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Lecture given at the International Thomas Merton Society conference in Memphis, Tennessee, on June 8, 2007

by Jim Forest

Given that we are in the midst of war, it seems appropriate to reflect on Thomas Merton’s life and thought in regard to war and peacemaking. And there is also the fact they we meet in Memphis, the city in which Martin Luther King was struck down. Dr. King was America’s greatest exponent of nonviolent methods of seeking social justice and also a brave opponent of war — a man Merton greatly admired and looked forward to meeting.

It’s not surprising that war was a major topic for Merton. He was born in France on the last day of January, 1915, not even half a year after the start of World War I. In its battlefields, soldiers were dying by the tens of thousands. Among the lesser consequences of that war was its impact on the Merton family. It tore their hopes and plans to shreds. Though a New Zealander by nationality, Owen Merton would have been subject to French military conscription. Owen’s objections to war were of no consequence to the French authorities. No exceptions were made for foreigners or conscientious objectors. In the summer of 1916, Owen, Ruth and their infant son, Tom, left France for US, living not far from Ruth’s parents on Long Island. It must have been a hard adjustment for Owen. The vast majority of Americans had a severe case of war fever. Men like Owen who opposed the war were generally regarded as traitors and cowards, but at least non-citizens like Owen were not being forced into the military.

War involves death on a factory scale — the mass production of corpses. Ordinarily death is a remote concept for children, but that was not the case for Tom Merton. While he would have known little about the Great War in Europe, when he was six death became something all too real when his mother died of cancer. Death meant a gaping absence, a collapse of the most basic structures of life. Death meant abandonment.

In 1930, just nine years after Ruth’s death, Merton’s father would also be on his death bed. He died of a brain tumor the following January, just two weeks before his son Tom’s fifteenth birthday.

In those years Merton was living in a Britain deeply maimed by war. Men of a certain age were in short supply. Every day he saw the physical and mental damage done by war.

In the fall of 1930, Merton began for the first time to think about alternatives to war. He became one of the admirers of Gandhi and his nonviolent campaign against British imperial rule in India. Rarely one to be part of any majority, Tom took Gandhi’s side in a formal debate at Oakham, his school, arguing that India had every right to demand Britain’s withdrawal. Merton’s side in the debate was easily defeated — the motion was carried by the pro-Empire side, 38 to 6. Until the end of his life, Merton was to remain not only a supporter but an advocate of Gandhi’s form of struggle, what Gandhi called satyagraha: the power that comes from embracing truth; the power the comes from seeking the conversion of opponents rather than their annihilation.

Among the formative events that both added another layer of meaning to the word “death” and also brought him close to the annihilating potential of toxic ideologies occurred in the spring of 1932. Now sixteen and still a student at Oakham, Merton went for a holiday walk along the Rhine River in Germany. It was an excursion that happened to coincide with Hitler’s rise to power. Along the way he witnessed villagers hurling bricks and fighting with pitchforks as political passions spilled over. Then one morning, while walking down a quiet 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, the car’s occupants showering him with Hitler leaflets as they passed.

In fact he was slightly injured. Pain in one toe cut the Rhine walk short. By the time he was back at his school in Oakham, the soreness had gotten worse. Then came a toothache. The school dentist extracted a tooth, which turned out to be the cork capping an infection that had spread throughout Tom’s body. By now the aching toe proved to be gangrenous. For weeks Tom was in a sanatorium, in the early days barely conscious and close to death. He later recalls how, at that time of deep estrangement from Christian faith, death seemed quite a suitable revenge on life. In fact Merton recovered, but his sense of the ultimate meaninglessness of life remained unchanged. Still, he had painfully acquired an entirely unromanticized sense of what the Nazis were like at a time when Hitler and his followers enjoyed a good deal of sympathy, even admiration, in both Britain and America.

First at Clare College in Cambridge and then at Columbia University in New York, like any student of his day Merton was in a maelstrom of radical political movements — Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, Nazism, Fascism, etc. For a time, Merton was among those who thought Communism was the path to a better future. The Soviet Union was widely regarded as a place where an oppressive old regime had been swept aside and a new order set up in which everyone had a fair share and a job: no Great Depression, no evictions, no homeless people sleeping under bridges, no one without education and health care. But, at least for Merton, perhaps the most attractive feature of Communism was that it absolved individuals of personal responsibility for sins they had committed. As he put it in The Seven Storey Mountain, “It was not so much I myself that was to blame for unhappiness, but the society in which I lived…. I was the product of my times, my society and my class … spawned by the selfishness and irresponsibility of the materialistic century in which I lived.” Merton went so far as to sign up as a Communist, but attending a single meeting of his cell group proved to be more than enough for him.

For Merton, a not unimportant part of his argument with Communism was that it was only sporadically anti-war. The Communist Party was anti-war in 1935, the brief period when Merton had been seriously attracted. The Party went pro-war during the Spanish Civil War in 1936, resumed an anti-war stance when Stalin signed the non-aggression pact with Hitler, then did another about-face when Hitler’s armies attacked the Soviet Union. Merton, whose one radical action during his year at Cambridge had been to sign a pacifist pledge, was not only looking for something with steadier principles, but especially for moral consistency about bloodshed. Merton came to realize that the Communist Party would “do whatever seems profitable to itself at the moment,” which was, he reflected in The Seven Storey Mountain, “the rule of all modern political parties.”

In 1938, with his baptism at Corpus Christi Church in Manhattan, Merton crossed the most important border of his adult life. For the rest of his life, every question was to be viewed in the light of Christ.

The following year, World War II began in Europe. Though it would be another two years before the United States became part of it, German bombs were falling in Britain, which only recently had been home to Merton. What was remote to most Americans was familiar ground to Merton. The question of how to respond if and when the US joined the war was the subject of many long-running conversations Merton had with such friends as Bob Lax and Ed Rice.

For Merton, a baptized and deeply convinced Catholic, it was a question that had to be regarded not in terms of political or ideological theory, but rather in terms of Christian discipleship. This led he him to formulate a response — conscientious objection — that, for an American Roman Catholic at that time, was along lines that were, to say the least, unusual. Here is how he put it in The Seven Storey Mountain:

[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.”

Keep in mind that the patriotism of American Catholics was still held suspect by the Protestant majority. Catholics bent over backwards to make clear their gratitude to have found a home in America. One would find the slogan, “Pro Deo et Patria,” over the door of many a Catholic church and school in America. Catholics were outshining their neighbors in doing whatever was required to be seen as “good Americans.” Merton, a convert with Anglo-Saxon family roots, had never had to face the prejudices so many of his fellow Catholics knew all too well. He didn’t think in terms of social acclimation, but rather tried to make choices that resembled those he believed Christ would make. Christ was not a Zealot. Christ joined no armies. Christ killed no one. Christ never blessed any of his followers to kill. Christ was merciful to all who sought his mercy. Christ accepted execution without resistance. In rising from the tomb, he buried death. Should it be the work of Christ’s disciples to resurrect the grave? Merton said no.

If Merton’s convictions regarding war were unusual, so were the basic vocational issues he was wrestling with. He had tried to join the Franciscans, whose founder had written a rule banning weapons and forbidding all bloodshed. When the Franciscans turned him away due to his checkered past, his next vocational attraction was to be part of a community of hospitality. People like Catherine de Hueck Doherty and Dorothy Day inspired him. While teaching at St. Bonaventure’s, he regularly traveled back to Manhattan to work as a volunteer at Friendship House in Harlem. It was in this period that he went on retreat at the Trappist monastery in Kentucky and found himself powerfully drawn to monastic life. He found it extremely difficultly to choose between Friendship House and the Abbey of Gethsemani — between a life shaped by the works of mercy and a life centered in prayer.

At last comes that other great defining choice in his life: to be a monk. Perhaps the war was a factor. His draft status had just been changed — he was no longer classified as physically unfit. His arrival at the monastery occurred just two days after the US declared war on Japan and a day before and the declaration of war with Germany. But as a monk he was exempted from military service.

One would have thought that, once within a monastic enclosure, Merton might have lost interest in the issue of war. Not so. Once Merton began writing for publication, war was among his topics, and what he had to say in that regard was not at all what Catholics were used to hearing. There were the many paragraphs in his autobiography about his own response to World War II and what had led him to be a conscientious objector, and then, a year later, in 1948, there was a chapter in Seeds of Contemplation with the remarkable title, “The Root of War is Fear.”

This was one of the few essays Merton was to write twice. In 1961, the text was greatly expanded for inclusion in New Seeds of Contemplation. In fact it was in connection with this revised text that my own correspondence with Merton began.

I was a young volunteer at the Catholic Worker community in Manhattan who had just a few months before been discharged from the Navy as a conscientious objector. Merton had sent his new version of “The Root of War is Fear” to Dorothy Day for possible use in The Catholic Worker. It was his first submission to a paper well known for its passionate opposition to war. Dorothy had passed along both Merton’s letter and the manuscript to me, asking that I prepare the his essay for publication.

When Merton wrote The Seven Storey Mountain, he framed his views on war in very personal terms. In “The Root of War is Fear” he expressed a view of what he thought ought to be normative for Catholics in general, if they were to be more than compliant citizens whose faith had to be adjusted to governmental demand and nationalistic ideologies.

In an addendum to the essay especially added to The Catholic Worker version, he argued that the current war crisis was not God’s doing but was entirely of our own making. Though there were no compelling reasons for war, the world was plunging headlong into destruction, even “doing so with the purpose of avoiding war.” This was, he said, “true war-madness,” which Merton saw “an illness of the mind and spirit that is spreading with a furious and subtle contagion all over the world,” with no country so afflicted with it as America. “On all sides we have people building bomb shelters where, in case of nuclear war, they will simply bake slowly instead of burning quickly or being blown out of existence in a flash. And they are prepared to sit in these shelters with machine guns with which to prevent their neighbor from entering.” All the while, “we claim to be fighting for religious truth, freedom and other spiritual values. Truly we have entered the ‘post-Christian era’ with a vengeance….”

He then asked what is the place of the Christian in all this? “Is he simply to fold his hands and resign himself for the worst, accepting it as the inescapable will of God and preparing himself to enter heaven with a sigh of relief? …. Or, worse still, should he take a hard-headed and ‘practical’ attitude about it and join in the madness of the war makers?”

The last option was, Merton said, “the most diabolical of illusions, the great and not even subtle temptation of a Christianity that has grown rich and comfortable, and is satisfied with its riches.”

Then he asks what are we to do? His answer to the question follows: “The duty of the Christian in this crisis is to strive with all his power and intelligence … to do the one task which God has imposed upon us in the world today. That task is to work for the total abolition of war.” Unless war is abolished, he continued, “the world will remain constantly in a state of madness and desperation,” always on the verge of catastrophe.” Unless we set ourselves to this task, “we tend by our very passivity and fatalism to cooperate with the destructive forces that are leading inexorably to war. It is a problem of terrifying complexity and magnitude, for which the Church itself is not fully able to see clear and decisive solutions. Yet she must lead the way on the road to the nonviolent settlement of difficulties and toward the gradual abolition of war as the way of settling international or civil disputes. Christians must become active in every possible way, mobilizing all their resources for the fight against war.”

The first task is simply to study and discuss the issues involved. “Peace is to be preached,” Merton wrote, “nonviolence is to be explained as a practical method, and not left to be mocked as an outlet for crackpots who want to make a show of themselves. Prayer and sacrifice must be used as the most effective spiritual weapons in the war against war, and like all weapons, they must be used with deliberate aim: not just with a vague aspiration for peace and security, but against violence and war. This implies that we are also willing to sacrifice and restrain our own instinct for violence and aggressiveness in our relations with other people. We may never succeed in this campaign but whether we succeed or not, the duty is evident.”

Especially in the expanded version of his essay as published in The Catholic Worker, Merton crossed a border, no longer simply confessing in public his personal sense of being called to renounce violence but to appeal to others to play a collective role in opposing any reliance on or use of weapons of mass destruction. More than that, he called on his readers to take nonviolent methods seriously as a practical and effective way of battling evil without imitating the methods of evil — not to fight fire with fire, but to fight fire with water.

That same summer Merton wrote to Dorothy Day:

I don’t feel that I can in conscience, at a time like this, go on writing just about things like meditation, though that has its point. I cannot just bury my head in a lot of rather tiny and secondary monastic studies either. I think I have to face the big issues, the life-and-death issues: and this is what everyone is afraid of.

Indeed there were those, in and out of his order, who were not at all happy to see Merton focusing on the highly controversial issue of war.

Just a few months later, still in 1961, Merton wrote me that the censorship he was encountering was “completely and deliberately obstructive, not aimed at combing out errors at all, but purely and simply at preventing the publication of material that ‘doesn’t look good.’ And this means anything that ruffles in any way the censors’ tastes or susceptibilities.”

Early in 1962, an editorial in The Washington Catholic Standard accused Merton of disregarding “authoritative Catholic utterances and [making] unwarranted charges about the intention of our government towards disarmament.”

Looking for a way to share his thinking about the religious dimension of social and political problems without having to pass through the labyrinths of censorship, Merton produced Cold War Letters, a mimeographed collection of his recent correspondence, a work which only a few months ago was at last published in book form. In 1962, it was Merton’s first experience of being read Russian-style in samizdat. Note, by the way, that Merton had a significant degree of support in doing this from his abbot. The self-publishing Merton did during the last seven years of his life was all done with his abbot’s backing and with a great deal of practical assistance from the monastery.

The early months of 1962 involved a great effort on Merton’s part to write a book on the issues of war and peace that he hoped would be regarded as moderate enough to pass inspection by the order’s censors. He christened the book Peace in the Post-Christian Era. The manuscript had just been completed when Merton received a letter from his order’s Abbot General, Dom Gabriel Sortais, ordering Merton to abandon all writing projects having to do with war.

“Now here is the axe,” he wrote me April 29, 1962. “For a long time I have been anticipating trouble with the higher superiors and now I have it. The orders are, no more writing about peace…. In substance I am being silenced on the subject of war and peace.”

The decision, Merton said, reflected

an astounding incomprehension of the seriousness of the present crisis in its religious aspect. lt reflects an insensitivity to Christian and ecclesiastical values, and to the real sense of the monastic vocation. The reason given is that this is not the right kind of work for a monk and that it ‘falsifies the monastic message.’ Imagine that: the thought that a monk might be deeply enough concerned with the issue of nuclear war to voice a protest against the arms race, is supposed to bring the monastic life into disrepute. Man, I would think that it might just possibly salvage a last shred of repute for an institution that many consider to be dead on its feet… That is really the most absurd aspect of the whole situation, that these people insist on digging their own grave and erecting over it the most monumental kind of tombstone.

Beneath the surface of the disagreement between Merton and the Abbot General was a different conception of the identity and mission of the Church. In his letter, Merton stated,

The vitality of the Church depends precisely on spiritual renewal, uninterrupted, continuous, and deep. Obviously this renewal is to be expressed in the historical context, and will call for a real spiritual understanding of historical crises, an evaluation of them in terms of their inner significance and in terms of man’s growth and the advancement of truth in man’s world: in other words, the establishment of the ‘kingdom of God.’ The monk is the one supposedly attuned to the inner spiritual dimension of things. If he hears nothing, and says nothing, then the renewal as a whole will be in danger and may be completely sterilized.

Those silencing him, he went on, regarded the monk as someone appointed not to see or hear anything new but

to support the already existing viewpoints … defined for him by somebody else. Instead of being in the advance guard, he is in the rear with the baggage, confirming all that has been done by the officials…. He has no other function, then, except perhaps to pray for what he is told to pray for: namely the purposes and the objectives of an ecclesiastical bureaucracy…. He must in no event and under no circumstances assume a role that implies any form of spontaneity and originality. He must be an eye that sees nothing except what is carefully selected for him to see. An ear that hears nothing except what it is advantageous for the managers for him to hear. We know what Christ said about such ears and eyes.

What strikes me as the most revealing part of this lengthy letter is what Merton has to say about obedience. Merton asked if he shouldn’t “just blast the whole thing wide open, or walk out, or tell them to jump in the lake?”

After all, many would say that he would be entirely justified in disobeying manifestly unjust orders. But Merton was convinced that a great many people would only find scandal in an act of disobedience and that public denunciation of the abuse of authority, far from being seen as a witness for peace and for the truth of the Church, would be seen by his fellow monks and many others as an excuse for dismissing a minority viewpoint. For those outside the Catholic Church, it would be regarded as fresh proof that the Church had no love for private conscience. Whose mind would be changed?

“In my own particular case,” Merton concluded, public protest and disobedience “would backfire and be fruitless. It would be taken as a witness against the peace movement and would confirm these people in all the depth of their prejudices and their self complacency. It would reassure them in every possible way that they are incontrovertibly right and make it even more impossible for them ever to see any kind of new light on the subject. And in any case I am not merely looking for opportunities to blast off. I can get along without it.”

Behind the silencing, Merton wrote a few weeks later, was the charge that he had been writing for “a communist-controlled publication,” as The Catholic Worker was said to be by some of its opponents.

He wrote me soon afterward that he wasn’t altogether pleased with Peace in the Post-Christian Era anyway. It had been written with a constant eye to what might be allowed through official channels. “What a mess one gets into,” he said in a letter that July, “trying to write a book that will get through the censors, and at the same time say something. I was bending in all directions to qualify every statement and balance everything off, so I stayed right in the middle and perfectly objective … [at the same time trying] to speak the truth as my conscience wanted it to be said.”

In fact, it was and remains a good book. It was at long last published two years ago, 42 years after it had been written, yet still a remarkably timely book.

While having to rely on the mimeograph machine and publication in tiny journals that his abbot regarded as too small for censorship to be required, occasionally the unfiltered Merton addressed wider audiences by writing for publication under pseudonyms. Under quite thin cover, one piece in The Catholic Worker was signed Benedict Monk. And to those acquainted with Merton’s delight in clownish names, who but Merton would sign himself Marco J. Frisbee?

Apart from prayer, for several years the only door that remained wide open for Merton was that of correspondence. Through correspondence, Merton was able to act as a pastor to peacemakers — a spiritual father, as such people are called in the Orthodox Church. Certainly he was to me.

When I reread those letters, one of the things I find most striking is how free they are of jargon. Merton was not an ideological person. He hated slogans whether religious or political. Neither was he self-righteous. While he believed following Christ ideally involved for us, as it did for the first Christians, a renunciation of all killing, he didn’t deny the possibility that just wars might have occurred in earlier times … wars of communal self-defense in which the technology of warfare didn’t inevitably cause numerous noncombatant casualties. He was also willing to speculate that such wars might occur in the modern context in the case of oppressed people fighting for liberation.

But, as he wrote Dorothy Day in 1962, the issue of the just war “is pure theory…. In practice all the wars that are [happening] … are shot through and through with evil, falsity, injustice, and sin so much so that one can only with difficulty extricate the truths that may be found here and there in the ’causes’ for which the fighting is going on.”

Neither did Merton insist that a Christian was, simply because of his baptism, obliged to be a conscientious objector, even though this had been his personal position before beginning monastic life. Yet the highest form of Christian discipleship, he was convinced, involved the renunciation of violence. As he wrote in Seeds of Violence,

The Christian does not need to fight and indeed it is better that he should not fight, for insofar as he imitates his Lord and Master, he proclaims that the Messianic Kingdom has come and bears witness to the presence of the Kyrios Pantocrator [Lord of Creation] in mystery, even in the midst of the conflicts and turmoil of the world.

What Merton found valuable in the just-war tradition was its insistence that evil must be actively opposed, and it was this that drew him to Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, and various groups involved in active nonviolent struggle for social justice, most notably the Catholic Worker and the Catholic Peace Fellowship.

Despite his isolation from events and his physical distance from centers of protest activity, he had a vivid memory of equivalent activities from his student days at Columbia University in New York City. “I have the feeling of being a survivor of the shipwrecked thirties,” he wrote me early in 1963, “one of the few that has kept my original face before this present world was born.”

What was often missing in the protest movements of the thirties, he realized, and remained rare in similar movements of the sixties, was compassion. Those involved in protests tend to become enraged with those they see as being responsible for injustice and violence and even toward those who uphold the status quo, while at the same time viewing themselves as models of what others should be. But without compassion, Merton pointed out, the protester tends to become more and more centered in anger, becomes a whirlpool of self-righteousness, and even becomes an obstacle to changing the attitudes of others rather than someone who helps open the door to conversion.

“We have to have a deep patient compassion for the fears of men, for the fears and irrational mania of those who hate or condemn us,” he told me in another letter. “[These are, after all] the ordinary people, the ones who don’t want war, the ones who get it in the neck, the ones who really want to build a decent new world in which there will not be war and starvation.”

Most people, Merton pointed out, are irritated or frightened by agitation even when it protests something — militarism, nuclear weapons, social injustice– which objectively endangers them. “[People] do not feel at all threatened by the bomb … but they feel terribly threatened by some … student carrying a placard.”

Without love, especially love of opponents and enemies, Merton insisted that neither profound personal nor social transformation can occur. As he wrote to Dorothy Day:

Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who we are. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action. To shut out the person and to refuse to consider him as a person, as an other self, we resort to the “impersonal law” and to abstract “nature.” That is to say we block off the reality of the other, we cut the intercommunication of our nature and his nature, and we consider only our own nature with its rights, its claims, it demands. And we justify the evil we do to our brother because he is no longer a brother, he is merely an adversary, an accused. To restore communication, to see our oneness of nature with him, and to respect his personal rights and his integrity, his worthiness of love, we have to see ourselves as similarly accused along with him … and needing, with him, the ineffable gift of grace and mercy to be saved. Then, instead of pushing him down, trying to climb out by using his head as a stepping-stone for ourselves, we help ourselves to rise by helping him to rise. For when we extend our hand to the enemy who is sinking in the abyss, God reaches out to both of us, for it is He first of all who extends our hand to the enemy. It is He who “saves himself” in the enemy, who makes use of us to recover the lost groat which is His image in our enemy.

When compassion and love are absent, Merton insisted, actions that are superficially nonviolent tend to mask deep hostility, contempt and the desire to defeat and humiliate an opponent. As he wrote in one of his most profound and insightful letters:

One of the problematic questions about nonviolence is the inevitable involvement of hidden aggressions and provocations. I think this is especially true when there are … elements that are not spiritually developed. It is an enormously subtle question, but we have to consider the fact that, in its provocative aspect, nonviolence may tend to harden opposition and confirm people in their righteous blindness. It may even in some cases separate men out and drive them in the other direction, away from us and away from peace. This of course may be (as it was with the prophets) part of God’s plan. A clear separation of antagonists…. [But we must] always direct our action toward opening people’s eyes to the truth, and if they are blinded, we must try to be sure we did nothing specifically to blind them.

Yet there is that danger: the danger one observes subtly in tight groups like families and monastic communities, where the martyr for the right sometimes thrives on making his persecutors terribly and visibly wrong. He can drive them in desperation to be wrong, to seek refuge in the wrong, to seek refuge in violence…. In our acceptance of vulnerability … we play [on the guilt of the opponent]. There is no finer torment. This is one of the enormous problems of our time … all this guilt and nothing to do about it except finally to explode and blow it all out in hatreds — race hatreds, political hatreds, war hatreds. We, the righteous, are dangerous people in such a situation…. We have got to be aware of the awful sharpness of truth when it is used as a weapon, and since it can be the deadliest weapon, we must take care that we don’t kill more than falsehood with it. In fact, we must be careful how we “use” truth, for we are ideally the instruments of truth and not the other way around.

Merton noticed that peace groups tend to identify too much with particular political parties. Ideally its actions should communicate liberating possibilities to others, left, right and center, no matter how locked in they were to violent structures. He wrote me late in 1962:

It seems to me that the basic problem is not political, it is apolitical and human. One of the most important things to 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.

At the heart of Merton’s writings on peacemaking was his emphasis on the spiritual life that must sustain peace service, without which we are easy prey to the ideologies of the day. As he wrote:

We have to pray for a total and profound change in the mentality of the whole world. What we have known in the past as Christian penance is not a deep enough concept if it does not comprehend the special problems and dangers of the present age. Hair shirts will not do the trick, though there is no harm in mortifying the flesh. But vastly more important is the complete change of heart and the totally new outlook on the world of man…. The great problem is this inner change…. [Any peace action has] to be regarded … as an application of spiritual force and not the use of merely political pressure. We all have the great duty to realize the deep need for purity of soul, that is to say the deep need to possess in us the Holy Spirit, to be possessed by Him. This takes precedence over everything else.

Merton was convinced that engagement was made stronger by detachment. Not to be confused with disinterest in achieving results, detachment meant knowing that no good action is wasted even if the immediate consequences are altogether different from what one hoped to achieve. In his longest letter on this theme, he advised me:

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

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…. As for the big results, they are not in your hands or mine, but they can suddenly happen, and we can share in them: but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important…. The great thing, after all, is to live, not to pour out your life in the service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths. If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ’s truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments…. The real hope … 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.

Today we have some idea of how much impact Merton’s writings had not only in the lives of many individuals but in shaping the official teaching of the Catholic Church. Merton’s influence can be seen in Pope John’s encyclical, Pacem in Terris. It is again evident in the final document issued by the Second Vatican Council, Guadium et Spes: the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. But at the time, Merton’s role in such documents was unknown.

Merton himself didn’t live to see the results of his efforts for peace. The war in Vietnam was raging when he flew to Asia in September, 1968. His death was now only weeks away. Surely he would have considered the return of his body to the monastery exactly right in all its details. He crossed the Pacific in an Air Force cargo plane as part of a shipment of the dead — all but him American soldiers who had died in Vietnam. Merton’s was the only body without a dog tag, and the only one without a war injury. Yet he was wounded. There was a long, raw third-degree burn about a hand’s width wide that ran along the right side of Merton’s body almost to the groin, where an electric fan had fallen across his body.

There was, as we only realized at the end of his life, a prophecy hidden in the final sentences of The Seven Storey Mountain.”

I will give you not what you desire. I will lead you into solitude. I will lead you by the way that you cannot possibly understand… Everything that touches you shall burn you …. that you may become the brother of God and learn to know the Christ of the burnt men.

[end]

Here are two exchanges about the Milwaukee 14, the first with a student, Dyllan Taxman, the second with a Milwaukee-based writer, Pegi Taylor…

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Here are responses to questions I received from  Dyllan Taxman, an eighth student in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. For a history research project,  Dyllan decided to look into an act of civil disobedience that I took part in back in the summer of 1968 — September 24 — when the Vietnam War was raging. A group of fourteen people broke into nine draft boards that had offices side by side in a Milwaukee office building, put the main files into burlap bags, then burned the papers with homemade napalm in a small park in front of the office building while reading aloud from the Gospel. We awaited arrest, were jailed for a month, freed on bail, then tried the following year, after which we went to prison for more than a year (for most of us it was 13 months).

Jim

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>> What made you do this?

I had been in the military myself so didn’t have to worry about the draft, but as a draft counselor (a big part of my work with the Catholic Peace Fellowship) I was painfully aware of how thousands of young people were being forced to do military service in an unjust war about which they knew little or nothing, or even opposed. Anyone who knew the conditions for a just war could see this war did not qualify.

It seemed to me that people committed to the Gospel ought to offer some sort of witness against the war and conscription (really, a kind of slavery). I had been impressed by a similar but smaller action in Catonsville, Maryland, in which the priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan — both good friends — had played a major role. It seemed to offer a model.

>> How did all 14 of you meet?

Bonds of friendship. Many of us knew Michael Cullen, a founder of the Casa Maria Catholic Worker house of hospitality in Milwaukee. As I recall, the idea began to take shape when Dan Berrigan and I were staying with Mike and Nettie at Casa Maria while in Milwaukee to speak at a national conference of Franciscan teaching nuns.

>> Who would you say was the leader of the group?

There was no leader. It was very much a group effort. I was a kind of press secretary (my background is mainly in journalism) and did the first draft for the group’s statement, but that too was something we all had a hand in.

>> Were you scared?

You bet! I recall my knees shaking as Jim Harney and I walked together to the building where the draft boards had their offices.

>> Did you tell your family about this before-hand? If so, did they approve? If not, were they shocked to find out? (did they agree with it or not)

A few people in the family knew. The ones I talked with approved.

>> How long did you plan this out? Was it spontaneous or carefully planned?

There was very careful planning — several weeks of preparation.

>> What do you think is the effect, now 38 years later, of the act that you, and the rest of the 14 did that day?

I was amazed at the impact — more than I would have expected: a two-page photo in Life magazine of the action, front page coverage in newspapers across the country, reports on TV news programs nationwide, national press attention while the trial was going on, respected poets coming to Milwaukee to do public readings in our support, lectures given by various scholars, supportive mail from all sorts of people (one of the astronauts on the first moon trip sent me as photo he had taken of the earth from space). One of the “epistles” in Leonard Bernstein’s “The Mass” was a letter about visiting me in prison.

Now, 38 years later, of course it’s just one item on a long list of protest actions that occurred during the Vietnam War. What surprises me is that it hasn’t been altogether forgotten. I recently received a newly made Milwaukee 14 poster!

>> Do you think that your actions that day had an affect on the draft?

Sure. For starters it closed down conscription for a time in a major US city. In Milwaukee for several months the only people who were sent to the war were volunteers. Judging from the mail we received, I think we helped more draft-eligible people decide that they would not take part in the war. More people became conscientious objectors. The fact that about half our groups were Catholic priests (and one a Christian Brother teaching economics at Note Dame) meant that our action had particular impact on the Catholic Church. It probably was a factor in the opposition to the war that was increasingly voiced by the Catholic hierarchy.

>> Do you approve with more recent protest such as protesting the soldiers in Iraq?

I’m not quite sure what the question is here. Do you mean protesting the war in Iraq? If so, I wish there were a great deal more protest. I am puzzled that the protest that have been going on hasn’t involved far more people. I see most of the soldiers in Iraq, even though volunteers for military service, as victims of the war who were driven to volunteer because of poverty and joblessness. Many of them, even if they come home alive and without physical injuries, will spend the rest of their lives battling with deep psychological scars and a haunted conscience.

>> Do you think that your motives for this protest are/were completely understood by the public or do you think that your actions were in some way misunderstood?

There were a great many who understood. It was, after all, a very simple deed. The religious basis was clearly expressed. A major goal was to encourage more draft resistance and indeed there was more. But of course there were many people who were astonished or even scandalized to see Catholic priests and committed lay people putting their freedom on the line by such an act of civil disobedience, and couldn’t understand.

I think for most if not all of us, the trial was at least as important as the action. We hoped to make the trial not so much a trial of fourteen people accused of burning papers but hoped to put an immoral and illegal war on trial. And that’s pretty much what happened. (If you have time to go the Library Archive at Marquette, my friend Phil Runkel can show you what they have re the Milwaukee 14. Probably they have a copy of the essay Francine du Plessix Gray wrote about the trial for the New York Review of Books. (Later it was included in a book called “Trials of the Resistance” — see: https://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2006/11/18/m14trial/.)

>> Do you still keep in touch with other members of the original 14?

Yes. I’m most often in touch with Bob Graf, who still lives in Milwaukee. I hope you have occasion to meet him. Thanks to Bob and Pat Graf, we had a Milwaukee 14 get-together in Milwaukee a few years ago.

>> Did you feel that during your stay in prison that you were a political prisoner?

I didn’t think much about myself in terms of such a label, but certainly we were seen as such by other prisoners, the guards, wardens, etc.

>> Did any of you end up going to Vietnam?

One of my regrets is that, for all the traveling I’ve done, I’ve never been to Vietnam. I lived in France for a time with a Vietnamese community and so am used to Vietnamese culture, food, music, etc., but I wish I might have visited Vietnam.

>> Would you do the same actions today if the same situation presented itself?

My present health being as it is — because of kidney illness I have to be at the local hospital three times a week for dialysis (an artificial kidney used to filter my blood) — major acts of civil disobedience would be quite problematic. [Postscript: In October 2007 a kidney donated by my wife was successfully transplanted.]

Also I think property destruction is not the ideal model of nonviolent protest — it’s on the borderline. I am still troubled by the cleaning woman we had to restrain when we entered the draft boards. What if we had caused her to have a heart attack? There is also the problem of secrecy. To plan actions of this type requires secrecy — and that in turn inspires distrust and suspicion. Also some of the actions that followed made me question what we had done. We stood around and took full public responsibility for what we did, welcoming the trial. Later in the draft board actions tended to become “hit and run” — actions often done anonymously. These had their value but in my view lacked the impact of actions in which those responsible said, “I did it, I’m glad, and here’s why.”

>> In the Constitution it states that when a government fails to protect your natural rights (one of which being life) you have the duty to overthrow it and form a new one. Then again, John Locke, one of the major influences on the framers of the constitution stated that you have to follow the laws and rules of the government in exchange for the protection of these rights (this is called the Social Contract). That situation seems to create a paradox in the situation you were in. What is your opinion on that?

My main text is the Gospel. The example of the saints is also important. I saw what we were attempting as being similar to what Jesus did in driving the money changers out of the temple. No one was injured or killed, but he made a protest which is recalled in each of the four Gospels. In the process he signed his own death sentence. His action surely had a great deal to do with the decision made by the religious leaders of the time that Jesus would be better dead.

>> Regarding Civil Disobedience, when do you think it is appropriate to break the law? And who should decide that? Also, when (if ever) is it considered all right to infringe on other peoples rights?

I’m not an anarchist. Laws may not be perfect but most of them exist to help us live together peacefully. Most of them are like barriers along the edge of a dangerous road that help keep us from driving into a ravine. But when a law is socially destructive, then we are obliged, as St. Peter said, “to obey God rather than man.”

>> What do you think the impact of this act was on your life specifically?

Every choice you make has consequences in your life and the lives of the people around you. Even little choices matter. If you’re in a bad mood, it will effect each and every person in your family. If you do something helpful — even a small thing like volunteering to wash dishes — that has a positive effect on the people you live with.

Being in prison was, for me, not without blessings. It gave me time to do some extremely valuable reading. Finally I read books like “The Brothers Karamazov”, which Dorothy Day had so often urged me to read. I became a more prayer-centered person. I spent time every day reading the Gospel and thinking about it. I got to know my fellow prisoners and their stories — amazing lives. Some of them were not guilty of the crimes for which they had been convicted — others were certainly guilty — but from each of them there was something to learn.

The very worst thing about prison was not seeing my son Ben for more than a year. When I think back on that, this still causes me great anguish. But I think too of soldiers who went to Vietnam and never saw their wives or children again, or came home with terrible injuries. My losses, and my son Ben’s, are hardly worth mentioning compared to that.

Thanks, Dyllan, for your probing questions.

PS There’s an autobiographical essay, “Getting from There to Here,” at this web address:

https://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2010/02/07/getting-from-there-to-here/

February 2, 2006

note: In the photo, I’m the guy wearing a tie standing near the left end. At the far left is a Milwaukee journalist taking notes.

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May 29, 1993

interview with Jim Forest by Pegi Taylor for Wisconsin magazine

How did you hear about the August [1968] retreat in New Jersey?

I was in Washington for the National Liturgical Conference and George Mische, one of the Catonsville Nine, was in DC as well. I didn’t realize then but eventually it became clear that he thought of his post-Catonsville role as organizing actions. He took me for a walk and asked me if I was interested in joining the next action. He had a close connection with Phil Berrigan so it was clear he meant something on the lines of what the Catonsville Nine had done. I said yes, feeling as I said it as if I had been hit by lightning.

Why did you decide to get involved in the Milwaukee action?

Having been in the US Navy, I had no further military obligation myself, so I wasn’t myself facing the draft. I had left a job as a journalist with a daily newspaper in order to work full-time as secretary of the Catholic Peace Fellowship and as a result was counseling conscientious objectors almost every day. It was good and useful work, but I felt that what I was doing wasn’t enough. It seemed to me that those who opposed the war might have to make a greater sacrifice, at least the kind of sacrifice that was taken for granted in the military: being taken away from home and family. (I was married and had a young son.)

A most important factor was the war in Vietnam itself. It was clear that a great many people had to find ways to impede a war which was killing vast numbers of civilians. I was also concerned about what involvement in such a war would do to US soldiers.

A big factor in the decision was my closeness to Dan Berrigan. I knew Phil Berrigan also, but not as well. I got to know most of the people in the Catonsville Nine group and was much involved in their defense committee. I had a lot of respect for these people and what they did, though it didn’t occur to me at first that it ought to be a model for another action, not to say a series of similar actions.

Another factor was my close contact with a Vietnamese Buddhist monk and poet, Thich Nhat Hanh. Through him I developed a deep feeling for the people of Vietnam and for the Vietnamese culture. The Fellowship of Reconciliation had set up his speaking tours in the USA; on at least two cross-country trips, I travelled with him. This friendship made the horror of the war very concrete to me.

Another influence was Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker and one of the speakers at the Liturgical Conference that year. Dorothy used the occasion to express her admiration for the Catonsville Nine and what they had done. I can’t recall exactly what she said, except that she compared the burning of draft records with Jesus turning over the tables of the money changers in the Temple. (Not many months later she was to do an about-face on the subject; while she still sympathized with all those who had carried out such actions, she came to the conclusion that she couldn’t support property destruction as a tactic of draft resistance.)

Had you considered getting involved in similar actions?

The only similar event up to that time was the Catonsville action. Had I known about it at the right moment, quite possibly I would have taken part. I can’t say. But as I recall I was on a cross-country speaking trip with Thich Nhat Hanh when it was being planned.

Did you see your participation as an act of Catholic witness?

Very much so. It seemed to me one of the tragedies of history that Christians, since the age of Constantine, had rarely put their obedience to Christ ahead of their obedience to the state. I was aware that few German or Austrian Catholics had resisted Hitler’s wars, that resistance to Hitler by the Church hierarchy had simply not happened, and that, far from being abnormal, this was typical of the role of the Church in a wide variety of political settings for centuries: “good” (meaning obedient) citizens first, followers of Christ only to the extent it didn’t conflict with obligations imposed by the state. Yet Christ had never killed anyone or blessed any act of killing  — very much the opposite.

It also seemed to me that for a Christian passivity is never enough. It isn’t enough not to commit an evil act; it’s necessary to try to change the minds of those who are harming others and to try to protect through active steps harm being done to others. More often than not, words aren’t enough. Often an action, even if it is only a symbolic gesture, is needed. Communication, in any event, is never simply verbal. The name “communication” is how you live, the spirit in which you live, and the choices you make.

How did leadership evolve within the group?

There was practically no leadership that I can recall. Decisions were made by consensus coming out of meetings, though sometimes consensus wasn’t easily reached. Everybody was listened to seriously and eventually we were of one mind about what to do. One of the hardest decisions we came to was the decision to defend ourselves in court. But I think we all felt very good about this decision once we got to it and never had second thoughts about it.

What role did you take in planning the action after the retreat?

Not much of a role. I wasn’t one of those looking for places where the action might happen. There were several cities that were being considered (New York City, where I lived, wasn’t one of hem) and two or three people appointed to see what the possibilities might be. When we met to hear the reports, it was clear that Milwaukee was the best site; more people from our group came from Milwaukee than any place else and there were nine draft boards side by side on the same floor of the same office building, with a convenient little park ideal for burning the draft records right across the street.

Were you roughed up by the police after the arrest?

Apart from handcuffs being made unnecessarily tight in a few cases, there is nothing to complain about that I recall. From our side, it was clear that whatever we were protesting, it wasn’t the police. We did our best to make that clear to them.

How do you see the relationship between the goals of the action and the goals of the trial then and now?

From the start it was clear in my mind, and probably in everyone’s mind, that the trial would be more important than the action. The action created the trial, and the trial might be, if we were lucky, a forum in which a great many issues of importance could be discussed. We hoped that the courtroom drama might have some influence in the way many others thought about the war and what personal response they could make to it. The action also gave us an event to speak about in many churches and colleges; in the months before the trial I did a lot of travelling, speaking all over the country from New England to Hawaii.

How would you compare your trial with the Chicago 7 trial?

I was in prison and couldn’t attend the Chicago trial. I didn’t see most of the press coverage. I can’t compare it.

Did you or others consider some sort of direct action to dramatize Judge Larson’s rulings?

Apart from some minor protests in the courtroom, none that I now recall. In fact I often felt a great deal of sympathy for Judge Larson, a decent man who gave us more chance to be heard than most other judges would have allowed and who was clearly wrestling with some of the issues we were raising. Still, it’s a pity he couldn’t have gone further, allowing the jury to hear more than it did. And it’s a pity he wasn’t in the end convinced that such an act of civil disobedience was justified in its context. But miracles rarely happen in courtrooms.

Why didn’t the trial get more media coverage?

Few who are hoping for headlines are satisfied with what they get. I doubt Sam Goldwyn thought Gone With the Wind got enough publicity. But we did amazingly well. There was the coverage the night of the action on NBC national news, with the film of the action being shown; the following week there was a two-page photo spread in Life magazine; both the action and the trial were all over the national press; the trial was sometimes on page one of The New York Times; there was a long essay about the trial in The New York Review of Books (a piece later published as part of a book, The Ultra Resistance); the composer Leonard Bernstein used a letter (written by Linda Henry about her first visit with me in prison) from that essay in one of his compositions, The Mass, a piece of music still being played. The Milwaukee papers, of course, gave the event and trial a great deal of attention and while one could complain about mistakes, omissions, occasional slanting, etc., still I think the reporters and editors did an honest job. And there was a play made about the trial, but the company that planned to put it on stage backed away from the script when it received advice that staging the play might jeopardize its foundation support and its tax-exempt status. (I have a copy of the script. Maybe someday it will at least be seen on a stage in Milwaukee.)

Did you do anything to try and increase media attention?

We had an excellent defense committee, people like Richard Zipfel), Bill Sell, Linda Henry and quite a number of others, all smart, resourceful people who in every possible way tried to help build something on the foundation of the action. This included their work with the press, which it seems to me was quite effective.

What was it like being in jail?

I would need a lot of time to fully answer that. I would just stress that in my case, the best thing about it was the chance it gave me to read and to deepen my spiritual life.

It was during that year that I started reading Dostoevsky, a writer who has had quite an influence on me since then. Still more important, I carefully re-read the New Testament.

I started using the rosary again, after some years of neglecting it. I never missed Mass. In a variety of ways I found my spiritual life getting steadily deeper while I was locked up and I am grateful for that to this day.

One of the most positive experiences I had in prison was getting a photo of the earth from space taken by one of the astronauts involved in NASA’s first moon-landing trip in July 1969. All the astronauts were military officers so it doubly impressed me that one of them would have thought about us, in such an appreciative way, while in space looking down at the earth, and, in the tumult of activity following their return, remembered to send me such a photo. The very same photo was used in the cover of Life magazine the week I received it at Waupun. On the other hand I had a lot of trouble being allowed to receive it. The “correspondent” wasn’t “approved”! Once I got it, it was the great treasure in my cell. I thought a lot about the earth, how beautiful it is, how small, and how invisible its political borders. There aren’t many gifts I’ve received in my life which meant nearly so much to me.

Jail was also a great place for listening. You get to hear a lot of life stories. Not everything you hear is true, but then you get to hear a lot of tall tales in the Navy. On the other hand you meet some people who really impress you in a positive way. You also occasionally meet people who were falsely convicted, and that makes you think a lot about what can be done to improve the court system.

If I were going to the same prisons today, I gather I would be in for a much harder experience. I’m told small prison cells in Waupun that had one inmate when I was there now have two, three or even four stuffed into them. That would be hell. How anybody can live in a tiny cell stacked in like herring and come not come out a greater danger to himself and to others, I don’t know.

How long were you in prison?

Including a month in the Milwaukee County Jail, I think it totaled 13 months. But that was much less than we had guessed we would serve when we were planning to burn draft records. I thought the most tangible victory we won in Judge Larson’s courtroom was a two-year sentence. (The Catonsville people had gotten six years and they did much less harm to the draft system than we did. They burned a single waste basket of paper; we burned hundreds of pounds of key draft files and in effect closed down Selective Service for a time in one major US city.)

What did you do while you were there?

I was at Waupun six months in two shifts, at Gordon Forestry Camp in the northwest for maybe two months between those shifts, and finally at Fox Lake for four months or so. I worked in the prison laundry, in a factory making office furniture, in a shipping department, in the kitchen, fought forest fires, helped clean state parks, worked at a trout hatchery; and finally was the clerk to the Catholic chaplain, Jim Koneazny (who still lives in Milwaukee though he has since married and left the active priesthood).

How did you view the other prisoners?

The great majority I got on with quite easily. I had grown up in poor neighborhood and later on been a part of the Catholic Worker community in New York City, which was in the Bowery area, so I was used to living with destitute people (at least 90 percent of the people in prison are poor).

I will never forget an older black man from Milwaukee. We worked side by side in the prison laundry at Waupun. By that time he had been in at least ten years. He was serving a life sentence for killing a guy who crashed into the back room of a Milwaukee bar where a wedding anniversary of my friend and his wife was being celebrated . The intruder insulted my friend’s wife. My friend, in blind rage and probably a bit the worse for wear from drinking, walked out to the car, came back with a gun he kept in his glove compartment, and shot the man. He told me he only meant to threaten the guy with the gun, to scare him off, but that the gun “just went off.” In any event, he killed a man. If the gun had been in my friend’s pocket and he had pulled it and shot the man on the spot, it would have been manslaughter. But the fact that he had gone to his car and come back with the gun made the crime premeditated murder. But what an honest, decent man he was, as fine a person as I’ve ever known. (I should add that he certainly took no pride in killing this other guy or justified it.)

How did the group feel about each other before and after the action?

We all had a high level of commitment to what we were doing. We got on quite well with each other both before and after the action, with the only hard part being Michael Cullen’s decision to pull out of the group and go on trial separately — a hard decision for him and hard for us too. But afterward, once we were both out of jail, it wasn’t stressful to resume my friendship with Michael, not at all. Yet I still regret we didn’t go through the same trials together.

Did people respond to you differently after the action and after the jail term?

That’s hard to know. It had a influence in some cases. For some we were heroes and that was embarrassing.

Women were excluded from the Milwaukee action. How does that look now?’

Silly, like a bird with one wing. The only good thing about it was, all being men, we had that month together in the Milwaukee County Jail, and that gave us the chance to come much closer to each other. Before that, most of our time together had been action-oriented.

What did you do once you were out of jail?

I joined Emmaus House, a community in East Harlem, New York, that was active in anti-war work, took in runaways, ran an educational program, and was involved in various inner-city projects. Later I became editor of Fellowship magazine for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a job I had when the war finally ended. Then in 1977 I moved to Holland to head the staff of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, a job I remained with for 12 years.

What did you do during the build-up to the Gulf War?

By that time I was no longer on the staff of International Fellowship of Reconciliation but was running Peace Media Service, an agency that gets out news of nonviolent initiatives in defense of life, human rights and the environment. A lot of our work in that period had to do with the danger of war in the Gulf, and now we’re still covering its aftermath.

Were you involved in actions protesting US policy in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

Yes, but I would want to add that it isn’t only the policies of the US government that have concerned me or which require protest.

How do you look on the situation in Bosnia?

It’s appalling and also poses a threat of a much larger war. It disturbs me that the press coverage in the US and most of western Europe focuses mainly on the war crimes committed by Serbians. God knows these are numerous but unfortunately the Serbs are far from alone in committing them. This Hollywood-like tendency to isolate one bad guy in the war is itself a factor that makes the war more dangerous.

I wish anti-military sanctions being imposed on Serbia were imposed on all combatants but at the same time humanitarian aid would be readily given to all who need it.

It also disturbs me that the peace groups that exist in all the republics of former Yugoslavia are more or less ignored in the US press. As long as the mass media considers violence more  newsworthy than nonviolence, many will turn to violence just to be noticed and taken seriously.

What kinds of peace action have you been involved in during the past ten years?

It depends what you mean by peace action. My own definition of peace work is anything you do to help people live and to protect the environment. In my own life today, peace work ranges from trying to be a decent father and husband to what I am doing as an editor and writer. There are occasional acts of protest in my life, but that’s the exception.

What are doing now?

I’ve mentioned Peace Media Service. In addition I’m secretary of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship. (East-west peace work often took me the former USSR throughout the 80s; and of the results on my ever deepening contact with the Russian Orthodox Church was to become Orthodox myself. My wife and I belong to an Orthodox parish in Amsterdam.)

I write books. The most recent, Living With Wisdom, is a biography of Thomas Merton. Love is the Measure, a biography of Dorothy Day, went out of print a few months ago but will be reissued this fall. Another recent book is Religion in the New Russia, about the impact of political change on religious life in the former USSR. Making Friends of Enemies [since revised and re-titled Loving Our Enemies] is still in print. There is also a recent children’s book, The Whale’s Tale, published in England, Holland and Germany — unfortunately not in the US. I also give lectures and occasionally lead retreats.

If you had it to do over again would you participate again in the Milwaukee 14 action?

Probably, but, if so, with more reluctance. Like so many men at that time, I was far more into my work than I was into being a parent. My year in prison was harder on my son than it was on me.

What advice would you give others drawn to social action?

Follow Christ — not the Berrigans, or Dorothy Day, or Gandhi, or Mother Theresa, or anyone, however heroic, inspiring or saintly. Don’t be bullied or manipulated or guilt-tripped into obedience or disobedience. You have a conscience; learn to hear it; no one can hear it for you.

Protest is not the most important part of peace work. Don’t imagine that you need to do something that involves a prison term in order for it to be of value.

Pay no attention to those in the peace movement who make a big deal out of having been to prison; every movement, including the peace movement, has its John Wayne types.

Avoid civil disobedience if you think you’re not going to be able to make good use of that kind of confinement.

Be aware that going to prison can, for some, be a way of putting a moral facade on what is mainly an abandonment of relationships and people or a life that may seem too ordinary, too prosaic.

The main thing is to try to build up a consistent pro-life ethic that connects with what you’re doing for a living.

No less important is developing the deepest possible spiritual life. No one needs this more than those who are trying to do something constructive about the injustice and suffering in this world.

Jim Forest

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Milwaukee 14-related link:

A one minute film of the burning of draft records in Milwaukee:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSVW9KJi7JY

A piece about a whole earth photo that reached me in prison shortly after the first moon landing:

https://jimandnancyforest.com/2014/03/whole-earth/

A long essay on the trial of the Milwaukee 14:
https://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2006/11/18/m14trial/

The Milwaukee 14 Today page on Bob Graf’s web site:

http://www.nonviolentworm.org/Milwaukee14Today/HomePage

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posted February 2006; updated 1 October 2018
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Edinburgh isn’t far from Amsterdam — a 75-minute flight — but it’s a very different world: a more northern light, not at all the flatland that is Holland, and where a form of English is spoken that takes some getting used to.

Via the web we had booked ourselves into a bed-and-breakfast southwest of the city center. As it happened, the house was on a canal that led nearly to the heart of Edinburgh, a refreshing half-hour walk that seemed to place us in the rural countryside rather that the middle of a city. So pleasant was the route that, more often than not, we walked back and forth rather than take the bus. (Walking back at night, I felt obliged to warn Nancy about the dreaded Edinburgh Ripper, who often frequents the canal, and takes special pleasure in carving up naive tourists who dare to walk this path in the dark. In reality the greatest danger we encountered were ducks and swans.)

The guest house, the proprietor told us, wasn’t far from the home of J.K. Rowling, but we saw no sign of her, nor did we meet Harry Potter. Our host complained of the wall Rowling had put up to safeguard her privacy.

Having read in guide books about Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, with the castle at one end and Holyrood Palace at the other, we started off by exploring this most ancient of the city’s streets, but were at first put off by the density of tourists and tourist shops. We had hoped to find an Edinburgh that was less like the center of Amsterdam, which also can barely hold all its visitors. In fact the crowds were mainly concentrated at the castle end of the Royal Mile, and neither they nor the shops that target them were unpleasant.

Need exercise? Edinburgh is hillier than either Rome or San Francisco. Exploring the city day by day, we gradually rehabilitated many long neglected muscles.

The city has beautiful parks, most of all a long green strip running through the heart of the city, below the castle. The day we arrived it has a site of preparation for a concert and fireworks display scheduled for the following evening, the final event in the annual Edinburgh Festival, but we were so walked out the following night that we missed the fireworks.

We were also among the small percentage of visitors who failed to visit the castle, striking though it is perched on it high rocky base overlooking the city, possibly the most impressive castle in Britain. If we had stayed longer perhaps we would have gotten around to it, but we focused more on walks and museum visits.

In the latter category, there was an outstanding Gauguin exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy. We were at the RSA and the adjacent Royal Gallery much of two days. There was also a major exhibition of the work of one of my favorite photographers, Henri Cartier-Bresson, at the Dean Gallery. The other museum where we spent many hours was the Museum of Scotland. It collection begins with the geology of Scotland and reaches into modern times. (See the Edinburgh photos)

Sunday morning we walked to the Liturgy at Orthodox Church of St. Andrew on Meadow Lane. The priest is Fr John Maitland Moir, now well into his 80s yet still in good health. We had last seen him during a brief visit to Edinburgh about 15 years ago. It was a striking to see how much the parish has grown — now there are many young families.

We enjoyed various pubs and pub meals though the place we returned to most often for supper was an Italian restaurant, Zizzi’s, on at the east end of the canal we so often walked. Inspiring cooking.
After five days in Edinburgh, we were off by train to Oban, a port town on the west coast of Scotland, a point of departure for ferries serving the Hebridean islands. (The Oban photos are included in the set of Iona pictures.)

The two days at Oban were the most restful part of our holiday. We had nothing to do, no museums to visit, no meetings, no appointments. It was cool enough to inspire Nancy to get a wool sweater and me to buy a fall jacket. Our one major exercise, beyond walking the harbor, was to climb the steep hill above the Oban Brewery to reach the “Tower,” the town’s one folly, a coliseum-like stone building that had been built a century ago by a local man who wanted to create employment.

We happened to meet my god-son Silouan in a local cafe and saw a good deal of him. He too was on his way to Mull to take part in the retreat/pilgrimage organized by Friends of Orthodoxy of Iona.

One of the highlights of Oban was the Catholic cathedral of St. Columba, a large, simple stone building which seemed to be open day and night. It is one of those churches that fills the visitor with a longing to pray. It was a blessing to be there.

Our good luck with the weather held up while in Oban. The first night there were treated to a sunset worthy of Tahiti — see the Oban photos — and, though less dramatic, we had another light show the second night.

On Saturday the 10th, along with others bound for the Iona pilgrimage, we took the ferry to Mull, then an hour-long bus ride across the island, east to west, to the village of Fionnphort, which put us on the wharf in sight of the island of Iona. Our retreat was to be centered in the Fionnphort village hall while the participants were lodged either in dormitories of the village hall or at guest houses in the neighborhood.

Once on Mull, the traveler crosses an visible border, entering a world so thinly populated and of such minor commercial interest that there is no McDonalds, no Burger King, no Pizza Hut, not even a Starbucks. The only chain, such as it is, is Spar: the vest-pocket grocery store in each town or village. But more impressive than the exodus from interchangeable fast- food outlets is the massive quiet, the Eden-like air, and — at night — skies much darker and immense than seen in most of Europe in the past hundred years.

The retreat/pilgrimage started Saturday and finished the following Friday evening.

There were a few lectures, but not so many that one felt over-loaded with talk.

Bruce Clark, chairman of Friends of Orthodox on Iona these past five years, spoke about the ways monasteries (understood as fortresses of spiritual life) have often hung on despite the most difficult political environments. St. Catherine’s on the Sinai has co-existed with the Muslim world since the time of Muhammed! One was reminded that monks are often as gentle as doves but wise as serpents, with their communities often managing to survive the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires.

Michail Neamatu, a young Romanian theologian, spoke insightfully about the Holy Cross, as did Bishop Kallistos two days later. As we celebrated the feast of the Holy Cross on Wednesday, the lectures and the Liturgy were in perfect alignment. (There were two Eucharistic liturgies during our days together, both held next to the abbey at St. Oran’s Chapel on Iona, the oldest building in that region of Scotland.)
Dr. David Winfield presented slides of the fresco restoration work he had led at the church of the Holy Wisdom in northeastern Turkey, now a museum church as the Greek population was forced to flee many years ago.

I gave a talk on “the essence of sin is fear of the Other.”

Apart from talks and liturgies and a delightful party the last night, our time together was a mixture of walks, boat rides and quiet time that could be used as we pleased.

Parts of three days were spent on Iona, the small island that St. Columba landed on after sailing from Ireland in 563. Not many missionary efforts have had so profound an effect on world history. The community was eventually destroyed by Viking raids, with many martyrdoms, but lasted four hundred years before retreating back to Ireland in the tenth century. (One of the surviving monuments of the community’s early years is the Book of Kells, now in the Trinity University Library in Dublin.)

Iona is often described as “a thin place” and truly it is that. I can hardly imagine someone visiting the island without thoughts of God. It’s not simply the rare beauty of Iona. In fact it’s an almost treeless island, quite austere, with a permanent population of about eighty people. No doubt it’s partly the abbey church, originally the main church of a Benedictine community founded early in the 13th century, along with a nearby nunnery. In the 17th century, however, the abbey properties in Britain were confiscated and the communities disbursed, after which the church buildings on Iona gradually fell into ruin. The abbey church was reroofed and partially restored more than a century ago. Then in 1938 George Macleod, a Glasgow pastor of the Church of Scotland, had the idea of rebuilding the abbey as a joint work for unemployed stone masons and seminarians — a means not only to restore ancient buildings but to repair the breach between the Church and the working class. Now the church, its cloister and the adjacent buildings look much as they did eight hundred years ago.

One of the special aspects of Iona is that it’s one of the oldest places on earth, much of it being composed of Lewisian Gneiss, extremely hard rock formed not quite three billion years ago. Lewisian Gneiss contains no fossils — there was as yet no biological life on earth. Iona belongs to the first day of creation.

Iona is also well known for its pale green marble. Few visitors leave with island without at least one green pebble. Several beaches are carpeted with smooth stones of various sizes, among which one occasional finds a “greenie.” (See the Iona photos.)

Not far from Iona is the still smaller island of Staffa, the end point of “the Giant’s Causeway,” an avenue of volcanic basalt columns that begins on the north coast of Ireland. Most of the highway is under the waves, but when it rears up at Staffa it’s an astonishing sight. We went there by boat on a day when the sea was calm enough to land, then followed a pathway that brought us into Fingal’s Cave, a cathedral-like opening amid the upright pillars of basalt, then later climbed up to the grassy fields above.

Nancy and I were not among those on the pilgrimage who managed to get to Inch Kenneth, a tiny island that in ancient times had been St. Kenneth’s home. Celtic monastic fragments still exist in the island. The day the sailboat was to take us there, as it had taken other pilgrims two days before, the weather was such that we went south instead of north, sailing round the southwest corner of Mull, close to many seals, at last coming to a remote beach. Along the way we passed by Erraid Island, the place where David Balfour landed after shipwreck in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, “Kidnapped.” The one beach on Erraid is now named in honor of Balfour.

On this particular day Nancy and I took separate trips. I joined the group on the sailboat and Nancy went with four other pilgrims by car to Castle Duart on the other side of Mull, a fully restored twelfth-century castle owned by the McClean clan, filled with artefacts, reconstructed dungeons, kitchens and ballrooms, clothing and weapons, and lots of McClean family photos. The family still live there.

To see southwestern Mull from the sea, at close range, is to be confronted with one of the great deserts of the northern world, a dramatic, barren landscape not unlike the landscape often seen in icons. This was the desert of the Celtic monks, still a dangerous place to be even in the 21st century. Many have drowned in these waters, while those who worked the land had a day-by-day struggle to survive. Now the local population is mainly sheep.

Pilgrimage, Bishop Kallistos pointed out at the beginning of the retreat, is the Moses-like discovery that one stands on holy ground and that creation itself is a burning bush. He had encouraged us to try to spend time alone on Iona, to give ourselves time to simply be pilgrims on the island, and to pray. Most of the pilgrims we spoke with took his advice. The pilgrimage was not so tightly organized that there was no time for such solitary wandering.

— Jim Forest
22 September 2005

See more Edinburgh photos and Oban, Mull, Iona and Staffa photos.

by Jim Forest

One of the people who became important in my life once I joined the staff of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1977 was Adolfo Perez Esquivel. From his office in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Adolfo led Servicio Paz y Justicia (Service for Justice and Peace), a continental network whose beginnings had much to do with the work of Hildegard and Jean Goss-Mayr, IFOR’s traveling secretaries.

On the 5th of April, 1977, we received a frantic call from his wife, Amanda: “Adolfo has been arrested!” In that period, when Argentina was being ruled by a military dictatorship, this meant that within a matter of days Adolfo was likely to be dead. He would become another of the disappeared — a disaparecido — like thousands of other dissidents who had been targeted by the Argentine military junta.

What could we do that might prevent Adolfo being murdered? The idea we came up with was to arrange Adolfo’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize and get reports of his nomination into the world press. Such a proposal could be formally initiated by former recipients of the prize. I had gotten to know two of them, Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams, founders of the Peace People movement, during my most recent trip to Belfast. They had also met Adolfo and were impressed with the work of Servicio. I phoned them and we worked together on a nomination letter and then on press releases both from IFOR and Peace People. Within hours the news of Adolfo’s Nobel nomination was making its way into print in hundreds of newspapers. We knew there was only the slightest chance of Adolfo receiving the award — he was little known outside Latin America — but hoped the Argentine generals would be made more cautious about Adolfo’s life. And they were. Though he was repeatedly beaten and tortured, he wasn’t executed. It took fourteen months of campaigning and appeals from several governments and such non-governmental groups as Amnesty International, but finally Adolfo was released.

IFOR staff prepared a dossier for the Nobel committee about Adolfo’s life and work, his writings and interviews with him, but regarded it as a pro forma exercise. Following his release, we gave little further thought to his Nobel nomination. Adolfo had survived and had resumed his work — this is all we had hoped for. Adolfo himself was our prize. But then in the late summer the phone rang — a call from Oslo with the news, shortly to be made public, that the committee had decided that Adolfo had been chosen. I thought at first the call might be a hoax.

On the 10th of December, along with Hildegard and Jean Goss-Mayr, I was in Oslo with Adolfo and his family for the award ceremony. We had been put up in what must have been the city’s most prestigious hotel. On the morning of the presentation, we were driven by limousine the few blocks to the aula.

Describing himself as “a small voice for those who have no voice,” in his acceptance speech Adolfo said: “I am convinced that the gospel power of nonviolence presents a choice that opens up for us a challenge of new and radical perspectives. It is an option which gives priority to the essential Christian value: the dignity of the human being; the sacred, transcendent and irrevocable dignity that belongs to the human being by reason of being a child of God and a brother or sister in Christ, and therefore, our own brother and sister.” I was impressed by his emphasis on the contemplative foundation that is needed for peace work to be constructive. “For me it is essential to have the inner peace and serenity of prayer in order to listen to the silence of God, which speaks to us in our personal life and the history of our times, of the power of love.”

Weeks before the trip to Oslo, Adolfo had phoned from Buenos Aires to ask me to arrange a meeting with Pope John Paul soon after the Nobel ceremony. I called the Papal Nuncio in The Hague and explained to him Adolfo’s hope that there might be such a meeting. I warned him that the Argentinean hierarchy, so compromised in its association with the military junta, was likely to do all in its power to block such a meeting, but the nuncio assured me there would be no problem. “The Holy Father decides on such matters himself,” he said, “and my request will go directly to his desk.” A few days later the Nuncio called with the news that we could meet John Paul for a private audience on the 13th of December.

Before the private audience there was the pope’s weekly public audience in the Aula Paolo VI, a large hall close to St. Peter’s Basilica. We were given places in the press gallery, which meant having an opportunity to watch from above the pope walk down the aula’s central aisle, repeatedly stopping and listening to people desperate to say something to him or receive a blessing. It took half an hour for him to make his way to the front of the hall. As a journalist, I had often watched famous people encountering crowds, but had never before seen anyone respond with such attentive care to so many people. It was astonishing. Pope John Paul’s impressed me as a man of inexhaustible energy. It was easy to imagine that he had been a mountain climber earlier in his life.

Finally John Paul reached his throne in the front of the hall. Behind it was a large modern sculpture representing Christ’s resurrection. Once the pope was seated, the master of ceremonies introduced various pilgrim groups present in the hall. Then the pope gave a lecture on marriage, part of a series on this topic. After the general audience there were brief meetings with individual pilgrim groups, beginning with a crowd of people, mainly in wheel chairs, who had significant physical handicaps.

These encounters were still going on when the Vatican staff person responsible for us escorted us to the papal throne room elsewhere in the same building. To Adolfo’s dismay, his wife Amanda went and sat briefly on the quite plain papal throne at the far end of the room. “I am the first woman pope,” she announced, laughing.

When John Paul at last entered the room, we immediately got down to business. For Adolfo this was not simply an opportunity to meet the pope and receive a blessing. He had a definite agenda: first to thank John Paul for his efforts to prevent a war between Argentina and Chile, an event that was far from unlikely at the time, and to present a letter signed by many young Argentineans and Chileans promising him that, in the event his efforts failed, they would refuse to fight. John Paul looked carefully at the letter and the many pages of signatures, and — speaking in Spanish — expressed his gratitude for the courage of those who had made such a commitment.

Next Adolfo gave the pope a large album of photos, with explanatory text, of people who had been kidnapped in Argentina and never seen alive again — the desaparecidos. John Paul looked through the album page by page while the conversation with Adolfo continued. Adolfo told the pope about his own experience being kidnapped and tortured and expressed his grief that the Argentinean hierarchy had been silent about the crimes committed by the junta.

A fourth item on the agenda concerned the Church in El Salvador. Earlier in the year Archbishop Oscar Romero had been assassinated while celebrating Mass. Adolfo urged the pope to appoint the acting archbishop, Arturo Rivera Damas, to become Romero’s successor. This was a controversial proposal. There were many in El Salvador’s power structure who wanted a bishop who would bless their activities, not condemn them, as Romero had done. The pope listened carefully and promised that what Adolfo asked for would be done. (Rivera Damas was later appointed Archbishop of San Salvador.)

The pope had gifts for us. We each received a silver rosary. Adolfo had a gift for him as well, a copy of my biography of Thomas Merton, which had recently been published. Merton’s writings, Adolfo told John Paul, had been a major influence in shaping his faith and vocation.

This was the one moment in the audience when I had a brief exchange with the pope. Adolfo had introduced me as the book’s author. John Paul, switching from Spanish to English, asked me if I had known Merton. “Yes,” I responded, “he had been my spiritual father during the last seven years of his life.” John Paul said he too was a great admirer of Merton’s writings. A close friend of his, he said, was both the publisher of his own books in Poland and also the publisher of Polish translations of many of Merton’s books. He had read them all, he said, and still had them in his library. He looked through my book, pausing over various photos.

At this point a bishop who had been standing behind the pope throughout the audience reminded him that our audience had taken considerably longer than had been scheduled. The pope apologized, gave us a final blessing, and left for his next appointment.

There is one other detail on the Rome visit worth recalling.

In the weeks before the trip to Rome I had tried but failed to arrange a meeting with the cardinal who headed the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace. The morning following our papal audience, Adolfo decided that, even without an appointment, we should go and seek a dialogue on the spot. After all, pictures of our meeting with John Paul were on the front page of Rome’s newspapers. If the pope would meet us, surely a cardinal would.

We had a good friend on the cardinal’s staff. Once we arrived at the Commission offices, we asked the receptionist to contact him. A few minutes later he appeared, obviously in panic. “Please leave immediately,” he begged. “The cardinal refuses to see you and does not want you in the building. If you don’t leave, I will be fired and never have a job again in the Vatican civil service.” He said he would meet us in fifteen minutes at a certain nearby café. Once there he explained that the Argentinean hierarchy had more influence in his department than the pope. It was a lesson in Vatican realities. Even the pope’s example sometimes has little influence on his own curia.

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Jim Forest
e-mail: [email protected]
Orthodox Peace Fellowship web site: http://www.incommunion.org
Jim & Nancy Forest web site: https://www.jimandnancyforest.com
photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/
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