describes in The Divine Comedy. The book was published in 1948 and, to everyone’s surprise, not only sold well but became a best seller. Seven decades have passed and it has never gone out of print.

No less interesting than the story of Merton’s pre-monastic life is what happened once he became a monk. But we have time only for a few highlights.

One of the main turning points happened in March 1958, ten years after publication of The Seven Storey Mountain. Merton happened to be in Louisville on an editorial errand. Standing at a busy intersection in the heart of the city, Merton had an intense experience of the hidden God-stamped beauty of the many strangers he was surrounded by. Here’s how he describes it in one of his later books, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake…. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun…. There are no strangers! … If only we could see each other [as we really are] all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other…. the gate of heaven is everywhere.

Fourth and Walnut in Louisville has since been renamed Thomas Merton Plaza. Standing there Merton was able to let go of one of the main illusions that had survived his first seventeen years of monastic life: the idea that sanctity required radical separation within “the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.” The experience did not suggest to him that he ought to give up his monastic vocation, but his understanding of what it meant to be a monk was expanded: authentic solitude must be a place where opposites meet — both contemplation and action, non-presence and attendance, non-participation and engagement, attachment and detachment, hiddenness and hospitality, disappearance and arrival. The opposites need each other as birds need two wings.

In Merton’s own case, his deepening engagement with the world was linked with a search for greater solitude. When I first visited him early in 1962, he was living part-time is a newly-built cinderblock hermitage in the woods about a mile from the principal monastery buildings. Three years later it became his full-time home.

That little building was not just Merton’s hermitage but also a place of many meetings. For example Merton occasionally would welcome small groups of Protestants from a Baptist seminary in Louisville where, at a time when inter-Christian dialogue was rare, unfettered dialogue could occur. At the time of my own first visit, a rabbi had just been Merton’s guest. In 1964 Merton hosted a retreat of peacemakers — I was one of them — from various Christian traditions.

During the last decade of his life, after the shift that occurred at Fourth and Walnut, Merton’s correspondence greatly expanded. He was in contact by letter with a wide range of people, believers and non-believers, fellow writers, social activists, students, scholars, poets, and was doing so in English, French and Spanish. The English novelist, Evelyn Waugh, was so impressed with Merton as a letter writer that he suggested he ought to give up authoring books and focus even more on correspondence.

Merton’s religious life became less bordered. He drew a great deal from the Orthodox Christian Church. As he wrote in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:

If I can unite in myself the thought and the devotion of Eastern and Western Christendom, the Greek and the Latin Fathers, the Russian with the Spanish mystics, I can prepare in myself the reunion of divided Christians. From that secret and unspoken unity in myself can eventually come a visible and manifest unity of all Christians. If we want to bring together what is divided, we cannot do so by imposing one division upon the other. If we do this, the union is not Christian. It is political and doomed to further conflict. We must contain all the divided worlds in ourselves and transcend them in Christ.

His search for connections also carried him into the non-Christian world. He read Buddhist texts and was in dialogue with various Buddhists. He also corresponded with Moslems, especially Sufis. It wasn’t that he was searching for an exit door from Christianity. As he wrote, “The Christian life … is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places.”

He paid a great deal of attention to issues connected with war and peace and for this got into trouble. His order’s Abbot General in Rome regarded Merton’s writings on that subject as inappropriate for a monk. Merton was silenced but in fact found ways to continue speaking out. His banned writings were circulated in mimeographed editions. Sometimes he wrote under pseudonyms. One was Benedict Monk, another was Marco J. Frisbee. Among the readers of Merton’s peace writings was Pope John XXIII. The secretary to the pope has since written that Merton was an influence on the encyclical Pope John wrote at the end of his life, Pacem in Terris — Peace on earth. As a gesture of friendship and solidarity, this much loved pope sent Merton, by the hands of a friend, a papal stole. You will see it if ever you visit the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University in Louisville.

Merton did very little traveling once be became a monk but his life ended on pilgrimage far from home in Asia. After visiting Christians, Hindus and Buddhists in India, including several days with the Dalai Lama, he flew to Thailand to take part in a conference of Benedictine and Trappist monks and nuns. On the 10th of December 1968, shortly after giving a lecture, he died of accidental electrocution. His body was flown back to the U.S. in an Air Force plane whose main cargo was coffins containing the bodies of American soldiers killed n Vietnam. If you ever visit the Abbey of Gethsemani, get one of the monks to show you his grave. It has become a place of pilgrimage.

Let me finish this too-brief introduction to Merton’s life with one final quotation from Merton. It’s from a talk he gave to his fellow monks in 1965:

Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God manifests Himself everywhere, in everything — in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that He is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him. You cannot be without God. It’s impossible. It’s simply impossible. The only thing is that we don’t see it. What is it that makes the world opaque? It is care.

* * *

prayer by Merton to use at the close of discussion:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

— Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (p 83)

* * *
text as of 25 March 2013
* * *

Why Each of Us is Called to be a Peacemaker

whole earth 1969
Earth as seen from Apollo 11 in July 1969

a talk by Jim Forest given 2 April 2014 at St Joseph’s College in Patchogue, NY

Let me begin by expressing appreciation to the college for bestowing on me its “Esse non Videri” award. I don’t deserve it but thank you. People who try to prevent war and promote the conversion of enmity into friendship rarely get awards. The award has the special added benefit of expanding my not-very-large collection of Latin phrases. I now can amaze my family and friends by being able to say “to be and not to seem to be” in the language of Cicero, Virgil, Augustine and Jerome: esse non videri.

Let me bring two more Latin words into the spotlight:“beati pacifici — blessed are the peacemakers. Or we might do the whole five-word Latin sentence: Beati pacifici quoniam filii Dei vocabuntur — blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God. It’s one of the Beatitudes, a term that comes from the Latin word beati. The Beatitudes are the eight blessings Jesus gives at the very beginning of his Sermon on the Mount.

Most of you have probably heard of the Sermon on the Mount or perhaps even know it quite well. It’s a talk Jesus gave in Galilee that fills up three chapters of the first book of the New Testament. The Beatitudes —- the eight opening verses — are a very compact, easy-to-memorize presentation of the Gospel:

Blessed are the poor in spirit …
Blessed are they who mourn …
Blessed are the meek …
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness …
Blessed are the merciful …
Blessed are the pure of heart …
Blessed are the peacemakers …
Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness …

Short though they are, each of the blessings gives one a lot to think about. Gradually you notice that they are all connected and that the order isn’t random. It’s a carefully arranged ladder. You might call it the ladder of the Beatitudes.

Peacemaking is the ladder’s seventh rung, just one rung short of the top. You can’t skip any rung on the way up. The ascent is a life-long project. To be a peacemaker requires the continuing integration of the rest of the structure, all that lies below plus readiness for the rung at the top.

Notice it’s peace makers, not peace advocates or peace wishers — peacemaking is something you actually do and not something you occasionally wish for.

Just what is a peacemaker? Is it something only for a very exceptional person? A highly specialized vocation for which one needs a doctorate in peacemaking? Not at all.

Peacemaking is any activity on the side of life. Peacemaking is any work that protects life rather than endangers it. Peacemaking is anything we do to safeguard life. It isn’t enough not to kill people — we need to do what we can to keep each other alive all the way from the womb to the death bed. And it’s not only about human beings but the world that all of us depend upon. Peacemaking is healing work, work that attempts to repair damaged relationships and damaged environments. Peacemaking is whatever you do, however small and hidden, that helps make for a safer, more caring world.

A few very ordinary examples that involve a huge part of the human race:

Think of anyone involved in any aspect of childcare — parents, teachers, school bus drivers, swimming instructors, any kind of work that helps children grow up safely and become mature adults. It’s peace work.

Think of any kind of work in health care — orderlies, lab technicians, doctors, dentists, nurses, therapists, etc. It’s peace work.

We could spend the day listing things people do, from farming to building bridges, that in one way or another helps make life safer and the world more peaceful. Peacemaking is any job that helps us live. As Jesus said, “I have come to give life and to give it more abundantly.” (John 10:10)

Let’s think for a moment about the Last Judgment. Even if you aren’t a Christian, what Jesus taught about the Last Judgment is important information about the basics of life and what matters most of all.

Here’s the text in Matthew’s Gospel:

“Welcome into the kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world because I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was naked and you clothed me, I was homeless and you welcomed me, I was sick and you cared for me, I was a prisoner and you visited me. I tell you solemnly that what you did to the least person, you did to me.” (Matthew 25)

In traditional Christian terminology, the six examples Jesus gives are called “the Works of Mercy.”

Many people find it surprising that the Last Judgment is not a theological quiz or the presentation of a “welcome to heaven” pass for those who went to church most often or put the most in the collection plate. One doesn’t have to be theologically brilliant. It all has to do with loving God and loving one’s neighbor — with the understanding that love of God is impossible unless you love your neighbor. Neighbor doesn’t mean a person you find it easy to like but whoever happens to be in front of you. It could be an enemy. The key sentence is, “What you did to the least person, you did to me.” But there is also the warning, “What you failed to do to the least person, you failed to do to me.”

Think of the implications. The Works of Mercy reshape the way we live and what we do for a living. Feeding someone who is hungry goes hand in hand with doing nothing that would cause hunger. Giving drink to the thirsty also means protecting water and using it carefully. Thus you wouldn’t destroy an enemy’s water purification plant. Clothing the naked and welcoming the homeless means not dropping bombs and burning home and bodies. Et cetera, et cetera.

One of the implications of the works of mercy is not centering one’s life of consumption and the acquisition of money. Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, called this “voluntary poverty.” Others call is “living simply.” In the Beatitudes it’s “poverty of spirit.” Call it what you will, it’s freeing yourself from living a life trapped in junk: the latest, most high-resolution TV, the best of all smart phones, the most up-to-the-minute, high-powered computer. The list of what you can have is endless. And then you get whatever it is and pretty soon it’s “what’s next?”

Another implication of both the Beatitudes and the Works of Mercy is living nonviolently. For example you don’t see killing as a solution to life’s problems and you play no part in killing people. Where there is injustice you become one of those who is exploring nonviolent alternatives and working for a nonviolent solution. Think of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Dorothy Day, Sojourner Truth, Gandhi, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Merton. Think of Jesus, who killed no one and healed many. Think of any of the people whose names are remembered in the calendar of saints.

Peacemaking is a word that describes a way of life. From time to time it’s likely to involve acts of protest but mainly it is what you do in day-to-day life.

Peacemaking is care of the planet and its inhabitants.

One of the icons of peacemaking is the planet we live on. Peacemaking is built on the realization that the human race is indeed one family — that this is not just a poetic assertion given to us in the Book of Genesis, a foundational story that regards every human being as a direct descendant of Adam and Eve, but a unity confirmed by our DNA. No matter what our skin color we can marry each other and have children. A transplanted Irish kidney can save a Kenyan’s life. The one and only race is the human race. We are one and every one of us lives at the same address: the third planet out from a single star we call the Sun. We are at home on this planet no matter where on the globe we happen to be. We are one people and always have been. The only problem is that we imagine our differences are more important than what we have in common. Those differences become the fuel of war. The challenge of peacemaking is the recovery of our original unity. Countless lives, and also the health of our souls, depend on it. It’s quite a challenge. The cruelest expression of our failure to live in unity is war.

Here’s a photo of the Earth taken from space. It was made in July 1969 by one of the three astronauts who took part in Apollo 11, the first human expedition to the surface of the Moon. Let me finish this talk by telling you the story of how this image made its way to me.

Most people who were alive at the time saw the moon landing on television. In my case, I listened on radio via a pair of low-tech earphones made available to me by the State of Wisconsin. I was in a narrow cell at Waupun State Prison, a facility that was originally constructed to hold Civil War captives.

Prison had become my temporary home due to an act of protest against the Vietnam War. I was one of fourteen people, several of them Catholic priests, who burned files of Milwaukee’s nine draft boards. We regarded the Vietnam War as unjust and didn’t believe anyone should be forced to take part in it. In July 1969 I was in the early weeks of serving a two-year sentence — in fact just over one year, given the “good behavior” factor.

My new address was the sort of zoo-like maximum-security prison you see in old James Cagney movies — tier upon tier of cells, each of them fourteen bars wide, reached via steel stairways and narrow catwalks. It was a place that seemed black-and-white even when seen in color.

Each cell had a radio connection and a pair of earphones. Not so bad! In fact it was perhaps more exciting to listen to the moon landing than to see the event on TV. Radio’s advantage has always been to enlist one’s own imagination for all the visual effects. I had plenty of props for my imagination, having seen many science fiction films and having read dozens of science fiction novels. Lots of si-fi book covers were embedded in memory.

It was astounding to imagine human beings, in a tiny container not a lot bigger than my cell, crossing that dry and airless sea of space, landing, then actually standing — then walking – on the Moon’s low-gravity, dusty surface. Incredible. One might even use the word “awesome.”

But the main impact of the event came in the days that followed as newspapers made their way to me full of photos taken by the astronauts in the course of their journey — the whole Earth as seen by human eyes, the Earth rising like a blue marble over the airless horizon of the desolate Moon.

Then came the biggest surprise of all: a packet from NASA, addressed to me, arrived in the prison mail room. But there was a problem. The prison administration made it difficult for me to receive the packet — mail was allowed only from “authorized correspondents” and no one at NASA was on that list. I was asked to sign a form that gave me two choices: destroy the packet or return-to-sender. Of course I refused both options. After a two-or-three-day struggle with the prison administration, the packet was at last delivered to my cell. This photo is what was inside. The same image was to appear a few months later on the cover of National Geographic Magazine, but even there it didn’t have quite the richness of color and detail the actual photo has.

For the rest of my time in prison it rested on top of the book-laden table that was allowed in my cell. It was an icon that I often contemplated: this magnificent fragment of creation that God has given us to share and care for, and in which we are called to love and protect each other.

How did this remarkable photo come to me? There was no letter in the envelope. I could only guess. The trial of the group I was part of, the Milwaukee 14, had received a great deal of press attention, including many articles in The New York Times as well as other major dailies and later a lengthy essay in The New York Review of Books. I can only guess that something I had said during our trial had been read by one of the astronauts and lingered in his memory during the trip to the Moon and back. His sending me a photo of our astonishingly beautiful borderless planet with its thin envelope of air may have been his way of saying thank you. Just a guess. If so, the giver of the photo was an officer in the US Air Force sending a gift to an anti-war protester locked up in a small cell in Middle America. How good it was to feel the bond between us.

Recently I looked us quotations from astronauts who have gazed at the Earth from space. It turns out many of the men and women who have seen the whole earth have an acute sense of it being a vulnerable living organism lacking all borders. Let me end with these few words from one of them, Russell Schweickart:

“You look down there and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross, again and again and again, and you don’t even see them. There you are — hundreds of people in the Middle East killing each other over some imaginary line that you’re not even aware of, that you can’t see. And from where you see it, the thing is a whole, the earth is a whole, and it’s so beautiful. You wish you could take a person in each hand, one from each side in the various conflicts, and say, ‘Look. Look at it from this perspective. Look at that. What’s important?’” [www.context.org/iclib/ic03/schweick/]

Astronaut Joe Allen put it in even fewer words: “With all the arguments, pro and con, for going to the moon, no one suggested that we should do it to look at the Earth. But that may in fact be the most important reason.”

Peacemaking is a never-ending work of seeing the world we are part of in its wholeness while repairing broken bonds and creating new ones. It’s the responsibility of each of us. May your life be a life of peacemaking.

* * *

text as of 23 March 2014

* * *

The Whole Earth in a Prison Cell

bWhole Earth AS11-36-5355HR (detail)y Jim Forest

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong, of the Apollo 11 crew, became the first human being to walk on the moon.

Most people at the time watched the moon landing on television. In my case, I listened to it via a pair of low-tech earphones. I was in a cell fourteen bars wide at Waupun State Prison in central Wisconsin.

Prison had become my temporary home due to an act of protest against the Vietnam War – I was one of fourteen people who burned files of Milwaukee’s nine draft boards. Now I was in the early weeks of serving a two-year sentence – in fact just over one year, given the “good behavior” factor.

My new address was the sort of grim maximum-security prison you see in old James Cagney movies – tier upon tier of cells reached via steel stairways and narrow catwalks. It was a place that seemed black-and white even when seen in color.

It was perhaps more exciting to listen to the moon landing than to see the event on TV. Radio’s advantage has always been to enlist one’s own imagination for all the visual effects. I had plenty of props for my imagination already, after seeing approximately every science fiction film made in the Fifties and having read many volumes of science fiction. Lots of si-fi book covers were embedded in memory.

It was astounding to imagine human beings crossing that dry and airless sea of space, landing, then actually standing – then walking – on the Moon’s low-gravity, dusty surface.

But the main impact of the event came in the days that followed as newspapers and magazines made their way to me full of photos taken by the astronauts in the course of their journey. The whole Earth as seen by human eyes. The Earth rising like a blue marble over the black horizon of the lifeless Moon.

drawing of the table in my cell at Waupun Prison
drawing of the table in my cell at Waupun Prison (click to enlarge)

Then came the biggest surprise of all: a packet from NASA arriving from one of the astronauts (or so I have always presumed) containing an  8-1/2 x 11 inch color photo of the Earth. I doubt the photo could have reached the White House much faster than it reached my prison. The same image was to appear a few months later on the cover of National Geographic Magazine, but even in that case didn’t have the richness of color and detail the actual photo had.

How did this remarkable photo come to me? There was no letter in the envelope. I could only guess.

The Milwaukee 14 trial had received a great deal of press attention, including many articles in The New York Times and later a lengthy essay in The New York Review of Books. Perhaps something I had said during our trial had been read by one of the astronauts and lingered in his memory during the trip to the Moon and back. I could only guess that his sending me a photo of our astonishingly beautiful borderless planet was his way of saying thank you.

another cell decoration: While I was in prison for being part of the Milwaukee 14, my son Ben -- age six at the time -- did this drawing for his Sunday School class. The topic that Sunday was St. Paul. The woman leading the group commented that St Paul was imprisoned for his faith. "So is my dad -- he's in jail right now," Ben responded, then drew this -- me behind bars on one side, a cell with a cross in the center on the other.
another cell decoration: While I was in prison for being part of the Milwaukee 14, my son Ben — age six at the time — did this drawing for his Sunday School class. The topic was St. Paul. The woman leading the group commented that St Paul was imprisoned for his faith. “So is my dad — he’s in jail right now,” Ben responded, then drew this.

The prison administration made it difficult for me to receive the photo – it hadn’t been sent by an “authorized correspondent.” I was given the option of the packet being destroyed or returned-to-sender. After a struggle with the prison bureaucracy, the packet was at last delivered to my cell and for the rest of my time in prison it rested on top of the book-laden table. It was an icon that I often contemplated: this magnificent fragment of creation that God has given us to share and care for, and in which we are called to love and protect each other.

Assuming I was right about the sender being one of the astronauts, the giver of the photo was an officer in the US Air Force and I was an anti-war protester locked up in a small cell in middle America. How good it was to feel the bond between us.

Later on I came upon this statement from Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth human being to walk on the moon:

“[Looking at the Earth from the moon] you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”

* * *

postscript: A Modest Proposal

Showing this photo at a conference in Edinburgh organized by the Thomas Merton Society of Great Britain & Ireland on 8 December 2018, the idea occurred to me that it would be a powerful thing were the photo widely worn as a small badge (or button). No words, no accusations, no slogans but just the photo. It would be a challenge to each person who wore it or noticed it: “What can I do to help our small, unbordered planet survive?”

The NASA images are copyright free. Anyone can make badges using any of their Whole Earth photos. The Glasgow Catholic Worker has since decided to produce a thousand badges with the photo plus a surrounding text: “Ours to care for.” At least one other group is planning to produce a badge with just a Whole Earth photo without any text. I’ve just received a first small batch made locally.

* * *

 

Whole Earth Quotations

I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of 100,000 miles their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified facade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied.

— Michael Collins, Gemini 10 & Apollo 11 astronaut, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys, 1974.

I have been places and done things you simply would not believe. I feel like saying: I have dangled from a cord a hundred miles up; I have seen the earth eclipsed by the moon, and enjoyed it. I have seen the sun’s true light, unfiltered by any planet’s atmosphere. I have seen the ultimate black of infinity in a stillness undisturbed by any living thing. I do have this secret, this precious thing, that I will always carry with me.”

— Michael Collins, Gemini 10 & Apollo 11 astronaut, Carrying the Fire: An Astronauts Journeys, 1974.

Oddly enough the overriding sensation I got looking at the earth was, my god that little thing is so fragile out there.

— Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, interview for the 2007 movie In the Shadow of the Moon.

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.

— Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11; first human being to walk on the Moon

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”

— Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, People magazine, 8 April 1974.

Suddenly, from behind the rim of the Moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth … home.

— Edgar Mitchell

My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity.

—  Edgar Mitchel, Apollo 14 astronaut, “The Way of the Explorer,” 1996.

What beauty. I saw clouds and their light shadows on the distant dear earth…. The water looked like darkish, slightly gleaming spots…. When I watched the horizon, I saw the abrupt, contrasting transition from the earth’s light-colored surface to the absolutely black sky. I enjoyed the rich color spectrum of the earth. It is surrounded by a light blue aureole that gradually darkens, becoming turquoise, dark blue, violet, and finally coal black.

— Yuri Gagarin, first Soviet cosmonaut

When you’re finally up at the moon looking back on earth, all those differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend, and you’re going to get a concept that maybe this really is one world and why the hell can’t we learn to live together like decent people.

— Frank Borman, Apollo 8, Newsweek magazine, 23 December 1968.

I think the one overwhelming emotion that we had was when we saw the earth rising in the distance over the lunar landscape … . It makes us realize that we all do exist on one small globe. For from 230,000 miles away it really is a small planet.

— Frank Borman, Apollo 8, press reports, 10 January 1969.

The view of the Earth from the Moon fascinated me—a small disk, 240,000 miles away. It was hard to think that that little thing held so many problems, so many frustrations. Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilence don’t show from that distance.

— Frank Borman, Apollo 8, ‘A Science Fiction World—Awesome Forlorn Beauty,’ Life magazine, 17 January 1969.

[The Moon] was a sobering sight, but it didn’t have the impact on me, at least, as the view of the Earth did.

— Frank Borman, Apollo 8, Interview for the PBS TV show Nova, 1999.

It’s tiny out there…it’s inconsequential. It’s ironic that we had come to study the Moon and it was really discovering the Earth.

— Bill Anders, Apollo 8, quoted in the 2008 Discovery TV series When We Left Earth.

We learned a lot about the Moon, but what we really learned was about the Earth. The fact that just from the distance of the Moon you can put your thumb up and you can hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything that you’ve ever known, your loved ones, your business, the problems of the Earth itself—all behind your thumb. And how insignificant we really all are, but then how fortunate we are to have this body and to be able to enjoy loving here amongst the beauty of the Earth itself.

— Jim Lovell, Apollo 8 & 13 astronaut, interview for the 2007 movie In the Shadow of the Moon.

This planet is not terra firma. It is a delicate flower and it must be cared for. It’s lonely. It’s small. It’s isolated, and there is no resupply. And we are mistreating it. Clearly, the highest loyalty we should have is not to our own country or our own religion or our hometown or even to ourselves. It should be to, number two, the family of man, and number one, the planet at large. This is our home, and this is all we’ve got.

— Scott Carpenter, Mecury 7 astronaut, speech at Millersville University, Pennslyvania. 15 October 1992.

If somebody’d said before the flight, “Are you going to get carried away looking at the earth from the moon?” I would have say, “No, no way.” But yet when I first looked back at the earth, standing on the moon, I cried.

— Alan Shepard

The world itself looks cleaner and so much more beautiful. Maybe we can make it that way—the way God intended it to be—by giving everybody that new perspective from out in space.

— Roger B Chaffee

It truly is an oasis—and we don’t take very good care of it. I think the elevation of that awareness is a real contribution to saving the Earth.

— Dave Scott, Apollo 9 & 15, interview for the 2007 movie In the Shadow of the Moon.

A Chinese tale tells of some men sent to harm a young girl who, upon seeing her beauty, become her protectors rather than her violators. That’s how I felt seeing the Earth for the first time. I could not help but love and cherish her.

—  Taylor Wang

As we got further and further away, the Earth diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man.

— James B. Irwin

No one, it has been said, will ever look at the Moon in the same way again. More significantly can one say that no one will ever look at the earth in the same way. Man had to free himself from earth to perceive both its diminutive place in a solar system and its inestimable value as a life -fostering planet. As earthmen, we may have taken another step into adulthood. We can see our planet earth with detachment, with tenderness, with some shame and pity, but at last also with love.

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Earth Shine, 1969.

The apologists for space science always seem over-impressed by engineering trivia and make far too much of non-stick frying pans and perfect ball-bearings. To my mind, the outstanding spin-off from space research is not new technology. The real bonus has been that for the first time in human history we have had a chance to look at the Earth from space, and the information gained from seeing from the outside our azure-green planet in all its global beauty has given rise to a whole new set of questions and answers.

— James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, 1979.

How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the TheFor the first time in my life I saw the horizon as a curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light—our atmosphere. Obviously this was not the ocean of air I had been told it was so many times in my life. I was terrified by its fragile appearance.

— Ulf Merbold.

It’s beyond imagination until you actually get up and see it and experience it and feel it.

— Willie McCool

It was a texture. The blackness was so intense.

— Charles Duke

Frequently on the lunar surface I said to myself, “This is the Moon, that is the Earth. I’m really here, I’m really here!

— Alan Bean

What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that man set foot on the Moon but that they set eye on the earth.

— Norman Cousins, Cosmic Search magazine, volume 1, number 1, January 1979.

“We will fall completely in love with the Earth. When we are in love with someone or something, there is no separation between ourselves and the person or thing we love. We do whatever we can for them and this brings us great joy and nourishment. That is the relationship each of us can have with the Earth. That is the relationship each of us must have with the Earth if the Earth is to survive, and if we are to survive as well.

— Thich Nhat Hanh

Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dry as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming, membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos.

— Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, 1974.

If I’d been born in space, I would desire to visit the beautiful Earth more than to visit space. It’s a wonderful planet.

— David Brown

It’s the abject smallness of the earth that gets you.

— Stuart Roosa, Apollo 14 astronaut, quoted in Rocket Men, 2009.

Man, I tell you, this is worth waiting 16 years for!

—  Deke Slayton, Apollo-Soyuz Test Project astronaut, regards finally getting his first view of the Earth from space. Deke was selected in the first Mercury Seven astronaut class but was grounded for years due to a heart murmur. 15 July 1975.

A tear-drop of green.

— Ron McNair, physicist and NASA astronaut on viewing the Earth from the Space Shuttle, Newsweek magazine, 10 February 1986.

Never in all their history have men been able truly to conceive of the world as one: a single sphere, a globe, having the qualities of a globe, a round earth in which all the directions eventually meet, in which there is no center because every point, or none, is center — an equal earth which all men occupy as equals. The airman’s earth, if free men make it, will be truly round: a globe in practice, not in theory.

— Archibald MacLeish, ‘The Image of Victory,’ commencement address, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, May 1942, later published in A Time to Act, 1943.

To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves a riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.

— Archibald MacLeish, American poet, ‘Riders on earth together, Brothers in eternal cold,’ front page of the New York Times, Christmas Day, 25 December 1968.

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.

— John Muir, Travels in Alaska, 1915.

Amid this vast and overwhelming space and in these boundless solar archipelagoes, how small is our own sphere, and the earth, what a grain of sand!

— Hippolyte Taine, The Ancient Regime, 1881.

That the sky is brighter than the earth means little unless the earth itself is appreciated and enjoyed. Its beauty loved gives the right to aspire to the radiance of the sunrise and sunset.

— Helen Keller, My Religion, 1927.

There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.

— Carl Sagan, Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University, regards the view of Earth from space, Time magazine, 9 January 1995.

Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1994.

My mental boundaries expanded when I viewed the Earth against a black and uninviting vacuum, yet my country’s rich traditions had conditioned me to look beyond man-made boundaries and prejudices. One does not have to undertake a space flight to come by this feeling.

— Rakesh Sharma

Now I know why I’m here. Not for a closer look at the moon, but to look back at our home, the Earth.

— Alfred Worden

Looking outward to the blackness of space, sprinkled with the glory of a universe of lights, I saw majesty—but no welcome. Below was a welcoming planet. There, contained in the thin, moving, incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere is everything that is dear to you, all the human drama and comedy. That’s where life is; that’s were all the good stuff is.

—  Loren Acton

I left Earth three times and found no other place to go. Please take care of Spaceship Earth.

—  Wally Schirra, 1998.

To fly in space is to see the reality of Earth, alone. The experience changed my life and my attitude toward life itself. I am one of the lucky ones.

— Roberta Bondar, Space Shuttle: The First 20 Years.

The world looks marvelous from up here, so peaceful, so wonderful and so fragile. Everybody, all of us down there, not only in Israel, have to keep it clean and good.

— Israeli Air Force Col. Ilan Ramon, 29 January 2003.

The Earth was small, light blue, and so touchingly alone, our home that must be defended like a holy relic. The Earth was absolutely round. I believe I never knew what the word round meant until I saw Earth from space.

—  Aleksei Leonov

The colors are stunning. In a single view, I see – looking out at the edge of the earth: red at the horizon line, blending to orange and yellow, followed by a thin white line, then light blue, gradually turning to dark blue and various gradually darker shades of gray, then black and a million stars above. It’s breathtaking.

— Willie McCool

We were flying over America and suddenly I saw snow, the first snow we ever saw from orbit. I have never visited America, but I imagined that the arrival of autumn and winter is the same there as in other places, and the process of getting ready for them is the same. And then it struck me that we are all children of our Earth.

— Aleksandr Aleksandrov

The scenery was very beautiful. But I did not see the Great Wall.

— Yang Liwei, China’s first astronaut (or ‘yuhangyuan’), 15 October 2003.

As I looked down, I saw a large river meandering slowly along for miles, passing from one country to another without stopping. I also saw huge forests, extending along several borders. And I watched the extent of one ocean touch the shores of separate continents. Two words leaped to mind as I looked down on all this: commonality and interdependence. We are one world.

— John-David Bartoe

Once during the mission I was asked by ground control what I could see. “What do I see?” I replied. “Half a world to the left, half a world to the right, I can see it all. The Earth is so small.”

— Vitali Sevastyanov

For those who have seen the Earth from space, and for the hundreds and perhaps thousands more who will, the experience most certainly changes your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us.

— Donald Williams

My first view — a panorama of brilliant deep blue ocean, shot with shades of green and gray and white — was of atolls and clouds. Close to the window I could see that this Pacific scene in motion was rimmed by the great curved limb of the Earth. It had a thin halo of blue held close, and beyond, black space. I held my breath, but something was missing — I felt strangely unfulfilled. Here was a tremendous visual spectacle, but viewed in silence. There was no grand musical accompaniment; no triumphant, inspired sonata or symphony. Each one of us must write the music of this sphere for ourselves.

— Charles Walker

We went to the Moon as technicians; we returned as humanitarians.

— Edgar Mitchell

The first day or so we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth.

— Sultan bin Salman Al-Saud

If the space age had opened new ways of seeing mere matter, though, it has also fostered a strange return to something reminiscent of the pre-Copernican universe. The life that Lowell and his like expected elsewhere has not appeared, and so the Earth has become unique again. The now-iconic image of a blue-white planet floating in space, or hanging over the deadly deserts of the moon, reinforces the Earth isolation and specialness. And it is this exceptionalism that drives the current scientific thirst for finding life elsewhere, for finding a cosmic mainstream of animation, even civilization, in which the Earth can take its place. It is both wonderful and unsettling to live on a planet that is unique.

— Oliver Morton, A Point of Warlike Light, 2002.

Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.

— attributed to Sir Fred Hoyle, 1948.

How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them. A very fit consideration, and matter of Reflection, for those Kings and Princes who sacrifice the Lives of so many People, only to flatter their Ambition in being Masters of some pitiful corner of this small Spot.

— Christiaan Huygens, The Immense Distance Between the Sun and the Planets, 1698,

We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the earth.

— William Anders

* * *

Whole Earth – Ours to Care For

V

Beyond Fear: The Therapeutic Role of Saints

[Talk given in Moscow at the Church of Sts Cosmas & Damian and at the Conference “Memory, Forgiveness and Reconciliation” in March 2013.]

Jim Forest & Andrey Cherniak at the Church of Sts Cosmas & Damian in  Moscow in March 2013
Jim Forest & Andrey Cherniak at the Church of Sts Cosmas & Damian in Moscow in March 2013

I often think of a remark made by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, who led the Russian Orthodox Church in Britain for many years: “We should try to live in such a way that if the Gospels were lost, they could be re-written by looking at us.”

Not many of us do well in becoming living translations of the Gospels, but there are those who do so in a remarkable way. From time to time the Church canonizes some of those who provided heroic examples of Christian discipleship.

Why does the church canonize certain people? It is certainly not for the sake of those who are honored in that way. Canonization is not for them but for us who are still struggling in this world. The memory of their works and lives needs to be passed on from generation to generation in order to encourage others — for example us — to follow in their footsteps. It is one of the ways the Church declares, “This is sanctity. This is the path to eternal life.”

To make sure we remember, the Church gives us a calendar of saints that serves as a memory device. Each day of the year, we are invited to recall certain names and from time to time may be inspired to explore the events that lie behind a particular name. These stories are not only challenging but healing. Most of all they help heal us of the fears that so often hold us prisoner. St Paul remarks that the love of money is the root of all evil; one might add to that the driving force behind the love of money is fear — fear of death, fear of poverty, fear of powerlessness, and finally fear of the Other. The Greek theologian, Metropolitan John Zizioulas, observed:

“The essence of sin is the fear of the Other, which is part of the rejection of God. Once the affirmation of the “self” is realized through the rejection and not the acceptance of the Other — this is what Adam chose in his freedom to do — it is only natural and inevitable for the other to become an enemy and a threat. Reconciliation with God is a necessary pre-condition for reconciliation with any ‘other’.”

Saints are people whose lives are not fear driven and who are able to embrace the Other. As we discover saints with whom we can identify in some way, especially if the saint’s life is told credibly, we find ourselves freer to follow Christ. The saint’s choices help bring the Gospels to life and can inspire us to open doors that fear had locked.

The majority of saints are martyrs — people who gave up their lives in bearing witness to Christ’s resurrection and the paschal values of the Kingdom of God. It seems no single country has produced so many martyrs as Russia. It did so mainly in the twentieth century during the Lenin and Stalin years. Poland also produced numerous martyrs during the same century, some because of Hitler, others because of Stalin.

There were also many “new martyrs” in West. Let me briefly speak about two of them, Mother Maria Skobtsova — now St Maria of Paris — and St Alexander Schmorell. My wife and I had the privilege of attending both of their canonizations.

Let’s look first at Mother Maria, or Elizaveta Pilenko, as she was earlier in life. Born in 1891, she grew up in the south of Russia near the town of Anapa on the shore of the Black Sea. Her parents were devout Orthodox Christians whose faith helped shape their daughter’s values, sensitivities and goals. As a child she once emptied her piggy bank in order to contribute to the painting of an icon for a new church. But her father’s death in 1905, when she was fourteen, so upset Liza that for a time she no longer believed in God.

When Lisa was fifteen, Lisa, the family moved to St Petersburg where she found herself drawn to groups advocating radical social change, but found that the people who talked about change did very little to help those around them. “My spirit longed to engage in heroic feats, even to perish, to combat the injustice of the world,” she recalled. No one she knew was actually laying down his life for others. She and her friends also talked about theology, but their theology floated in clouds far above the actual Church. There was much they might have learned, she reflected later in life, from any old woman praying in church.

Little by little, Liza found herself drawn toward the religious faith she thought she abandoned after her father’s death. She prayed and read the Gospel and the lives of saints. It seemed to her that the real need of the people was not for revolutionary ideas but for life in Christ. She was beginning to embrace a truth that the French writer, Leon Bloy, put in these words: “There is only one sadness: not to be a saint.”

If we had time, I would tell you all that happened to her during the revolution and the civil war — the collapse of her first marriage, the beginning of her second, her becoming a mother, her near execution, the three-year journey into exile that took her to Georgia, Istanbul, Yugoslavia, and finally to Paris, which she and her family reached in 1923. By then she was the mother of three.

In the hard winter of 1926, her daughter Anastasia died of influenza. This tragedy marked a major turning point in Liza’s life. It became clear to her that she must devote the rest of her life to Christ’s commandment, “Love one another.” It was to be a love without exceptions. She felt called to become “a mother for all who need maternal care, assistance, or protection.”

In 1930, Liza was appointed traveling secretary of the Russian Student Christian Movement, work which put her into daily contact with Russian refugees in cities, towns and villages throughout France. It was in this period of life that she began to envision a new type on community, “half monastic and half fraternal,” which would connect spiritual life with service to those in need, in the process showing “that a free Church can perform miracles.” She had come to understand that Christ was present in the least person. “We ought to treat the body of our fellow human being,” she wrote, “with more care than we treat our own.”

Her bishop, Metropolitan Evlogy, aware that Liza’s marriage had collapsed, was the first person to suggest to her the possibility of becoming a nun, not a nun living away from the world and its problems, but in the middle of Paris, helping people who had no one to turn to. If the diaconate for women had still existed, probably he would have ordained her to that role. In 1932 Liza was professed as a nun. For the rest of her life she was known as Mother Maria.

From the beginning, Mother Maria’s plan was “to share the life of paupers and tramps.” With financial help from her bishop, she rented a house. Donated furniture began arriving, and also guests, mainly young Russian women without jobs. To make room for others, Mother Maria gave up her own room and slept in the basement. Mother Maria’s credo was: “Each person is the very icon of God incarnate in the world.” With this recognition came the need “to venerate the image of God” in each person.

It was far from an easy life. Often there was no money at the end of the day, but then the next morning one or several gifts arrived. Mother Maria sometimes thought of the old Russian story of the ruble coin that could never be spent. Each time it was used, the change given back proved to equal a ruble. It was exactly this way with love, she said: No matter how much love you give, you never have less. In fact you discover you have more — one ruble becomes two, two becomes ten.

Mother Maria was certain that there was no other path to heaven than participating in God’s mercy. As she wrote, “The way to God lies through love of people. At the Last Judgment I shall not be asked whether I was successful in my ascetic exercises, nor how many bows and prostrations I made. Instead I shall be asked: Did I feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and the prisoners? That is all I shall be asked.”

The last phase of her life was a series of responses to World War II and Germany’s occupation of France. The work of Mother Maria and her community of co-workers greatly increased and so did the dangers they faced. Early in 1942, Jews began to knock on the door asking Father Dimitri Klepinine, chaplain of the community, if he would issue baptismal certificates to them. The answer was always yes. The community assisted countless Jews and others in danger in finding safe places of refuge.

In July came the mass arrest of 12,884 Jews. Almost 7,000 Jews a stadium for bicycle races not far from Mother Maria’s house of hospitality. Thanks to her monastic robes, she was able to work for three days in the stadium, managing to rescue a number of children by enlisting the aid of trash collectors who smuggled the children out in trash bins.

Early in 1943, the long-expected event happened: Mother Maria was arrested along with Father Dimitri, her son Yuri and one other friend and collaborator, Ilya Fondaminsky. All four of them died in concentrations camps.

Mother Maria was sent to the Ravensbrück camp in Germany, where she endured for two years. One fellow prison recalled that Mother Maria “was never downcast, never. She was full of good cheer .… She was on good terms with everyone. She was the kind of person who made no distinction between people no matter what their political views might be or their religious beliefs.”

By March 1945, her condition was critical. The last day of her life was the day before Easter. The shellfire of the approaching Russian army could be heard in the distance. Accounts vary about what happened during the last hours of her life. According to one, she was simply one of those selected to die that day. According to another, she took the place of a fellow prisoner, a Jewish woman.

Although perishing in the gas chamber, Mother Maria did not perish in the Church’s memory. Soon after the end of World War II, essays and books about her began appearing, in French and Russian. There was also a Russia film. Two biographies were published in English, and little by little her essays were made available in Russian, French and English. In May 2004, along with the three others arrested with her, she was canonized at the Cathedral of St Alexander Nevsky in Paris. The 20th of July each year as the day of their remembrance. One finds her icon in more and more churches, a veneration that not only crosses jurisdictional lines but lines of ecclesiastical division. The cardinal-archbishop of Paris attended her canonization. She is the one Orthodox saint of modern times who is on the calendar of the Catholic Church in France.

Now to say a little about another saint who died in the same period, Alexander Schmorell, who grew up in Munich and was executed there.

Were this conference happening in Germany I would not need to tell very much of his story. Alexander Schmorell was one of several Munich University students who, in the Hitler period, formed an anti-Nazi resistance group known as the White Rose. Today it would be hard to find a German over the age of twelve who hadn’t heard of the White Rose and wouldn’t recognize the names of Schmorell and the other five core members, all of whom were guillotined in 1943. Hundreds of streets, squares and parks are named in their honor. Postage stamps have celebrated their memory and movies have been made that put the drama of their lives on the screen. In Munich there is a museum in their memory. Alexander Schmorell is the first of the six to be formally recognized as a saint, an event that was given a great deal of news media attention in Germany.

But for us who are non-Germans, the White Rose martyrs are not so well known. What did they do? What makes them patrons of inter-Christian dialogue, and even dialogue that reaches beyond the borders of Christianity to other faiths?

In the spring and summer of 1942, while a medical student at Munich’s Maximilian University, Schmorell and two fellow students co-founded the White Rose. Schmorell was a member of the Russian Orthodox parish in Munich where he attended the Eucharistic Liturgy regularly; friends recall he always had a Bible with him. The other two founders were also devout Christians — Hans Scholl, a Lutheran, and Willi Graf, a Catholic. Before long several others joined, including Hans Scholl’s sister, Sophie. At age twenty-one, she was the youngest member of the group and its only woman.

Why did the group christen their endeavor the White Rose? It was a name proposed by Schmorell. The reference was to a story by Dostoevsky, Schmorell’s favorite author. In one chapter of The Brothers Karamazov, “The Grand Inquisitor”, Christ comes back to earth, “softly, unobserved, and yet, strange to say, every one recognized Him.” He is suddenly present among the many people crowding Seville’s cathedral square, the pavement of which is still warm from the burning of a hundred heretics the day before. At this moment it happens that an open coffin containing the body of a young girl is being carried across the square on its way to the cemetery. They pass Jesus. “The procession halts, the coffin is laid on the steps at [Christ’s] feet. He looks with compassion, and His lips softly pronounce the words, ‘Maiden, arise!’ and she arises. The little girl sits up in the coffin and looks round, smiling with wide-open wondering eyes, holding a bunch of white roses they had put in her hand.” This merciful action completed, the Grand Inquisitor, having witnessed the miracle, orders Christ’s arrest. He is outraged at the boundless freedom Christ has given humanity.

In this remarkable story, the white rose serves as a paschal symbol, a sign of Christ’s victory over death. The adoption of the name White Rose was the group’s way of declaring their Christian conviction that He who has defeated death can also lift us from our graves — not only the grave to be dug at the end of our lives but the grave of fear so many of us live in here and now.

What the White Rose members did was simple but astonishingly dangerous: they wrote, mimeographed and widely distributed a series of leaflets that called on ordinary people living in Hitler’s Third Reich to resist Nazism. This was civil disobedience at the most hazardous level.

How did a handful of students find the courage not only to open their eyes so widely to the hell which Germany had become, but decide it was worth risking their lives to call on Germans to take part in resistance?

First of all it came from the completeness of their faith. For them Christ was not a mythical figure from the past whose bones were carefully hidden by his disciples in order to pretend his resurrection. He had given himself for the life of the world and on the third day had truly risen from the dead.

The actions of the White Rose also drew inspiration from a brave sermon given by August von Galen, Catholic bishop of Münster, in which he denounced Aryan racism and the Nazi euthanasia program that resulted in killing those regarded as unfit or unproductive. “These are men and women, our neighbors, our brothers and sisters!” von Galen declared. “Poor ill human beings. Maybe they are unproductive, but does that mean that they have lost the right to live? … If one adopts and puts into practice the principle that men are entitled to kill their unproductive fellows, then woe to all of us when we become aged and infirm! … Then no one will be safe: some committee or other will be able to put him on the list of ‘unproductive’ persons, who in their judgment have become ‘unworthy to live.’” (Von Galen spent the rest of the war under house arrest and was listed by Hitler for eventual execution following the anticipated Nazi victory. In 2005, von Galen was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI.)

The first White Rose action was clandestine distribution of von Galen’s sermon, a sermon which had been reported in no German newspaper.

In the first leaflet of their own authorship, the group declared, “It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes — crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure — reach the light of day?”

The second leaflet contained the only known public protest by any German resistance group specifically against the Holocaust: “By way of example we want to cite the fact that since the conquest of Poland 300,000 Jews have been murdered … in the most bestial way. Here we see the most frightful crime against human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of history.” (In light of the final Holocaust death toll, the estimate of 300,000 seems relatively small. The same month the leaflet was published, June 1942, the “final solution to the Jewish question”— factory-style mass murder — began to be implemented.)

Theology not only motivated the group but was expressed in their texts. “Every word that comes from Hitler’s mouth is a lie,” declared the fourth leaflet. “When [Hitler] says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the foul-smelling maw of Hell, and his might is at bottom accursed. True, we must consider the struggle against the National Socialist state with rational means; but whoever today still doubts the reality, the existence of demonic powers, has failed … to understand the metaphysical background of this war. … We must attack evil where it is strongest, and it is strongest in the power of Hitler.”

There were six White Rose leaflets in all. With each, circulation widened, distribution mainly in plain envelopes with typed addresses sent in small quantities from widely scattered post boxes. To get the leaflets into Austria, Schmorell made train trips to Salzburg and Vienna.

For nine months the Gestapo failed in its efforts to find those responsible for the leaflets. It was only on February 18, 1943, as Sophie and Hans were leaving copies of the latest leaflet in the atrium of their university, that they were spotted by a custodian and the Gestapo summoned. Another member of the group, Christoph Probst, was arrested soon after. Four days later the three they were both tried and beheaded. Probst was baptized a Catholic just a few hours before his death. Three other arrests and executions followed. Alexander Schmorell and Kurt Huber were beheaded on the 13th of July, Willi Graf on the 12th of October.

In his last letter to his family, Schmorell wrote: “This difficult ‘misfortune’ was necessary to put me on the right road, and therefore was no misfortune at all…. What did I know until now about belief, about a true and deep belief, about the truth, the last and only truth, about God? Never forget God!”

Thanks to a witness, we have an account of his last words: “I’m convinced that my life has to end now, early as it seems, because I have fulfilled my life’s mission. I wouldn’t know what else I have to do on this earth.”

At Schmorell’s canonization last year at the Cathedral of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, the icon carried into the center of the church shows him as the tall, brown-haired young man he was, wearing the white robe of a physician with a Red Cross arm band, his left hand raised in a gesture of greeting, the other holding a thin blood-red cross with a white rose. He is standing against a gold-leaf background representing eternity and the kingdom of God.

Schmorell and his co-workers, in common with countless other brave Christians of the past century, provide an example of ecumenical witness to Christian values that transcends theological disagreements, encourages common action by Christians despite ecclesiastical divisions, and warms the climate for dialogue aimed at expanding areas of agreement and obtaining greater Christian unity. Those who follow the way of the Cross, not in theory but in praxis, are more likely to find the love that opens locked minds and institutional hearts, the love that breaks down the dividing wall of enmity.

* * *

Learning from Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh, Paris 1975 (photo by Jim Forest)
Thich Nhat Hanh, Paris 1975 (photo copyright by Jim Forest)

I traveled and at times lived with Thich Nhat Hanh in the late sixties through the early eighties. Here is an extract from a memoir I have been writing plus extracts from various letters in which Nancy and I relate a few stories about him. The autobiographical  text is a work-in-progress and should not be reproduced without my permission.

Jim Forest

* * *

As 1967 began I was dividing my work time between the Catholic Peace Fellowship — I was its co-secretary — and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which had appointed me “Vietnam Program Director.” I was given an office at the FOR headquarters in Nyack, a town on the west bank of the Hudson River about an hour’s drive north of Manhattan. For fifty dollars the FOR sold me a battered Volkswagen “bug” for the daily commute from East Harlem and, as I had no license, paid for me to take driving lessons.

Initially my FOR job meant taking a Catholic Peace Fellowship project we had launched in October 1966 called “Meals of Reconciliation” and building it into a major FOR program meant to reach, as in fact it did, hundreds of churches and synagogues all over the USA.

The original stimulus had come from a letter Merton had sent me four years earlier:

It seems to me that the basic problem is not political, it is apolitical and human. One of the most important things is to keep cutting deliberately through political lines and barriers and emphasizing the fact that these are largely fabrications and that there is another dimension, a genuine reality, totally opposed to the fictions of politics: the human dimension which politics pretends to arrogate entirely [to itself]…. This is the necessary first step along the long way … of purifying, humanizing and somehow illuminating politics themselves. Is this possible? … At least we must try…. Hence the desirability of manifestly non-political witness, non-aligned, non-labeled, fighting for the reality of man and his rights and needs … against all alignments.[1]

Our hope was that Meals of Reconciliation would help those involved move beyond a Cold War mentality, beyond ideology and politics, and enter the human dimension.

It was all very simple. Participants gathered for a semi-eucharistic evening meal — rather than bread and wine, rice and tea were served plus, when it was possible, examples of Vietnamese cookery. The project’s overriding goal was to shrink the distance between America and Vietnam, focusing on the immense suffering American bombs were causing explosion-by-explosion in Southeast Asia.

Meals of Reconciliation introduced those taking part to elements of Vietnamese literature, poetry and music. It was a culture, a way of life, which was being targeted and the destruction was heartbreaking. “Blessed are they who mourn,” Jesus declared. We hoped those taking part in one of the might leave in a state of mourning that could widen and deepen their anti-war commitment.

No two Meals of Reconciliation were identical. Menus varied though always rice and tea was at the core. When it was possible people who had been in Vietnam gave brief talks or, when there were no actual witnesses, accounts from observant journalists were read aloud. There was a handbook I had edited that included various suggestions plus a selection of possible readings, including poetry. The poet whose work was invariably used at Meals of Reconciliation was Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese monk whose name was all but unknown at the time.

Thich Nhat Hanh had begun building a relationship with the Fellowship of Reconciliation after meeting FOR Executive Director Al Hassler when Hassler made a trip to Saigon (today’s Ho Chi Minh City) in 1965. A friendship between Hassler and Thich Nhat Hanh quickly took root that deeply influenced both men’s lives and eventually played a major part in helping an unknown Buddhist monk become a world-renowned teacher of mindfulness.

One of the key figures in Vietnam’s peace movement, Nhat Hanh was also the leading figure in the development of “engaged Buddhism,” a pathway that linked insights gained from meditation and the teachings of the Buddha to situations of suffering and injustice. He was founder of a movement of service in Vietnamese villages, the School of Youth for Social Service. One of the precepts of a rule Nhat Hanh had written called on his disciples “not to avoid suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world. Find ways to be with those who are suffering, including personal contact, visits, images and sounds. By such means, awaken yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world.”

Hassler arranged a series of lectures at Cornell University (through which invitation Thich Nhat Hanh’s US visa was obtained) and followed that up with a series of meetings for Nhat Hanh with senators, congressmen, newspapers editors, various religious leaders, most notably Martin Luther King, Jr., and even Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

In May 1966 Thomas Merton welcomed Thich Nhat Hanh, accompanied by FOR staff member John Heidbrink, to the Abbey of Gethsemani. The two monks stayed up into the night, sharing the chant of their respective traditions, discussing methods of prayer and meditation, comparing western and eastern aspects of monastic life, and talking about the war.

Thich Nhat Hanh is “a perfectly formed monk,” Merton said to his novices the day after the two-day visit ended, telling them that his Vietnamese guest’s arrival was really the answer to a prayer. In meeting Nhat Hanh, Merton felt he had met Vietnam.

“What is the war like?” Merton had asked his guest. “Everything is destroyed,” Nhat Hanh replied. These three words, Merton told his novices, were the answer of a true monk — not a long-winded analysis but just the essence: “Everything is destroyed.”

One aspect of their conversation concerned the formation of young monks, a process that in Vietnam begins not in a novitiate classroom but in the monastery kitchen and gardens where the novice may feel he is nothing more than an unpaid laborer ignored by everyone. Unbeknownst to the novice, in fact the apprentice monk is being quietly watched by an elder who, once he has come to know the novice without exchanging a word, at last reveals himself as a spiritual parent. Only then does spoken conversation and guidance begin.

Monastic formation, whether Buddhist or Christian, has much to do with discovering the significance of “insignificant” moments and the most routine activities: washing dishes, cutting vegetables, pulling weeds, sweeping floors, waiting in line, walking from here to there. It is an attitude Nhat Hanh sums up in one word: mindfulness. For example, it doesn’t help to rush from a “less sacred” to a “more sacred” part of the monastery where, once you arrive, you change gears and move and behave more reverently. “Before you can meditate,” Nhat Hanh told Merton and Merton told his novices, “you must learn how to close the door.” Aware of how often they ran to the church in order to be on time to chant the monastic offices, leaving behind them a trail of slammed doors, the novices laughed.

Nhat Hanh, Merton told the novices, is an example of a true monk who cannot ignore a social crisis in the world around him but is “professionally involved” simply because a monk sees and hears. “A genuine monk has an orientation toward peace and a reverence for life,” Merton said. “He tries to save whatever he can.”

Soon after the visit Merton wrote a letter to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo proposing the award go to Thich Nhat Hanh. Martin Luther King Jr. had already made a similar nomination. “Thich Nhat Hanh is my brother,” wrote Merton. “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.”

Thich Nhat Hanh, fluent in English and French, became a voice for all those Vietnamese who were victims of all sides in the war but whose sufferings were mainly due to the high-tech Goliath-might of the US military.

I had met and briefly spoken with Thich Nhat Hanh when he first visited Shadowcliff, the river mansion in which the FOR was housed, and immediately was enchanted not only by what he had to say about his homeland but by his entire manner. His voice was as gentle as a windbell. He spoke slowly, quietly, carefully, sparingly. His wide open eyes were as receptive and unguarded as I imagined the eyes of Jesus or the Buddha might be. No pretense, no self-importance, no rhetoric. Afterward I said to Al Hassler, “I could lidten to this guy for hours even if he were reading aloud from the telephone book.” Al laughed. “Me too!”

Al Hassler was the person who normally accompanied Thich Nhat Hanh wherever he went but occasionally another staff member might have that privilege. One evening, when Al was not feeling well, I was pressed into the job. I was to pick Nhat Hanh up at an apartment near Columbia University and take him by subway to a small gathering at a ritzy apartment in mid-town Manhattan.

The event we attended was, for both Nhat Hanh and me, a waste of time. The principal guest was a Hindu guru whose ego could have filled every floor of the Empire State Building. He wore a pale saffron robe and pale saffron sandals, had a box of pale saffron kleenex at his side, and every sentence he pronounced about the path to enlightenment seemed made of pale saffron words. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him drive off afterward in a pale saffron Rolls. I don’t recall Nhat Hanh saying a single word while we were there but his expression was one of discomfort.

Slipping away at the earliest possible moment (lying to our hostess, I said Thich Nhat Hanh had another engagement), we took the elevator down and returned to the street. I suggested perhaps a cup of tea wouldn’t be a bad idea. Nhat Hanh agreed. We found a nearby neon-lit café. And there it was they I decided to ask a question of a Zen master that I thought only a Zen master could answer.

A little background: Not many weeks before, while visiting a friend at the University of Oklahoma, I had tried LSD, an experiment way off my beaten track. I liked neither marijuana nor hashish (both made me feel vaguely paranoid) and avoided them. I wasn’t interested in drugs. But I had heard a little about LSD. This not-yet-illegal drug had been seriously described by my friend in Oklahoma as “a shortcut to enlightenment.”

The night-long experience had indeed, to use a hard-core sixties phrase, “blown my mind.” For perhaps eight hours I dived into my own subconscious brain in which eternity was an experience rather than a concept. I was able to watch a sound drift slowly into my head and observe how my own neurons received that sound and eventually made decisions about it, deciding it was, for example, a word or a note of music or a dangerous noise that required my moving away. Just to hear a simple sentence was a major event. The editorial, sorting-out part of the brain was a bright, colorful metropolis calmly making sense of all the data my senses were providing, at the same time comparing this and that, taking a fresh look at relevant memories, making some wild guesses, considering what if any response might be required to the events going on around me. Slowly coming out of the experience at dawn, feeling I had lived an infinity of lifetimes, I wondered indeed if this was enlightenment.

Now I was face to face with one of few people who would know, but to ask seemed risky. Might a real Zen master be scandalized by such a question? A shortcut to enlightenment? What impertinence! But what the hell, I decided. I’ll never have another chance to find out. And so I asked.

Nhat Hanh’s eyes widened in surprise, but there was no trace of irritation. Looking back, I think he was astonished that there were people involved in anti-war protest who were interested in such a topic. “Please tell me what you experienced,” he said. I did my best and have rarely been listened to so attentively. When I finished, Nhat Hanh said, “Perhaps it is not enlightenment — no drug can do that — but you are on the way.” He told me he had once tried marijuana but would never do so again — he had been unable to sleep for days afterward.

There was a deep sense of connection, an almost audible click.

Then he asked if in the future I would accompany him in his travels whenever Al Hassler was unavailable. “If you say yes, you have to be good at saying no. Every third day for me is a day of mindfulness. On those days under no circumstances will I give any talk or participate in any meeting, no matter how important it may seem. On those days I need someone who can be a stonewall. Can you do that? Others have said they could but in actual practice could not. For them proposed events were too important.”

I assured him I was good at saying no. I could say no to the president or to the pope. I liked the word “no.”

In the months that followed we traveled thousands of miles together. I had many opportunities to say no to TV interview requests, meetings with important people, opportunities that, on any other day would have been very worthwhile. My no was waterproof.

It was from Nhat Hanh that I first became aware of walking as an opportunity to repair the damaged connection between the physical and spiritual. In conversation Nhat Hanh had sometimes spoken of the importance of what he called “mindful breathing,” a phrase that seemed quite odd to me at first. Breathing is breathing — we learn it in the first minute of our lives. 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. Even if we were late for an appointment, he always walked in an attentive, unhurried way.

It wasn’t until we climbed the steps to my sixth floor apartment in East Harlem that I began to understand. Though in my late twenties and quite fit, I was always out of breath by the time I reached my front door. Nhat Hanh, on the other hand, seemed rested. I asked him how he did that. “You have to learn how to breathe while you walk,” he replied. “Let’s go back to the bottom and walk up again. I will show you how to breathe while climbing stairs.” On the way back up, he quietly described how he was breathing. It wasn’t a difficult lesson. Linking slow, attentive breaths with taking the stairs made an astonishing difference. The climb took one or two minutes longer, but when I reached my door I found myself refreshed instead of depleted.

Traveling together, Nhat Hanh was always the first to wake. His nights were short. When he decided it was time to wake me, he would sit at the foot of whatever bed or couch I was using and quietly say, “Zheem! Zheem! [Jim! Jim!] The ginger tea is ready.” Indeed there was a pot of tea in his hand, the perfume of fresh ginger in the air, a happy smile on his face and a teasing look in his eyes.

Almost every night there was an invitation for us to have a meal with a family that had played a part in whatever Nhat Hanh was doing locally but almost always the response I had to make was, “No thank you — Thich Nhat Hanh is too tired.” We would be brought to wherever we were staying, say goodnight to our hosts, then when they had left look for a Chinese restaurant, the simpler the better.

By now Thich Nhat Hanh was becoming “Thay” (pronounced Tie), the Vietnamese word for teacher. I was never short of questions and Thay was happy to respond both with words but also drawings or calligraphy. “Do you know,” he asked, “how to write your name in Chinese?” I had no idea. “Look. This is the sign for a tree.” He drew in my notebook a cross with two root-like diagonal lines descending right and left from the intersection. “Then you draw it again and you have a forest. Two trees! Add to the sign for forest the sign for zen, you have a zen forest, which is the sign for monastery.” “What about the word for monk,” I asked. “Very simple. He drew the sign for a human being and placed it over a dot. “The dot means nothing. A monk is a person standing on nothing.”

Thay was certainly a teacher for me but sometimes the roles were reversed. Thay was extremely curious about Christianity, not only as a theory or theology but how it is lived. Thus I often told him stories about Christian saints that I held in especially high regard — Francis of Assisi, for example. We also talked about the Buddha — a man who had found out, as Thay explained, how to be completely awake. Thay thought Jesus was also someone who was fully awake.

Even though our meals were almost always very simple (the only exception I recall was at Korean restaurant in Seattle), they were playful. Thay, wanting me to become comfortable in using chopsticks, liked to make me practice lifting melting ice cubes out of glasses of water. Much laughter.

Thay noticed things that I hardly saw and took absolutely for granted, as happened one day at the University of Michigan. He had been invited to give a lecture on the war in Vietnam to be followed by a poetry reading. Waiting for the elevator doors to open to go up to the lecture hall, I noticed Thay quietly gazing at the electric clock above the elevator doors. Then he said “You know, Zheem, a few hundred years ago it would not have been a clock, it would have been a crucifix.” So simple but so startling a comment. He was right. More than a tool of social coordination, the clock had become a religious object in our world, a symbol of secular social unity, a symbol so powerful that it could depose another.

One day we were in San Francisco and found ourselves walking in a seedy district, the Tenderloin. In fact we were passing a sex store with wide windows and startling photos. Embarrassed, I pretended I didn’t see the store, imagining Thay would do the same. But no. He stopped, calmly gazing at the nothing-not-revealed pornography. Then he pointed to a sign in the window that read, “You must be 21 years old and able to prove it to enter this store.” “Jim,” asked Thay, “are you 21?” I noticed his smile and realized the question was about the advantages of being a child. “No, I’m not 21.” “Good,” said Thay. “Neither am I. We don’t have to go inside.”

One of our trips was to Montana where Thay was a speaker at a day-long university “teach-in” on Vietnam. The event went well, with about a thousand students and faculty taking part, including a US senator as well as a representative from the State Department. But afterward because of the weather, there was a twenty-four hour delay with the return flight. Thay liked my suggestion that we use our rented car and unexpected free time for a visit to nearby Yellowstone National Park. Neither of us had ever been there. We were lucky to get in — because of a blizzard, the roads had been blocked but snow plows had just cleared the main road. Ours was the first car of the day to arrive at the park’s Montana entrance. Once in, a surprise awaited us, a sort of welcoming committee. A few miles into the park, I stopped the car so we could admire a mother bear playing in the deep snow with her two cubs. Then one of the cubs clambered onto the hood and began licking the window. The mother came closer — clearly she was guarding her child. Thay began laughing, then kissed the window just where the cub’s pink tongue was engaged.

One evening, while speaking at a large Protestant church in St. Louis about what the war was doing to Vietnamese peasants, Nhat Hanh awoke not understanding or grief but the white-hot rage of one man in the audience. In the question period he stood up and spoke with searing scorn 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?” At this point my recollection of his words is replaced by the memory of intense anger overwhelming me. The stranger’s anger had become my anger, only directed at him. When the man finished, I looked toward Nhat Hanh in bewilderment. What could he or anyone say? The spirit of war itself had suddenly filled the room, and it seemed hard to breathe.

There was a prolonged silence. Then Nhat Hanh began to speak — quietly, with astonishing calm, even with a sense of personal caring for the man who had just damned him. Thay’s words seemed like rain falling on fire.

“If you want the 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 are here, in your country. To help the people who are to be bombed, to try to protect them from this suffering, I have to come here.”

The atmosphere in the room was transformed. In the man’s fury we had experienced our own furies; we had seen the world as through a bomb bay. In Nhat Hanh’s response we had experienced an alternate possibility: the possibility — here brought to Christians by a Buddhist and to Americans by an “enemy” — overcoming hatred with love, of breaking the seemingly endless chain reaction of violence that had tortured human history.

But after his response, Nhat Hanh whispered something to the chairman and walked abruptly from the room. Sensing something was wrong, I left the book table at which I was stationed and 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 deeply underwater and 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. “I wanted to respond to him with anger. So I had made myself breathe deeply and very slowly in order to find a way to respond with calm and understanding. But my breathing was 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 speak for Vietnamese peasants. I have to show those who came here tonight what we can be at our best.”

It isn’t easy to describe the influence Thay had on me. Partly it was simply helpful guidance about what I would call prayer and Thay would call mindfulness. He helped carry me, a Christian, into the deeper waters of my own faith, never suggesting that I would do better as a Buddhist. In contrast with Dan and Phil Berrigan, Thay exerted no pressure to do anything, to do more than I was doing, to struggle harder to end the war in Vietnam. But because of Thay, Vietnam was no longer a distant country but a country of kites, flutes, ancient festivals, children and parents, a country as close as Thay’s voice, a voice I could easily hear whether Thay was present or a thousand miles away.

When I was invited to be part of the group that would carry out a Catonsville-like burning of draft records, part of the reason for saying yes was my love of Thich Nhat Hanh and all the Vietnamese people he represented.

* * *

[1] The Hidden Ground of Love, letter dated 8 December 1962, p 272.

* * *

stories from the 70s…

Washing dishes

I sometimes think of an evening with Vietnamese friends in a cramped apartment in the outskirts of Paris in the early 1970s. At the heart of the community was the poet and mindfulness teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh. An interesting discussion was going on the living room, but I had been given the task that evening of doing the washing up. The pots, pans and dishes seemed to reach half way to the ceiling of that closet-sized kitchen. I felt really annoyed. I was stuck with an infinity of dirty dishes while a great conversation was happening just out of earshot in the living room.

Somehow Nhat Hanh picked up on my irritation. Suddenly he was standing next to me. “Jim,” he asked, “what is the best way to wash the dishes?” I knew I was suddenly facing one of those very tricky Zen questions. I tried to think what would be a good Zen answer, but all I could come up with was, “You should wash the dishes to get them clean.” “No,” said Nhat Hanh. “You should wash the dishes to wash the dishes.” I’ve been mulling over that answer ever since — more than three decades of mulling.

But what he said next was instantly helpful: “You should wash each dish as if it were the baby Jesus.”

That sentence was a flash of lightning. While I still mostly wash the dishes to get them clean, every now and then I find I am, just for a passing moment, washing the baby Jesus. And when that happens, though I haven’t gone anywhere, it’s something like reaching the Mount of the Beatitudes after a very long walk.

* * *

a purchase at a butcher shop

I recall going with Nhat Hanh and Phuong to one of the Paris airports to pick up a volunteer who was arriving from America. On the way back, the volunteer stressed how dedicated a vegetarian she was and how good it was to be with people who were committed vegetarians. Passing by the shop of a poultry butcher in Paris, Nhat Hanh asked Phuong to stop. He went inside and bought a chicken, which we ate that night for supper at our apartment in Sceaux. It’s the only time I know of when Nhat Hanh ate meat.

* * *

A lesson in perception

I often think about how Thich Nhat Hanh uses the image of one river/two shores as a way of attacking dualistic perception: Standing on a river bank, I see two shores, the shore I am standing on and the shore facing me, on the other side of the river. Two shores — you see them with your own eyes — two! But in reality there is only one shore. If I walk from where I stand to the source of the river and continue round that point, the “other side” becomes this side — the two-ness was created only by bending it. In time I will be on the opposite embankment, facing the spot where I was formerly standing, and I will have never crossed the stream to get there and I will never have changed shores.

“Is there a river that separates the two sides, a river which no boat can cross? Is such an absurdly complete separation possible? Please come over to my boat. I will show you that there is a river but is no separation. Do not hesitate. I will row the boat myself. You can join me in rowing too. But let us row slowly and very, very quietly.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh
explaining non-duality to Jim Forest, July 1972, Paris
(photo taken at our house in May 1982)

* * *

“The miracle is to walk on earth”

In the seventies, I spent time in France with Nhat Hanh on a yearly basis. He was becoming better known then — his home had become for many people a center of pilgrimage. One of the things I found him teaching was his method of attentive walking. Once a day, all his guests would set off in a silent procession led by him. The walk was prefaced with his advice that we practice slow, mindful breathing while at the same time being aware of each footstep, seeing each moment of contact between foot and earth as a prayer for peace. We went single file, moving slowly, deeply aware of the texture of the earth and grass, the scent of the air, the movement of leaves in the trees, the sound of insects and birds. Many times as I walked I was reminded of the words of Jesus: “You must be like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven.” Such attentive walking was a return to the hyper-alertness of childhood.

Mindful breathing connected with mindful walking gradually becomes normal. It is then a small step to connect walking and breathing with prayer.

I was reminded of the original title he intended for his first English-language book on meditation (published as The Miracle of Mindfulness),”The miracle is to walk on earth.”

* * *

Small b buddhists and small c christians…

“Small b buddhists can talk with and cooperate with small c christians but it is difficult for big B Buddhists and big C Christians to find common ground.” Thay said this on the day he led a retreat for the staff of the International Fellowhip of Reconciliation in Alkmaar, Holland, in 1982.

* * *

Cooking with Nhat Hanh: a story told by Nancy Forest:

I came to the Netherlands in April of 1982 with my daughter Caitlan, who was five years old at the time. Jim and I were married shortly after that. We had been friends for many years in the US. Both of us worked together at the headquarters of the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Nyack, New York, and Jim move to Holland in 1977 to serve as general secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR). We had kept in touch during those five years. Jim was Cait’s godfather.

Nhat Hanh - IFOR retreat
Nhat Hanh – IFOR retreat

Shortly after I had moved here, Jim told me Thich Nhat Hanh would be coming to Alkmaar to visit. I had never met Nhat Hanh, but of course I had heard a great deal about him, and I knew how close Jim and Nhat Hanh had been over the years. Jim said Nhat Hanh would be coming to our house, and that the IFOR staff would be coming over as well to meet with him.

It was a beautiful day in May. First the staff arrived and took seats in our living room, then Nhat Hanh himself arrived, dressed in his brown robe. A hush fell over the staff members, and everyone was apparently in awe of this man. I remember feeling nervous that he was coming to our house, nervous about hosting this event. After he had sat down, the room fell silent and a sort of Zen silence fell on the room. It was hard for me to tell what to make of the atmosphere in the living room that day, but it made me uncomfortable.

In the meantime, Cait, who had just been given her first bicycle and was practicing riding it in the parking lot behind our house, kept running in to tell me how far she was advancing. So you have this room full of awestruck adults sitting there with what appeared to me glazed looks on their faces, and my little daughter running in, breathless with excitement.

After Nhat Hanh finished speaking with the staff, Jim came up to me and told me he had invited him to dinner. This was a little more than I could handle. I went into the kitchen at the back of the house and started chopping vegetables. I remember feeling that I really had to get out of that living room, that there was something definitely weird about what was going on there. It didn’t feel genuine, while the vegetables were certain genuine and so was Cait.

After a few minutes, Nhat Hanh came into the kitchen and, almost effortlessly, started helping me with the vegetables. I think he just started talking to me in the most ordinary way. He ended up telling me how to make rice balls — how to grind the sesame seeds in a coffee grinder, to make the balls with sticky rice and to roll them in the ground sesame seeds. It was lots of fun and I remember laughing with him. The artificial Zen atmosphere was completely absent. Cait kept coming in, and Nhat Hanh was delighted with her.

This was my first Zen lesson.

— Nancy Forest

* * *

Plum Village Memories

Thich Nhat Hanh with Anne

We visited Plum Village in the summer of 1984. We came by car — Jim and myself, Caitlan, then six, and Anne, who had recently turned one. At the time Plum Village was no more than a nice piece of rural property in the countryside northeast of Bordeaux with a small plum orchard, a kind of deep ravine, an open field, a couple of old farm buildings, and a zendo (meditation hall), recently built. Thay lived there with Phuong, his longtime collaborator from Vietnam and now a nun with a different name, and several other Vietnamese. There was not yet a formal monastic order. I don’t recall anyone wearing monastic robes except Thay. There was no monastic schedule. We ate in a rather ugly windowless room. The cooking was done in a dark corner on a grease-encrusted stove.

It was all very relaxed and peaceful. Thay was remarkably accessible. We have photos of him playing with Anne under a tree. When we were there, a small group of American Buddhists were also visiting, cheerful young people who did a lot of the cooking. At one point, one of the Americans decided to spend some time cleaning the stove. He scrubbed and chipped away at the accumulated grease. While he was working Thay came up to him and just stood there and watched. Finally, Thay said quietly, “We never do that.” It was very funny.

Caitlan really enjoyed herself. She took to Phuong and the Americans right away. I remember her spending a lot of time helping Phuong pack medicine to send to Vietnam.

We had meditation in the zendo a few times. I remember Caitlan wanting to come with us. I told her we were just going to sit quietly for a long time, probably too long for a lively six-year-old girl. But she insisted. She loved being there, and she really loved being with Phuong and the Americans. So she came, and she sat through the entire meditation. I couldn’t believe it.

Sometimes Thay would announce that he was going on a mindfulness walk, and anyone who wanted to was welcome to walk with him. It was all quite ad hoc.

The mindfulness walks took place around a large field. We walked slowly and in silence. Cait came with us and really enjoyed it, which was amazing for a seven-year-old. The sun would be low, birds singing, sweet smell of summer in the air. Every sensory thing was amplified by everyone’s quiet attention. I remember during one walk I suddenly realized that someone was walking right next to me. It was Thay. He didn’t say anything, but he fell into step with me. For the rest of the walk he was there, walking in tandem with my steps. It was both playful and reassuring. I am walking with you.

– Nancy Forest / 3 March 2018 / revised 21 May 2020

* * *

This also comes from Nancy…

Notes of a conversation with Thich Nhat Hanh on August 21, 1984 at the Plum Village in France

(Thay was outside sitting on a stone.)

Nancy: Do you have a moment to talk?

Thay: Yes, please. Sit here on a stone.

N: I’ve felt rather out of it here. I’m not a person from one of the Zen Centers, and I’m not an old friend, like Jim.

T: (very emphatically) No, no! You are wrong. Maybe you are better than Jim!

N: (I tell him my “North Pole” experience — how, when I was young, I had a profound experience of standing at the point on the globe where all lines converge and intersect — an overwhelming experience of being at the absolute Center.)

T: It’s true we are each, as you say, like the North Pole. (He takes a stick and places it at the edge of his stone.) We are each on the edge. We are each separate, and each one of us has everyone within us.

N: How can that be?

T: (He holds up a leaf.) As this leaf holds within it everything – all the sun, all water, all earth.

N: But it also makes you realize we do everything alone. Everything, every step – alone. Walk through life alone. Die alone.

T: Yes. I told the people in the Zen Centers in America, “Meditation is a personal matter!” (He smiles.) That means meditation is an exercise in being alone – in realizing what it is to be alone. There is a story in Zen Buddhism about a monk. His name was (pause), “The Monk Who Was Alone.” He did everything alone – eat alone, wash dishes alone – everything. They said to him, “Why do you do everything alone?” He said, “Because that is the way we are.”

N: (I tell him how, lately, I’ve been reading so many things which all seem to pertain to this event. How I pick up a book or read an article, and it all connects. I tell him at first I thought it was a coincidence that so much of what I read is connected.)

T: (Smiles and shakes his head.) It’s no coincidence.

N: I’ve read some of Merton. And about the Hasidic Jews. And the story of the Fall in the Bible – Adam and Eve. About how, before the Fall, Eve just stood in her place, and walked in the garden. God had given them everything they needed, and it was all good. Eve didn’t know what evil was. Then when she was tempted to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she decided there wasn’t enough for her, just standing there – even though she didn’t have any idea what “evil” was. So by eating, she destroyed the garden.

I’ve thought a lot about that here – walking slowly through the woods.

T: But you know – good and evil are just concepts. Maybe even the serpent was good, and the apple. All good. It’s like this stick. I can say, “This half is good, this half is evil.” They’re all concepts. Maybe Eve was even good after the Fall. You say “before the Fall – after the Fall.” It’s all the same.

N: The Hasidic Jews always are dancing. It’s all holy, everything. But after Eve ate the apple, we don’t know if she really was able to know good from evil – we only know she was ashamed.

(Thay smiles.)

N: Merton said Eve wasn’t good before the Fall and bad afterwards. He said she was her True Self before the Fall and not her True Self afterwards.

T: And he also said, “Everything is Good.” (He smiles and stares at me) – and he said that in Bangkok! (Long pause.) You know, if you are really able to understand this, you can look at all the nuclear weapons and … (very long pause – his eyes scan the distance) … and smile.

* * *

The problem is to work toward awakening

In January 1973, while in Paris, I taped a conversation involving Thich Nhat Hanh, Dan Berrigan and myself. Here are a few sentences from what Thich Nhat Hanh had to say:

The problem is to work toward awakening. That is the most important.  Then everything will follow. If you are not awake, you cannot do anything. The problem is not the one force opposing another force to gain ground on this earth. The problem is awakening — opposing forgetfulness — which is the fruit of many sins, many crimes. People who kill people, who commit crimes, do so not necessarily because they are cruel or evil by nature, but because they forget. They are not conscious of what is going on around them and even inside themselves. Violence destroys consciousness,

I have thought very much about the effectiveness of nonviolent action — how it is that one action  may have decisive effect only two thousand years later. At the time of Jesus nobody could predict the impact of Jesus in the twentieth century. Many people blamed him and misunderstood him in his lifetime.

I have the conviction that not a single act of ours will fail to produce fruit in the future. Any action in the right direction will bear fruit.

We have to have hope. The moment you lose all hope, you die. It’s very simple. You die. You die right away.

* * *

The Miracle of Minfulness (extracts)

Nhat Hanh believes that meditation has a healing effect by helping people let go of the pains of history and planting the seed of peace. The following excerpts were selected from his book The Miracle of Mindfulness, A Manual on Meditation:

Family Life

“Is family life easier than being a bachelor?” I asked. Allen didn’t answer directly. But I understood. I asked another question: “A lot of people say that if you have a family you’re less lonely and have more security. Is that true?” Allen nodded his head and mumbled something softly. But I understood. Then Allen said, “I’ve discovered a way to have a lot more time. In the past, I used to look at my time as if it were divided into several parts. One part I reserved for Joey, another part was for sue, another part to help with Ana, another part for household work. The time left over I considered my own. I could read, write, do research, go for walks. “But now I try not to divide time into parts anymore. I consider my time with Joey and Sue as my own time. When I help Joey with his homework, I try to find ways of seeing his time as my own time. I o through his lesson with him, sharing his presence and finding ways to be interested in what we do during that time. The time for him becomes my own time. The same with Sue. The remarkable thing is that now I have unlimited time for myself!” Allen smiled as he spoke. I was surprised. I knew that Allen hadn’t learned this from reading any books. This was something he had discovered for himself in his own daily life.

Washing the dishes to wash the dishes

Thirty years ago, when I was still a novice at Tu Hieu Pagoda, washing the dishes was hardly a pleasant task. During the Season of Retreat when all the monks returned to the monastery, two novices had to do all the cooking and wash the dishes for sometimes well over one hundred monks. There was no soap. We had only ashes, rice husks, and coconut husks, and that was all. Cleaning such a high stack of bowls was a chore, especially during the winter when the water was freezing cold. Then you had to heat up a big pot of water before you could do any scrubbing. Nowadays one stands in a kitchen equipped with liquid soap, special scrubpads, and even running hot water which makes it all the more agreeable. It is easier to enjoy washing the dishes now. Anyone can wash them in a hurry, then sit down and enjoy a cup of tea afterwards. I can see a machine for washing clothes, although I wash my own things out by hand, but a dishwashing machine is going just a little too far! While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes. At first glance, that might seem a little silly:

Why put so much stress on a simple thing? But that’s precisely the point. The fact that I am standing there and washing these bowls is a following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions. There’s no way I can be tossed around mindlessly like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves.

The cup in your hands

In the United States, I have a close friend named Jim Forest. When I first met him eight years ago, he was working with the Catholic Peace Fellowship, later for the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Last winter, Jim came to visit. I usually wash the dishes after we’ve finished the evening meal, before sitting down an d drinking tea with everyone also. One night, Jim asked if he might do the dishes. I said, “Go ahead, but if you wash the dishes you must know the way to wash them.” Jim replied, “Come on, you think I don’t know how to wash the dishes?” I answered, “There are two ways to wash the dishes. The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes and the second is to wash the dishes in order to wash the dishes.” Jim was delighted and said, “I choose the second way — to wash the dishes to wash the dishes.” From then on, Jim knew how to wash the dishes. I transferred the “responsibility” to him for an entire week.

If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as they were a nuisance, then we are not “washing the dishes to wash the dishes.” What’s more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can’t wash the dishes , the chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While of other thing, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus, we are sucked away into the future — and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.

Eating a tangerine

I remember a number of years ago, when Jim and I were first traveling together in the United States, we sat under a tree and shared a tangerine. He began to talk about what we would be doing in the future. Whenever we thought about a project that seemed attractive or inspiring, Jim became so immersed in it that he literally forgot about what he was doing in the present. He popped a section of tangerine in his mouth and, before he had begun chewing again. He was hardly aware he was eating a tangerine. All I had to say was, “You ought to eat the tangerine section you’ve already take.” Jim was startled into realizing what he was doing. It was as if he hadn’t been eating the tangerine at all. If he had been eating anything, he was “eating” his future plans.

A tangerine has sections. If you can eat just one section, you can probably eat the entire tangerine. But if you can’t eat a single section, you cannot eat the tangerine. Jim understood. He slowly put his hand down and focused on the presence of the slice already in his mouth. He chewed it thoughtfully before reaching down and taking another section.

Later, when Jim went to prison for a activities against the war, I was worried about whether he could endure the four walls of prison and sent him a very short letter: “Do you remember 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.”

The Essential Discipline

More than thirty years ago, when I first entered the monastery, the monks gave me a small book called “The Essential Discipline for Daily Use,” written by the Buddhist monk Doc The from Bao Son pagoda, and they told me to memorize it. It was a thick book. It couldn’t have the thoughts Doc The used to awaken his mind while doing any task. When he woke up in the morning, his first thought was, “Just awakened, I hope that every person will attain great awareness and see in complete clarity.” When he washed his hands, he used this thought to place himself in mindfulness: “Washing my hands, I hope that every person will have pure hands to receive reality.” The book is comprised entirely of such sentences. Their goal was to help the beginning practitioner take hold of his own consciousness. The Zen Master Doc The helped all of us young novices to practice, in a relatively easy way, those things which are taught in the Sutra of Mindfulness. Each time you put on your robe, washed the dishes, went to the bathroom, folded your mat, carried buckets of water, or brushed your teeth, you could use one of the thoughts from the book in order to take hold of your own consciousness.

The Sutra of Mindfulness say, “When walking, the practitioner must be conscious that he is walking. When sitting, the practitioner must be conscious that he is sitting. When lying down, the practitioner must be conscious that he is lying down……No mater what position one’s body is in, the practitioner must be conscious of that position. Practicing thus, the practitioner lives in direct and constant mindfulness of the body….” The mindfulness of the position of one’s body is not enough, however. We must be conscious of each breath, each movement, every thought and feeling, everything which has any relation to ourselves. But what is the purpose of the Sutra’s instruction? Where are we to find the time to practicing mindfulness, how will there ever be enough time to do all the work that needs to be done to change and to build an alternative study Joey’s lesson, take An’s diapers to the laundromat, and practice mindfulness at the same time?

* * *

http://www.abuddhistlibrary.com/Buddhism/G%20-%20TNH/TNH/From%20The%20Miracle%20of%20Mindfulness/Teaching.htm

Venerable Master Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh is a Zen Buddhist monk, scholar, poet, and a political figure from Vietnam. He actively opposed the war in Vietnam. In 1966, he came to the United States a spokesperson for monks who felt that reconciliation was possible in Vietnam, if the U.S.A. Stopped its war effort. He was the Chairman of the Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation at the Paris talks that produced the peace accords later. After the Vietnam was, he organized efforts to rescue boat people fleeing the new regime.

In the United States he was welcomed by antiwar groups on college campuses. He was supportive of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, when the American civil rights leader declared his opposition to the war. After Dr. King won the Noble Peace Prize in 1964, Dr. King recommended the same award be given to Thich Nhat Hanh.

Thich Nhat Hanh lives in Plum Village, a small Vietnamese Buddhist community, in the southwest of France. He is the author of The Miracle of Mindfulness, A Guide to Walking Meditation, Being Peace, Peace In Every Step, The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life and many other books.

* * *

mindfulness explained… (from one of my journals)

“When we recognize the violence that has taken root within us, in the everyday we think, speak and act, we can wake up and live in a new way… Shining the light of awareness on the roots of violence within our hearts and thoughts, we can stop the war where it begins, in our minds.”

— Thich Nhat Hanh

* * *

Why hurry?

In Peace Is Every Step, Thay recalls being a child and taking half an hour or more to finish a cookie that his mother bought him. “I would take a small bite and look up at the sky,” he writes. “Then I would touch the dog with my feet and take another small bite. I just enjoyed being there, with the sky, the earth, the bamboo thickets, the cat, the dog, the flowers.”

* * *

Thomas Merton as a Messenger of Hope

Thomas Merton (photot by John Howard Griffin)
Thomas Merton (photo by John Howard Griffin)

By Jim Forest

On pilgrimage in Asia in 1968, Thomas Merton was both far from home and at the same time very much at home. His at-homeness on the far side of the planet shines through the remarks he made while in Calcutta, ten time zones east of his monastic community in Kentucky: “My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one, but we imagine that we are not. So what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.”

Merton’s insight is not a poet’s wishful thinking. The human race is indeed one family — not only the Book of Genesis but our DNA confirms it. We are one and every one of us lives at the same address: the third planet out from a single star we call the sun. We are at home on this planet no matter where on the globe we happen to be. We are and always have been one. The only problem, as Merton points out, is that we imagine our differences are more important than what we have in common. Those differences become the fuel of wars. Our challenge is indeed to recover our original unity. Countless lives, and the health of our souls, depend on it. It’s quite a challenge.

From an early age, one of Merton’s major concerns was war, the cruelest expression of our failure to live in unity. World War I is the main reference point in the opening sentences of his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain:

On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers. Not many hundreds of miles away from the house where I was born, they were picking up the men who rotted in rainy ditches among the dead horses … in a forest without branches along the river Marne.

In the population of Europe and North America, Merton was one of the rare men of his generation to refuse to take part in war. Instead, after a great deal of thought, conversation and prayer, he decided to seek recognition as a conscientious objector. In the end he became a monk instead — thus part of a fragment of the U.S. population automatically exempt from conscription.

What stood behind his conscientious objection? For Merton the question of overwhelming importance was not political or ideological but simply what would Christ do — what weapons would he carry, what flag would he march behind, who would he kill, who would he bless to kill? In The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton expanded on his decision in a text that must have startled many readers, appearing as it did just after World War II and in the early days of the Cold War:

[God] was not asking me to judge all the nations of the world, or to elucidate all the moral and political motives behind their actions. He was not demanding that I pass some critical decision defining the innocence and guilt of all those concerned in the war. He was asking me to make a choice that amounted to an act of love for His truth, His goodness, His charity, His Gospel…. He was asking me to do, to the best of my knowledge, what I thought Christ would do…. After all, Christ did say, “Whatsoever you have done to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”

Not many Christians, still fewer Catholic Christians, were struggling with such questions or making similar decisions.

Nor were many Christians making significant contact with people of other religions. In The Seven Storey Mountain, parts of which seem parochial by today’s standards, Merton makes a point of drawing attention to non-Catholics who played key roles in his spiritual and intellectual formation.

One of the influential people was a Hindu monk, Bramachari, who had been sent from his ashram in India to take part in a Congress of Religions in Chicago. In fact he had arrived too late for that event but stayed on in America anyway, living from the hospitality of friends. Merton had been part of a small welcoming committee when Bramachari arrived in Manhattan in 1938. In the weeks that followed the two of them spent a great deal of time together. Merton was deeply impressed by Bramachari’s deep kindness. “He was never sarcastic, never ironical or unkind in his criticisms: in fact he did not make many judgments at all, especially adverse ones. He would simply make statements of fact, and then burst out laughing — his laughter was quiet and ingenuous, and it expressed his complete amazement at the very possibility that people should live the way he saw them living all around him.”

Bramachari gave Merton life-changing guidance: “He did not generally put his words in the form of advice, but the one counsel he did give me is something that I will not easily forget. ‘There are many beautiful mystical books written by the Christians. You should read Saint Augustine’s Confessions and The Imitation of Christ…. Yes, you must read those books.’” Reading The Imitation of Christ in his apartment on 114th Street, Merton started praying again “more or less regularly.”

It’s not altogether surprising that, thirty years after their encounter in New York, that Merton, now in Bramachari’s homeland for the first time in his life, should be speaking about the bonds that unite us even as wars are being fought.

The theme of peace and human unity is one of the golden threads running through Merton’s writing throughout his adult life.

Through letters and very occasional visits at the monastery, Merton built relationships with various people outside the monastery who were involved in efforts to end wars and to prevent a nuclear holocaust. I was among the beneficiaries of his affection and care. During the last seven years of his life we exchanged letters on a more or less monthly basis.

The greater part of his correspondence to me been published in The Hidden Ground of Love. Of these, the letter that has been most widely circulated and has had the most impact on others was without doubt one he sent me in February 1966. The text has often been published with the headline “Letter to a Young Activist.” I would like to quote from that letter and briefly comment on these extracts.

By way of background, let me explain that the letter to which Merton was responding expressed the exhaustion, bordering on despair, I was then experiencing in my work. I was at the time secretary of the Catholic Peace Fellowship, which several friends and I had founded the previous year. Merton was a member of our advisory board. Much of Fellowship’s work was focused on ending the Vietnam War and promoting conscientious objection. While in many ways our efforts were going well, the Vietnam War was getting worse by the day. It was to continue nearly another decade, not ending until 1975.

Merton’s letter began:

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.

I wasn’t until I received Merton’s letter that it had occurred to me that peace work is of its nature apostolic work — quite a dignity and also quite a responsibility. It was not an altogether comforting linkage. The apostles, few of whom died of old age, experienced a great deal of failure and ridicule.

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.

The shift from focusing not on the satisfaction of measurable results but rather on the value, rightness and truth of the work we were doing required a major shift of perception. We had to think of counseling prospective conscientious objectors in terms not merely of assisting them in their refusal to participate in a manifestly unjust war but, far more significantly, of assisting in the shaping of vocations in which the works of mercy were the main event.

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.

That last sentence has been for me one of the most important insights that I ever received from Merton. It sums up incarnational theology. Words and slogans and theories are not nearly as important as how we see and relate to each other. In the context of peace work, it suggests getting to know, as best we can, the people and culture being targeted by our weapons. (Along these lines, in 1967 the Catholic Peace Fellowship began to develop “meals of reconciliation” during which Vietnamese food was eaten by participants and Vietnamese poetry read aloud.)

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.

Movements require words and use slogans to sum up goals. These have their place but it’s secondary. In a talk to his novices, Merton once said, “He who follows words is destroyed.” One of Merton’s main contributions to many people who were involved in peace efforts was the witness given by his contemplative monastic life in which prayer and meditation were integral elements of every activity, with each day having a liturgical and sacramental foundation.

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.

For me the last few words — “after all [satisfaction] is not that important” — were especially helpful. It’s not that important that we personally get to see the results of our efforts, however worthy our goals may be. Here Merton suggests what I think of as a cathedral builder’s attitude, a metaphor that easily comes to mind as I live just a minute’s walk from a cathedral whose construction began in 1470 and which wasn’t completed until 50 years later. As cathedral construction goes, half-a-century was relatively fast. Those who laid a cathedral’s foundations knew they wouldn’t live to see their building roofed; perhaps their grandchildren would have that satisfaction.

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.

Building an identity in one’s work is so basic an element for all of us living in a career-driven, results-oriented society that it’s hard to imagine another way of identifying ourselves. Asked who we are, we tend to respond with information about what we do. It’s not easy to think in other terms and indeed any more basic answer (what would that be?) might be embarrassing. But if what you do is rooted in attempting to follow Christ, in trying to live a life in which hospitality and love of neighbor is a major element, a life nourished by the eucharist, that foundation may not only keep you going in dark times but actually, ironically, make your work more effective.

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.

In my own case the problem was less making myself the servant of a myth than the servant of an ideology, both pacifism and even Christianity. Our myths so often are packaged as ideologies — closed systems of ideas and concepts.

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….

It is after all Christ’s truth that matters, a truth we experience from time to time but which can never be adequately expressed in words or be obtained by movements and causes. Trying to live within Christ’s truth certainly doesn’t mean we will live an undented life, a life free of disappointments, but it may help prevent disappointment from becoming despair.

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…

The end of the letter circles back to its beginning: not to live a results-driven life but to have confidence that God will somehow make use of our efforts even though we ourselves will probably not live long enough to see them bear fruit.

Referring back to the book Bramachari successfully urged Merton to read years before he found his vocation as a Trappist monk, it all has to do with the imitation of Christ.

* * *
text as of 3 January 2014
* * *