[lecture given at Boston College 13 November 1995]
by Jim Forest
“I believe in one God.” These few words overturn an ancient perception in which each fragment of existence — stars, ocean, winds, trees, animals, grasses, this or that region, this or that people — was at odds with everything else, and each attached to autonomous, competing deities. To speak not of gods plural but of God singular is to realize the connection that exists beneath all the chasms of apparent separation. The discovers of the oneness of God, the Jews, brought an idea into human history that remains as challenging today as ever it was: we are one people belonging to one God and in that oneness are sewn together: living, dead and yet to be born.
An overwhelming fascination with the underlying oneness of God and the implications of that oneness in both the spiritual life and the social order is at the core of Thomas Merton’s journey.
In the life of Thomas Merton, the words “I believe in one God” are connected to a mystical experience that happened to him in the year just prior to his becoming a monk. In was the spring of 1940. A rather innocent America was inching its reluctant way into World War II. Merton, 25-years-old, a graduate student at Columbia University, had gone to Cuba during the Easter recess, pilgrimage and vacation intertwined.
The event happened among crowds of school children at Mass in the Church of Saint Francis in Havana. Having only moments before been full of irritation with the intrusive noises of urban life outside the church, not least the repeated cry “quatro mil quatro ciento quatro” by a vendor selling lucky numbers, Merton suddenly had an overwhelming experience of the divine presence:
The bell rang again, three times. Before any head was raised the clear cry of the brother in the brown robe cut through the silence with the words “Yo creo…” [“I believe”] which immediately all the children took up after him with such loud and strong and clear voices, and such unanimity and such meaning and such fervor that something went off inside me like a thunderclap and without seeing anything or apprehending anything extraordinary through any of my senses (my eyes were open on only precisely what was there, the church), I knew with the most absolute and unquestionable certainty that before me, between me and the altar, somewhere in the center the church, up in the air (or any other place because in no place), but directly before my eyes, or directly present to some apprehension or other of mine which was above that of the senses, was at the same time God in all His essence, all His power, all His glory, and God in Himself and God surrounded by the radiant faces of the uncountable thousands upon thousands of saints contemplating His glory and praising His Holy Name. And so the unshakable certainty, the clear and immediate knowledge that Heaven was right in front of me, struck me like a thunderbolt and went through me like a flash of lightning and seemed to lift me clean up off the earth.
To say that this was the experience of some kind of certainty is to place it as it were in the order of knowledge, but it was not just the apprehension of a reality, of a truth, but at the same time and equally a strong movement of delight, great delight, like a great shout of joy, and in other words it was as much an experience of loving as of knowing something, and its love and knowledge were completely inseparable. All this was caused directly by the great mercy and kindness of God when I heard the voices of the children cry out “I believe” in front of the altar…. It was not due to anything I had done for my own part, or due to any particular virtue in me at all but only to the kindness of God manifesting itself in the faith of all those children. Besides, it was in no way an extraordinary kind of experience, but only one that had greater intensity than I had experienced before. The certitude of faith was the same kind of certitude that millions of Catholics and Jews and Hindus and everybody that believes in God must have felt much more surely and more often than I, and the feeling of joy was the same kind of gladness that everybody who has ever loved anybody or anything has felt; there is nothing esoteric about such things, and they happen to everybody, absolutely everybody, to some degree or other. These movements of God’s grace are peculiar to nobody, but they stir in everybody, for it is by them that God calls people to Him[self], and He calls everybody…. [T]hey are common to every creature that ever was born with a soul. But we tend to destroy these effects, and bury them under our own sins and selfishness and pride and lust so that we feel them less and less.
In The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton again sought once again to describe what he had experienced in Havana:
It was a light that was so bright that it had no relation to any visible light and so profound and so intimate that it seemed like a neutralization of every lesser experience. And yet the thing that struck me most of all was that this light was in a certain sense “ordinary” — it was a light (and this most of all was what took my breath away) that was offered to all, to everybody, and there was nothing fancy or strange about it…. It disarmed all images, all metaphors … it ignored all sense experience in order to strike directly at the heart of truth … it … belonged to the order of knowledge, yes, but more still to the order of love.
Surely this was, for Merton, what later in life he sometimes referred to as a “kiss from God.”
If the event was consoling, the times were not. While Merton was listening to the Creed being sung in Havana, France, where he was born at the beginning of World War I, was already occupied by Germany, while England, where he went to high school and began his higher education, was under German bombardment. Places in London that had once been Merton’s haunts — record shops, cinemas, cafes, the homes of friends — had been demolished by bombs. Former classmates from Clare College were at war, no doubt some of them dead. In his diaries and autobiographical writings, we notice how much time and thought Merton was giving to the widening war in Europe. As was often the case in his life, his personal response was unusual. He registered with Selective Service as a conscientious objector, though prepared for noncombatant service as a medic. In such a role, he wrote in his journal, “I would not have to kill men made in the image and likeness of God” but could obey the divine law of “serving the wounded and saving lives.” Even if it turned out that he would only dig latrines, he considered this “a far greater honor to God than killing men.”
Writing his autobiography fifteen years later, he expanded on his decision in a text which startled many readers, appearing as it did 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.”
December 10, 1941, a year-and-a-half after his sojourn in Havana, only two days after US entry into World War II, we find Merton, nearly 27 years old, not waiting his turn at the local recruiting office but entirely by himself, ringing the gatehouse bell at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in the farmland of Kentucky.
His first 27 of life years were bracketed by two world wars: mega-death, death on the scale of plague. But he also knew of death at closer quarters. His mother died of cancer when he was six, his father when he was sixteen. While Merton’s father was lying on a London hospital bed in an dreadful silence imposed by a brain tumor, we find the son in tight-lipped silence as the Creed was being recited in the school chapel. “I believe in nothing” was his bitter view at age fifteen.
Then there was Merton’s own close brush with death in 1932, soon after Owen Merton’s burial. Merton, age seventeen, had gone hiking in Germany along the Rhine River and been run off the road by a car full of young Nazis waving their fists and throwing Hitler leaflets. What seemed at first a minor injury proved nearly fatal — a gangrenous toe and blood poisoning. Thus Merton came to know the main facts about people and movements that regarded murder as socially cleansing — or simply a form of entertainment.
Merton’s sense of evil in the world was not limited to evil beyond the walls of his life but informed by a sense of his own capacity to harm others. He had come to America following a disastrous year at Cambridge where his major achievement was to father an illegitimate child. It was a hellish interval in Merton’s life, “an incoherent riot of undirected passion,” said Merton; a time of “beer, bewilderment and sorrow,” says his compassionate friend, Bob Lax.
It was out of the wreckage of his year at Clare College that Merton struggled to make a fresh start as a student at Columbia in New York City. Here, partly thanks to the influence of remarkable teachers and an attraction to books on medieval Europe, he had found his way to Christian faith and into the Catholic Church. It was the major turning point in his life, but one which only made more dramatic the fundamental question of what to do with the rest of his life. The trip to Cuba, a country in which religious life and Catholicism were taken for granted, was a part of his search for a glimpse of his vocation.
The mystery of death, the problem of war, the experience of making destructive choices, his encounter with structures of institutionalized evil — all these were to become major themes in Merton’s work, but always with a sensibility informed by the oneness of God.
“I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ.” Mystical experiences are powerful realizations of the presence of God and probably happen in most people’s lives, though we may not recognize them for what they are, or explain them away because they don’t fit, or relegate them to a sea chest in the attic of memory. At times the word mysticism impedes our understanding of mystical life — it has become a kind of perfumed cloud bank within which edges are blurred and everything melts together, a word disconnected from the incarnational. Merton was never one to smudge the edges of reality. His mystical experiences gave existence a razor sharpness.
We know of a several mystical experiences in Merton’s life because it was his writer’s nature to record them. The first he records happened in February 1933 when, having finished high school early, he set off for an extended holiday in Italy.
What his brush with death the year before hadn’t done, Rome did. It was not the usual sights that moved him, neither the “vapid, boring, semi-pornographic statuary of the Empire” nor the ecclesiastical monuments of the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation that he had first sought out as a dutiful tourist. Rather, it was the city’s most ancient churches.
“I was fascinated by these Byzantine mosaics. I began to haunt the churches where they were to be found, and … all the other churches [among them Saints Cosmas and Damian, Santa Maria Maggiore, Santa Sabina, the Lateran, and Santa Costanza] that were more or less of the same period…. Without knowing anything about it, I became a pilgrim.”
The principal icons were 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 the Fathers. It is the Christ of St. John, and of St. Paul…. It is Christ God, Christ King.”
Eager to understand iconography, he bought an English translation of the New Testament. Perhaps he recalled his father’s efforts to interest him in the Bible when he was ten. “I read more and more of the Gospels, and my love for the old churches and their mosaics grew from day to day.” Their attraction wasn’t simply his appreciation of the aesthetics of iconography but a profound sense of peace he experienced within such walls. He had a “deep and strong conviction that I belonged there.”
Alone one night in his pensione room on the corner of Via Sistina and Via Tritone, trying to record in his journal his thoughts about Byzantine icons, he sensed his father’s presence, “as real and startling as if he had touched my arm or spoken to me.” The experience was over in a flash, “but in that flash, instantly, I was overwhelmed with a sudden and profound insight into the misery and corruption of my own soul…. And now, I think for the first time in my whole 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 next day, still overwhelmed by contrition, he visited the Church of Santa Sabina. 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 that first day was to cross himself with blessed water as he entered and to recite with tears the Our Father over and over again as he knelt down at the altar rail. “That day in Santa Sabina, 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 in years.
Icons continued to play a significant role in Merton’s life. In letters written in 1967 and 1968, 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…. 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.” One of the few personal objects Merton carried with him on his pilgrimage to Asia, where he died in 1968, was a small icon of Mary and Christ.
From Italy Merton went on to the United States for a family visit. He brought his Bible along, but the embarrassment he had felt in trying to pray that first day in Santa Sabina still haunted him. He read the Bible surreptitiously, afraid someone would make fun of him. Nonetheless he began to window-shop for a church. Despite the at-homeness he had felt in Roman churches, a long-standing aversion to Catholicism remained. He tried the Zion Episcopal Church to which his grandparents belonged and where his father had once been organist, but the service only irritated him. He next went to a Quaker Meeting in Flushing. His mother had been a Quaker and had meditated there. He enjoyed the silence while it lasted but was annoyed by what one member had to say about the virtues of the Swiss but even if it been George Fox risen from the dead and preaching with earthquake force it’s unlikely Merton would have found his spiritual home in among Quakers. What had thrilled him in those iconed churches in Rome wasn’t here. He didn’t return.
It took another five years before Merton had overcome the primary barriers to conversion. It was in November 1938 that he was received into the Church. But his expereince in Rome in 1933 would for the rest of his life keep him from shrinking Christ down to just one more of the long-dead luminaries of antiquity. He had experienced the Christ of the Byzantine icons: the Risen Christ, the Christ who has the power to raise to heal the blind and bring the dead back to live, the Christ who will come again in glory, the Christ of the Last Judgment.
“I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.” At the heart of Merton’s vocation was what might be called his search for “the undivided Church.” This is something more than the Church before division a thousand years ago or the Church brought back into union at a future time, but the Church as it always exists in communion beneath its divisions, the Church that is one, holy, catholic and apostolic despite countless broken relationships among the followers of Jesus. To the extent we live in Christ, to the same extent we are drawn into a deeper communion.
His search was less hampered than would be the case for many others. One of the unusual factors in his life was that he grew up without a strong sense of nationally-defined identity. Growing up on both sides of the Atlantic, he had an experience of the world and its cultural variety that was rare among Americans, an experience not only of what divides people but what connects them. He had lived in France, England and America, and there was also an extended period of his childhood spent in the Caribbean. Not only did he live in these places but there is a sense in which he also escaped from each of them. By the time he made America his home, he was a British subject, but it was only long after becoming a monk that he applied for US citizenship, a happy event in his life when it happened, but he was never one drawn to the pseudo-religion of nationalism. He had experienced the revival of nationalism under the Nazis in Germany and encountered the “my country right of wrong” way of thinking in both Britain and America.
He was far more interested in a religious than a national community and this was no doubt a factor in his attraction to Catholicism: truly a world church. Within it he found his monastery home — a community, as it turned out, with French roots in which his facility with the French language was at times a helpful resource, especially when the Abbot General, a Frenchmen, came to visit.
One finds in Merton an ever-deepening longing for a unity that exists not only beneath geographical borders but beneath the borders drawn by details of personal identity, borders of belief, even the borders left by events in the past: truly a longing to be catholic — lower case c — in the deepest sense of the word.
But it was only 17-years into his monastic life that Merton was able to overcome a sense of radical separation from those who didn’t share his religious faith or have an affinity for the monastic life. In this regard, we note another mystical experience in his life, in March, 1958, when he was on an editorial errand in Louisville, the city nearest the monastery:
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 world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream…. This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud…. It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried 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 every-where.
Seen in the context of sacramental life, Merton’s experience was eucharistic. To receive communion is to be in communion, and while we use the phrase “in communion” to refer to people able to receive the Eucharist, its significance is wider. Eucharistic life leads us gradually to discover how unalterably we are wedding to each other. While not many of us are graced with the experience of actually seeing that we are each of us made in the image of God (it is hard to see when most of is have so disfigured the likeness), still each of us has had at least occasional moments of awareness through which we know the truth of John Donne’s phrase, “no man is an island.” We discover, or re-discover, that we are part of a social organism in which God has identified Himself and in which God is present.
As he stood at that busy urban intersection, Merton was given an experience of communion with those around him which had the brilliance of lightning. “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun,” he remarks. No, there isn’t. But his contribution to us is that he tried to do so, not only sharing that days’s gift from God but a day-by-day record of spiritual experience.
It was after this event, Msgr. William Shannon, the editor of several collections of Merton’s letters notes, that Merton’s correspondence takes off.
One of those he started writing to was Dorothy Day, founder the Catholic Worker movement, someone as much identified with the world as he was associated with leaving the world. It became clear to Merton, though it was no surprise to Dorothy Day, that the monastic life on the edges of society and the life of hospitality in the midst of urban life were deeply connected. For the rest of his life Merton was linked with the Catholic Worker movement and other several groups and communities seeking to care for abandoned members of society and to oppose economic and military structures that can throw people away without batting an eye.
In a talk he gave in Calcutta a few weeks before he died, Merton said, “The deepest level of communication is … communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear brothers [and sisters], we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. What we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.”
One groundbreaking element of Merton’s life was passion for dialogue with conteplatives of other religious traditions, not so much to discuss doctrine as methods of prayer, meditation and mystical experience. His interest in the eastern religions had deep roots in his life. When he was 15, he took Gandhi’s side in student debate. Living in New York seven years later, it was a Hindu monk from India, Bramachari, who encouraged Merton to read The Imitation of Christ. While drafting his dissertation on William Blake, Merton had discovered Chuang Tzu, the Chinese storytelling sage who had lived several hundred years before Christ.
In the late fifties Merton’s thinking led him back toward Asia. In 1956 he had begun reading everything he could find by D.T. Suzuki, the Japanese Zen Buddhist scholar. Three years later Merton initiated a correspondence with Suzuki, confessing he did not pretend to understand Zen but nonetheless owed a great debt to Suzuki. “Time after time, as I read your pages, something in me says, ‘That’s it!’ Don’t ask me what. I have no desire to explain it to anybody…. So there it is, in all its beautiful purposelessness.” He took the occasion to send Suzuki a collection of sayings of the Desert Fathers, the Zen Masters of the early church.
While Suzuki never came to Gethsemani, in 1964 Dom James had allowed Merton a short trip to New York to meet Suzuki, then age 94 and deaf but still the lively, responsive man Merton had anticipated. They drank green tea and talked. The main thing for Merton was “to see and experience the fact that there really is a deep understanding between myself and this extraordinary and simple man whose books I have been reading now for about ten years with great attention.” Suzuki told Merton a story about a great master’s dream in which his mother appeared to him with two mirrors, one in each sleeve. One was black, the other contained all things; the master found “himself among them, looking out.” Being with Suzuki, Merton “felt as if I had spent a few moments with my own family.”
Suzuki’s essays had revived Merton’s interest in Chuang Tzu. In 1961 he had enlisted the help of John Wu in preparing The Way of Chuang Tzu. “I have enjoyed writing this more than any other book I can remember…. I simply like Chuang Tzu because of what he is,” Merton commented in the book’s preface.
In the midst of the Vietnam War, in 1967, he had a visit from Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Zen Master and poet. For Merton it was like meeting Chuang Tzu in the flesh. As the two monks talked, the different religious systems in which they were formed didn’t seem to matter. “Thich Nhat Hanh is my brother,” Merton said a preface for a book by Nhat Hanh. “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.” When Merton asked Nhat Hanh what the war was doing to Vietnam, the Buddhist said simply, “Everything is destroyed.” This, Merton said to the monks of Gethsemani, was truly a monk’s answer, revealing the essence without wasting a word. Merton described the rigorous formation of Buddhist monks in Vietnam and the fact that instruction in meditation doesn’t begin early. “Before you can learn to meditate,” he said, quoting Nhat Hanh, “you have to learn how to close the door.” The monks laughed; they were used to the reverberation of slamming doors as latecomers hurried to church.
Because Merton was drawn to develop relationships with non-Christians — Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists — casual readers occasionally form the impression that Merton’s bond with Christianity was wearing thin during the latter years of his life and that he was window-shopping for something else. It is not unusual to meet people who think that, had he only lived longer, he would have become a Buddhist. But as you get to know Merton’s life and writing more intimately, you come to understand that his particular door to communion with others was Christ Himself. Apart from times of illness, he celebrated Mass nearly every day of his life from the time of his ordination in 1949 until he died in Thailand 19 years later. Even while visiting the Dalai Lama in the Himalayas, he found time to recite the usual Trappist monastic offices. One of the great joys in the last years of his life was his abbot permitting the construction of a chapel adjacent to the cider block house that became Merton’s hermitage — he was blessed to celebrate the Liturgy where he lived. If there were any items of personal property to which he had a special attachment, they were the several hand-written icons that had been given to him, one of which traveled with him on his final journey. Few people lived so Christ-centered a life. But his Christianity was spacious. The Dalai Lama has remarked, “When I think of the word Christian, immediately I think — Thomas Merton!”
For Merton, his approach to Christ was nourished by the traditions of spiritual life that are associated more with the early than the modern Church. As he wrote in an as yet unpublished essay that was circulated in mimeographed form chiefly among Trappist monks:
If for some reason it were necessary for you to drink a pint of water taken out of the Mississippi River and you could choose where it was to be drawn out of the river would you take a pint from the source of the river in Minnesota or from the estuary in New Orleans?
The example is perhaps not perfect. Christian tradition and spirituality does not become polluted with development. That is not the idea at all. Nevertheless, tradition and spirituality are all the more pure and genuine in proportion as they are in contact with the original source and retain the same content.
He was drawn to the hesychast traditions of Mount Athos, especially the practice of the Jesus Pryer, or the Prayer of the Heart: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” The goal in using this prayer is that it becomes an integral part of life so that truly one prays without ceasing. To breathe finally is the same as to pray.
We find Merton not altogether pleased with what happened to the Liturgy in the Catholic Church after the First Vatican Council. There are barbed comments in his writing about the decline of music and the loss of Latin — what one might call the Macdonald-ified Mass; fast-food worship. But at least of the Abbey of Gethsemani, prayer was not all a hurried event. But singing such hymns as “A Mighty Fortress is our God” had no attraction to Merton.
The liturgical changes associated with Vatican II resulted from decisions made at the Council’s first session. It was the latter work of the Council that Merton most identified with, especially the document that was approved at the Council’s last session, Guadium et Spes — the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. We see him taking an active role, insofar as correspondence allowed, in shaping this remarkable text which contains the one and only condemnation to emerge from the Council: “Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and humanity, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.” Emphasizing the role of conscience, the bishops called on states to make legal provision for those “who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to bear arms, provided that they agree to serve the human community in some other way.” Those who renounce violence altogether, seeking a more just and compassionate society by non-violent means, were honored: “We cannot fail to praise those who renounce the use of violence in vindication of their rights and who resort to methods of defense which are otherwise available to weaker parties too, provided this can be done without injury to the rights and duties of others or to the community itself.” Those who, in the name of obedience, obey commands which condemn the innocent and defenseless were described as “criminal,” while those who disobey such corrupt commands merit “supreme commendation.”
The final results followed closely what Merton had urged in an “open letter to the American hierarchy” published shortly before the last session of the Council.
Given Merton’s life and temperament, it is hardly surprising that the issues of war and peace mattered so much to him, that his vision was so unclouded by nationalism, and that these topics could not be separated from his understanding of what it meant to be a follower of Christ seeking the deepest levels of contemplative life.
Perhaps there is a certain providence not only in his dying where and when he did: one border removed from the war in Vietnam, and the 27th anniversary of his arrival of the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1941 in the days following US entry into World War II. There is also the significane of the way his body was brought back home — one more body in a US Air Force plane bringing back the dead from the war in Vietnam.
Let us thank God what Thomas Merton achieved in 54 years living among us: a Christian monk who responded with such joy to God’s presence in others and who could not be silent when his brothers and sisters were being made to suffer. He gave a witness to Christ, who killed no one and blessed no one to kill; who only healed. He brought many to faith and still more to a deeper faith. He helped to overcome divsion among Christians and left bridges which have helped bring Christians and non-Christians into dialogue at the level of spiritual experience. At the heart of his life we find a witness to God’s oneness, in which we find oneness. Not least, he gave a witness to catholic and apostolic life.