Category: Jim Essay

by Jim Forest

The book you hold in your hands was intended for publication in 1962. While Thomas Merton would be pleased that 42 years later this labor of love is at last in bookshops and libraries, it would distress him that, far from being a poignant memento of a bygone era, it remains both timely and relevant.

1962: Culturally it was still the fifties. What would be known as “the Sixties” hadn’t quite started. “West Side Story” had won the Academy Award for best film of 1961. The Beatles were unheard of.

John F. Kennedy was serving his second year as President of the United States. Nikita Khrushchev was in his fourth year as premier of the Soviet Union. It was three years since the revolution led by Fidel Castro had taken charge of Cuba. American military involvement in Vietnam was steadily building. The Cold War was still blowing its icy winds across every border. Russians en masse were regarded as godless Communists. The United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France were the only countries with nuclear weapons. It was ten years since the first hydrogen bomb had been exploded, seventeen years since the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by much less powerful atom bombs. Americans were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on fallout shelters as a means of surviving nuclear war.

Politicians, generals, and experts of the period spoke of “missile gaps” when they advocated building missiles that flew further and delivered bigger payloads.

Nuclear weapons were by no means the only systems of mass destruction. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had large programs for the development and stockpiling of chemical and biological weapons.

“Peace” was a suspect word. Those who used it risked being regarded as “reds” or “pinkos.”

Yet profound change was underway in the United States. Racism was being challenged. Activists in America’s Civil Rights movement were struggling to integrate schools, public transport, and restaurants. Martin Luther King had acquired an international reputation.

The Roman Catholic Church in America in 1962, after many years of struggle with anti-Catholic prejudice, could be relied on to have a supportive attitude regarding America’s economic system and foreign policy. Over many a Catholic parish or school entrance were carved the words, Pro Deo et Patria — for God and country. Many Catholics had made a career in the military, the FBI and the CIA. For the first time, there was a Catholic in the White House.

One of America’s most widely read religious writers was a Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. Orphaned in his youth, a convert to the Catholic Church while studying at Columbia University, in December 1941 he had given up a teaching job at St. Bonaventure’s College in western New York State in order to begin monastic life at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in rural Kentucky. When his abbot became aware of his talents as a writer, he was encouraged to write an autobiography. Published in 1948, The Seven Storey Mountain became a runaway best-seller. Merton, only six years a monk and only 33 years old, found himself a famous man. Every subsequent book he wrote was assured excellent sales both in English and in translation. For years his main themes were the monastic vocation, contemplation, prayer, sacramental life, the lives of saints and the quest for holiness, but there were also books that revealed his struggles as a monk. Though he occasionally revealed critical social views — there was a blast at racism in The Seven Storey Mountain — many of his readers were unprepared for his criticisms of the arms race and the Cold War that began appearing in Catholic journals in 1961.

There was also the Catholic Worker movement, let by Dorothy Day, another convert. Founded during the Depression in 1933, it had not only brought into existence many houses of hospitality to welcome the down-and-out but often took part in protests against preparations for war. While regarded as marginal by most of the hierarchy, it was a center of much ferment and enthusiasm. It was one of the few Catholic groups at that time deeply engaged in the Civil Rights movement. Its publication had many thousands of readers.

Thomas Merton was one of those who had a high opinion of Dorothy Day and the movement she led. In the summer of 1961 he submitted the first of a series of articles — “The Root of War is Fear” Endnote — to The Catholic Worker. It appeared in the October issue. (At the time I was part of the Catholic Worker community in New York. Dorothy Day, aware of my interest in Merton’s writing, asked me to prepare his essay for publication and also encouraged me to correspond with him. Thus began a relationship of letters and occasional visits that was to last until Merton’s death in December 1968.)

In April 1962 Merton completed Peace in the Post-Christian Era. He had hoped it would be released by Macmillan in the Fall. Instead it was banned by Dom Gabriel Sortais, Abbot General of Merton’s order: the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, better known as the Trappists. Just days after completing work on Peace in the Post-Christian Era, a letter from Dom Gabriel was delivered to Merton which forbade him to do any further writing on the subject of war and peace. Endnote

The following day, Merton sent me the most distressed letter that I ever received from him:

Now here is the axe. 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, he said, reflected

an astounding incomprehension of the seriousness of the present crisis in its religious aspect. It 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 his Abbot General was a different conception of the identity and mission of the Church. For Merton the monk was obliged to be among the most attentive to what was going on in the world at large and had a role to play in renewal:

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.

But these authoritarian minds believe that the function of the monk is not to see or hear any new dimension, simply to support the already existing viewpoints precisely insofar as and because they are 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. The function of the monk, as far as renewal in the historical context goes, then becomes simply to affirm his total support of officialdom. 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. The monastery as dynamo concept goes back to this. The monk is there to generate spiritual power that will justify over and over again the already pre-decided rightness of the officials above him. He must under 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.

Merton wondered aloud if it he should obey:

Now you will ask me: how do I reconcile obedience, true obedience (which is synonymous with love) with a situation like this? Shouldn’t I just blast the whole thing wide open, or walk out, or tell them to jump in the lake?

But he was convinced disobedience would do more harm than good and that, in any event, it could not be his path:

Let us suppose for the sake of argument that this was not completely excluded. Why would I do this? For the sake of the witness for peace? For the sake of witnessing to the truth of the Church, in its reality, as against this figment of the imagination? Simply for the sake of blasting off and getting rid of the tensions and frustrations in my own spirit, and feeling honest about it?

In my own particular case, every one of these 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.

I am where I am. I have freely chosen this state, and have freely chosen to stay in it when the question of a possible change arose. If I am a disturbing element, that is all right. I am not making a point of being that, but simply of saying what my conscience dictates and doing so without seeking my own interest. This means accepting such limitations as may be placed on me by authority, and not because I may or may not agree with the ostensible reasons why the limitations are imposed, but out of love for God who is using these things to attain ends which I myself cannot at the moment see or comprehend. I know He can and will in His own time take good care of the ones who impose limitations unjustly or unwisely. That is His affair and not mine. In this dimension I find no contradiction between love and obedience, and as a matter of fact it is the only sure way of transcending the limits and arbitrariness of ill-advised commands.

Endnote

Behind the silencing, Merton wrote me 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. Endnote

Merton responded to Dom Gabriel’s letter with the promise of obedience but also a defense of his book. In mid-May Merton received a reply in which the Abbot General renewed his order, stressing the difference between religious orders which teach and those that pray. “I am not asking you to remain indifferent to the fate of the world,” Dom Gabriel insisted. “But I believe you have the power to influence the world by your prayers and by your life withdrawn into God more than by your writings. That is why I am not thinking about hurting the cause you are defending when I ask that you give up your intention of publishing the book you have finished, and abstain from now on from writing on the subject of atomic warfare, preparation for war, etc.” Endnote

Ironically, as Merton points out in Peace in the Post-Christian Era, Machiavelli’s The Prince, an unabashedly immoral book, “has never been on the Index of books forbidden to Catholics.” Endnote

Merton obeyed Dom Gabriel, if in a limited way. Never given to a publisher nor vetted by Trappist censors, Peace in the Post-Christian Era remained generally unknown, yet was not altogether buried. Merton resorted to samizdat methods for putting his book in the hands of others, much as a Russian might in that same era. Dom James Fox, Merton’s abbot, though far from a radical, decided that Dom Gabriel’s ruling only barred publication in a widely-distributed commercial form. He also saw no need for the order’s censors to review material that wasn’t being offered to the general public — thus anything mimeographed or offered to publications with a small circulation. Endnote

Dom James gave one of the abbey’s young monks the job of typing the book on stencils for a mimeographed edition. In the first printing, several hundred copies of Peace in the Post-Christian Era were produced by this means. By June Merton began mailing copies to a wide variety of his correspondents, including Ethel Kennedy, sister-in-law of President Kennedy, and Cardinal Montini in Milan, later to become Pope Paul VI. Not long afterward, a second printing was run off. By the end of 1962 there were five or six hundred copies of the book in circulation. Hot item that it was, few of them stayed long at any one address. Merton’s banned book must have reached thousands of attentive readers within a few months. Many of them were people of influence.

Part of the distribution of Peace in the Post-Christian Era was in my hands. In the course of the summer of 1962, by which time I was on the staff of Catholic Relief Services, Merton sent me at least twenty copies to distribute to others. I still have one copy that wasn’t given away, though I can see from marginal notes in it that I shared it with at least one other reader.

I no longer have a carbon of my letter to Merton responding to the book nor has it survived in the Merton archives in Louisville, Endnote but I see from a reply dated July 7 that I had put forward a number of suggestions for revision in the event he was ever able to do more work on the book. I expressed disappointment that Merton’s own convictions about war, so similar to Dorothy Day’s, were not expressed more explicitly, and proposed he add a section about Francis of Assisi, a saint particularly important to Merton. During the Fifth Crusade, Francis had given an example of unarmed peacemaking, traveling to Egypt to meet with one of Christianity’s chief opponents, Sultan Malik-al-Kamil. Francis had also founded a “third order” for lay people whose members were forbidden to possess or use weapons of war.

Merton wrote in reply:

What a mess one gets into 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 the long run the result is about zero. … Certainly if I ever get to work over the book again, I will bear in mind your requests. Endnote

Reading this again after all these years, I am struck by how the white-hot anger Merton has expressed in his previous letter had either receded or been put under wraps. I’m also impressed by his reluctance to defend his book in the face of the criticisms I had voiced. There is a stunning modesty in his reply to a reader not half his age. Yet one sees in Merton’s journal entries and letters to other friends how hard the struggle was to come to terms with being silenced on what he remained convinced was a crucial issue. Certainly he did not believe that he had been wasting his time in writing the book nor could he agree that it was just as well that it went unpublished.

Had publication not been blocked, perhaps there might have been a final round of revisions, but in its broad outlines I doubt the final text would differ significantly from the book as now published.

Fortunately much that Merton had been forbidden to say was being said by Pope John XXIII. Endnote A succession of papal statements critical both of the arms race and nuclear weapons culminated in the publication of Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth), issued in April 1963. It quickly became the most widely discussed papal encyclical of modern times. Addressed not only to Catholics but to all people of good will, Pope John stressed that the most basic human right is the right to life. John spoke out passionately against such threats to life as the arms race, said that war was no longer “an apt means for vindicating violated rights,” and called for legal protection of conscientious objectors to military service. Far from sanctioning blind obedience to those in authority, the pope stressed the individual responsibility to protect life and uphold morality: “If civil authorities legislate or allow anything that is contrary to the will of God, neither the law made nor the authorization granted can be binding on the conscience of the citizens since God has more right to be obeyed than man.” Endnote

Writing to the Abbot General to say “it was a good thing that Pope John didn’t have to get his encyclical through our censors: and could I now start up again,” Endnote Merton asked if he might now return to work on Peace in the Post-Christian Era so that it might finally be published. Unmoved, Dom Gabriel renewed the prohibition. Merton commented in his journal, “At the back of [Dom Gabriel’s] mind obviously is an adamant conviction that France [of which Dom Gabriel was a citizen] should have the bomb and use it if necessary. He says that the encyclical [Pacem in Terris] has changed nothing in the right of a nation to arm itself with nuclear weapons for self-defense.” Endnote

A Council of the Roman Catholic Church, the first one in nearly a hundred years, had been announced by Pope John in January 1959 and had gotten underway in October 1962 — the same month, as it happened, of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the United States and the Soviet Union found themselves on the verge of nuclear war.

Seeking a way to play a role in the Council’s discussions, in December 1962 Merton sent copies of Peace in the Post-Christian Era to Hildegard and Jean Goss-Mayr, secretaries of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. The Goss-Mayrs were in close contact with Cardinal Ottaviani, Secretary of the Holy Office and the member of the Curia most responsible for the process of preparing first drafts of Council documents. One of these was Schema 13, as it was known in the drafting stage — a document on the church’s role in the modern world, including the issue of war.

After two years of drafting and redrafting and many hours of debate, Schema 13 at last was published in 1965 as the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes).. The culminating work of the Council, it contained the only specific condemnation issued by the Second Vatican Council:

Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and humanity, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.

It was a sentence not very different than this passage in Peace in the Post-Christian Era:

I wish to insist above all on one fundamental truth: that all nuclear war, and indeed massive destruction of cities, populations, nations and cultures by any means whatever is a most serious crime which is forbidden to us not only by Christian ethics but by every sane and serious moral code. Endnote

Those who renounce violence altogether, choosing the tools of nonviolence instead, won the Council’s approbation:

We cannot fail to praise those who renounce the use of violence in the vindication of their rights and who resort to methods of defense which are available to the weaker parties too, provided that this can be done without injury to the rights and duties of others in the community itself. Endnote

Supporting legislation for conscientious objectors, the Council urged all governments to make “humane provision for those who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to bear arms, provided that they accept some form of service to the human community.” Endnote

Echoing another major theme Merton had explored in Peace in the Post-Christian Era, the Council Fathers declared that orders which conflict with the “all-embracing principles of natural law” were criminal, stating further that “blind obedience cannot excuse those who yield to them,” and that “the courage of those who fearlessly and openly resist such commands merits supreme commendation.” Endnote

How much Merton’s writings played a role in the Council we may never know, but without a doubt he was a significant influence, mainly thanks to effective distribution of the mimeographed edition of Peace in the Post-Christian Era.

Now, forty-two years after it was written and thirty-six years after the author’s death, the first copy of Peace in the Post-Christian Era bearing a publisher’s imprint is coming off the press. These pages have slept even longer than Rip van Winkle.

How does a book addressing issues that were current in 1962 hold up in a world in which the Soviet Union is no more and the Cold War a chapter heading in history books? Despite many close calls, there has been no use of nuclear weapons in war since 1945. Indeed American and Russian stockpiles of nuclear weapons have been hugely reduced and nuclear tests have gone underground and become a rarity. We no longer hear an ominous phrase that was repeatedly used in the sixties to describe the lynchpin of deterrence strategy: “mutually assured destruction.” Endnote Few remember the names of Herman Kahn and Edward Teller, men mentioned repeatedly in Peace in the Post-Christian Era.

Yet the means of fighting nuclear war are still with us. Despite all the weapons that have been eliminated thanks to a series of treaty agreements of the past thirty years, the United States retains an estimated 10,400 nuclear warheads in its arsenal and Russia a similar number. Endnote Meanwhile, in the United States, the Bush administration has called for development of a “new generation” of nuclear weapons “better suited” to battlefield use. The number of countries known to possess nuclear weapons has grown to include not only Britain and France but China, India, Pakistan, and Israel, while several other countries are suspected to have nuclear weapons or are known to have taken steps toward obtaining them. There is in addition the grave danger of nuclear weapons being procured by such terrorist organizations as Al-Qaeda. The issue of nuclear weapons and other means of mass destruction is not only still with us but the possibility of their use in war is growing.

Merton did not foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the USSR’s Warsaw Pact alliance in Eastern Europe. Neither did he anticipate the current “War on Terror,” as the Bush administration has defined its response to the events of September 11, 2001. Nothing similar to the Taliban or Al-Qaeda existed in 1962. Yet, as one reads Peace in the Post-Christian Era, it is striking how often the word “terrorism” appears — referring not to the activities of secret groups but rather to the acceptance by governments of tactics of war that result in large numbers of non-combatant casualties.

It is interesting how, when Merton speaks of Communism, references to terrorism often work well in its place. For example:

The struggle against totalitarianism is directed not only against an external enemy — Communism — but also against our own hidden tendencies towards fascist or collectivist aberrations. Endnote

The same would make sense today with only a slight alteration:

The struggle against totalitarianism is directed not only against an external enemy — such terrorist groups as Al-Qaeda — but also against our own hidden tendencies towards fascist or collectivist aberrations.

In many ways the world is hardly different than it was in 1962. Then as now, one need not have an overactive imagination to envision Doomsday. Death by nuclear explosion is only one of many grim futures we can all too easily imagine for ourselves.

Always sensitive to the language of propaganda, Merton would not be surprised with such current phrases as “the axis of evil,” nor that Americans still take it for granted that evil is committed by it enemies, not themselves.

The willingness of the United States to participate in the United Nations and other international bodies only when doing so suits national interests would not surprise him. As he wrote in Peace in the Post-Christian Era:

Indeed the big powers have been content to use the UN as a forum for political and propagandist wrestling matches and have not hesitated to take independent action that led to the discrediting of the UN whenever this has been profitable to them. Endnote

The same mind-set is linked with the temptation to initiate pre-emptive war “based not on the fact that we ourselves are actually under military attack, but that we are ‘provoked’ and so ‘threatened’ that even the most drastic measures are justified. Endnote

Also unchanged despite the passage of time is American bewilderment that so good-willed a people are the object of so much enmity:

Faced by the supercilious contempt of friends as well as the hatred of our avowed enemies, and wondering what there is in us to hate, we have considered ourselves and found ourselves quite decent, harmless and easygoing people who only ask to be left alone to make money and have a good time. Endnote

One of Merton’s still-relevant themes is the way that those moral restrictions which warriors pledge to apply to their conduct as they contemplate conflict in the abstract gradually recede and finally completely evaporate as events in actual war push them toward more drastic measures. In the early days of World War II America and Britain vowed not to replicate the city bombing committed by their enemies, but in the end didn’t hesitate to regard entire cities as legitimate targets. As Merton writes:

Moral thinking guided by pragmatic principles tends to be very vague, very fluid. Moral decisions were now a series of more or less opportunistic choices based on short term guesses of possible consequences, rather than on definite moral principles. Endnote

When the first mimeographed copy arrived by post, I recall being startled with the book’s title. Was I really living in a post-Christian world? After all, most Americans professed a belief in God and one didn’t have to travel far to find well-attended churches. I couldn’t deny, however, that our religious life in many ways resembled a Hollywood set: a thin veneer of impressive facades supported by scaffolding in back. As Merton put it:

Whether we like it or not, we have to admit we are already living in a post-Christian world, that is to say a world in which Christian ideals and attitudes are relegated more and more to the minority. … It is frightening to realize that the facade of Christianity which still generally survives has perhaps little or nothing behind it, and that what was once called “Christian society” is more purely and simply a materialistic neo-paganism with a Christian veneer. Endnote … Not only non-Christians but even Christians themselves tend to dismiss the Gospel ethic on nonviolence and love as “sentimental.” Endnote

Yet not all is as it was when Merton finished writing Peace in the Post-Christian Era. One of the changes that would greatly please Merton is that among Christians the word “peacemaking” is no longer the suspect term it was in 1962, a profound change in attitude that is partly thanks to him.

A striking sign of the times is the fact that several years ago the Archdiocese of New York formally proposed that Dorothy Day be recognized as a saint and placed on the calendar of the Catholic Church. The Vatican has already given her the title, “Servant of God.”

The Catholic Church has been a consistent voice for peace since Merton’s time. Its commitment to seek peace has not wilted despite such events as the terrorist attacks of September 11 or America’s subsequent “pre-emptive” war in Iraq.

Were he alive and no longer hobbled by censorship, perhaps Merton would set to work on updating Peace in the Post-Christian Era. But many paragraphs, even chapters, would remain unaltered. He would remind us once again that Christ waves no flags and that Christianity belongs to no political power bloc. He would affirm once again that “an essential part of the ‘good news’ is that nonviolent and reasonable measures are stronger than weapons. Indeed, by spiritual arms, the early Church conquered the entire Roman world.”

* * *

by Jim Forest

[see lecture can be seen at:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXNPEbrm7S8&t=5s ]

At different periods of my life, Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen were spiritual parents to me. Both were excellent confessors and counselors. Both made it possible for me to share parts of myself that were painful, awkward and embarrassing. Each helped me survive hard times and survive close encounters with despair. So I say at the beginning that whatever light I can shine on them is not the result simply of studying their writing, identifying major themes, trying to see where their thoughts converge or diverge, or analyzing them as if I were studying them through a telescope. They were both people who played — indeed still play — a significant role in my life.

For all their differences, they had a great deal in common. Both were Europeans who made their home in North America. Both lived a life that centered in the Eucharist. Both were Catholic priests. Both were deeply responsive to the suffering of others. Both were involved in opposition to war, racism and social injustice, for which they were sometimes regarded as liberals or even radicals, yet both took a dim view of popular political ideologies, for which they were sometimes regarded as conservatives. Liberal? Conservative? Neither label fits.

Both were restless, searching men.

Thomas Merton entered the limelight after the publication of his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. In it he recounts one of the hardest decisions he faced as a young man — whether to become a monk or to be a full-time member of a community of hospitality, Friendship House, in Harlem. He had been volunteering at Friendship House while teaching at St. Bonaventure’s University. Even after deciding on the monastic path, a part of Merton continued to feel a powerful connection with those who cenetered themselves in the works of mercy, especially the Catholic Worker movement that Dorothy Day had founded.

Once grafted into monastic life at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, he seemed to say there was no better place on earth to be than his contemlative outpost in rural Kentucky. But in fact it wasn’t easy for him to maintain stability. Some of Merton’s letters in later years almost catch fire with complaints about the shortcoming of life in his chosen monastery. On several occasions Merton sought permission to leave Gethsemani with the idea of sharing in the life of a poorer, smaller, more primitive monastery either in Latin America or some other part of the world. Yet one of the remarkable achievements of his life was how steadfast he was in his monastic; he remained a monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani from 1941 until his death his in 1968. Still there was a basic restlessness. It is somehow appropriate that he should die while on pilgrimage on the other side of the planet while attending a monastic conference in Thailand after weeks of travel in India and Sri Lanka.

Henri had no monastic vows to limit his travels nor was his bishop in Utrecht inclined to rein him in. His restlessness brought him from Holland to America. He taught at Notre Dame, then Yale, then Harvard, but could not bring himself to stay at any of these distinguished institutions. Searching for community, he was for an extended period a temporary brother at a Trappist monastery, but found monastic life, though it helped clear his mind and re-center him, wasn’t what he was searching for. He had a sabbatical in Latin America and for a time thought he was perhaps called to remain there, but then decided this also wasn’t his calling. He finally found a home for himself not in academia or monastic life but with the L’Arche community in Canada — not among the best and the brightest but the mentally disadvantaged plus their downwardly-mobile assistants. But even there he was often on the move.

Like Merton, Henri died while traveling — two heart attacks in his homeland, Holland, while en route to Russia where he intended to make a film about Rembrandt’s painting of the Return of the Prodigal Son.

There are still other Merton-Nouwen similarities:

Both Merton and Nouwen produced a flood of books, many of which refuse to go out-of-print. Few writers on religious life have been so widely read or so often translated into other languages as these two. Thanks to their writings, both still have a huge influence on the lives of many people decades after their deaths. Both had a remarkable gift for communicating to others the fact that to follow Christ is a journey of endless pilgrimage.

Both of them died relatively young. Merton age 53, Henri at 64.

Another commonality: They had a shared appreciation of the Orthodox Church and deep distress regarding the Great Schism. Both felt that the healing of East-West divisions within Christianity could be assisted by a process of East-West integration in one’s spiritual life. As Merton put this in one of his journal-based books, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:

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

Both of them had a perceptive appreciation of icons as focal points of prayer and contemplation and as non-verbal theological declarations. It’s this commonality I’d like to focus on today. Merton and Nouwen have played a major role in this quiet movement of rediscovering icons and their role both in private and communal prayer. It is partly thanks to the two of them that, in recent years, one often finds icons — an art form chiefly associated with Orthodox Christianity — in Catholic and even Protestant churches as well as in retreat centers, monasteries, homes and offices.

Before going further, let me explain how these two gifted men enter my life.

My contact with Merton started in the summer of 1961 not long after I had been granted an early discharge from the U.S. Navy as a conscientious objector and had joined the Catholic Worker community in New York City, a house of hospitality mainly for homeless street people. At the time I had the idea that the Catholic Worker would be a way station en route to the monastery, a vocational aspiration that had been in part nurtured by reading Merton’s autobiography.

I was astonished to discover that Dorothy Day, leader of the Catholic Worker, was one of Merton’s correspondents. Aware I was a Merton reader, she shared with me his letters to her. It was Dorothy who urged me, indeed instructed me, to write to Merton. To my surprise, he responded. The first letter led to many more. From 1961 until his death in 1968 I wrote to Merton often, and he to me, perhaps on average a letter per month in both directions. In The Hidden Ground of Love, an anthology of Merton letters, his letters to me take up sixty pages. There were not only letters from him, but cards and copies of manuscripts. There were also occasional packages — I recall a box of monastery-made cheese with a gift card signed “Uncle Louie and the boys.” (In monastic life, Merton was Father Louis.) I also had two visits with Merton at the monastery, one early in 1962, another late in 1964.

It was Merton who introduced me to icons. In the summer or fall of 1962 a postcard came, the image side of which I look back on as quite significant but at the time I regarded in vaguely negative terms: a photo of a medieval Russian icon — Mary with the child Jesus in her arms. Jesus, though infant-sized, looked more like a miniature man. It seemed to me formal, lifeless and somehow even flatter than the postcard that bore the image. Compared to the masterpieces of the Renaissance, this sort of painting seemed to me, at best, something left over from the kindergarten of art history. Years later, when I had reason to make a complete set of photocopies of all Merton’s notes and letters to me, I didn’t bother to photocopy the image side of this or any of the other icon postcards he had sent me. I assumed that Merton had no more taste for this kind of primitive Christian art than I did. I imagined some donor had given the monastery a box of icon postcards which Merton was using in the spirit of voluntary poverty.

It was only years after his death, in writing a biography of Merton, Living With Wisdom, that it finally dawned on me how crucial a role icons had played in Merton’s life and conversion and realized that no one could have been happier in sending an icon photo to friends than Merton.

In fact I should have been aware of this side of Merton even before I knew him personally. It’s something he writes about in The Seven Storey Mountain, when he describes one of the catastrophes of his unsettled childhood, his father’s death when Tom was a student at Oakham, a residential high school in rural England. Owen Merton, on the edge of significant recogniton as an artist, was suffering from a brain tumor that produced a large lump on his head that made him unable to speak. Tom, fifteen years old, would occasionally go down to London and sit in anguished silence next to his father’s bed in Middlesex Hospital. Gazing into his father’s eyes, he must have thought with bitterness of his mother’s death from cancer ten years earlier.

Merton could see no meaning in what was happening to his father, whose misshapen head seemed to him like “a raw wound for which there was no adequate relief.” Now on the verge of becoming an orphan, he responded with anger to the religious platitudes he heard from the chaplain of his public school, Oakham. Clearly there was no “loving God.” Clearly life had no meaning. His patents’ fate was proof of that. “You had to take it like an animal,” he wrote in his autobiography. The only lesson he could draw from his parents’ fate was to avoid as much pain as possible and take what pleasure you could out of life. At chapel services at his school, Merton would no longer join in reciting the Creed. “I believe in nothing” was his anti-creed at this point in his life.

Yet Owen Merton had another view of his own suffering which he managed to communicate to his son through drawings, the only “last word” he could manage in his silenced condition. Shortly before Owen’s death, Tom came to see his father in his hospital room and, to his bewilderment, found the bed littered with drawings of “Byzantine-looking saints with beards and great halos.” In a word, drawings of icons. The younger Merton didn’t know what to make of them. He had no eye for icons at the time. He then regarded Byzantine art, he confessed in an unpublished autobiographical novel, The Labyrinth, as “clumsy and ugly and brutally stupid.”

Owen Merton died early in January 1931, days before Tom’s sixteenth birthday. Two years passed. In 1933, having finished his studies at Oakham and with more than half a year to fill before entering Clare College in Cambridge in September, Merton set off for an extended European holiday, a one man Grand Tour with an extended visit to Italy the main event. He hiked along the Mediterranean coast of France, then took the train into Italy: first Genoa, then Florence, finally Rome.

Once in Rome, a Baedeker guidebook in hand, he spent days following the main tourist track, but the big attractions, from the Roman Forum to St. Peter’s Basilica, left him either yawning or annoyed. The architecture, statuary and painting of the Roman Empire, the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation struck him as vapid and melodramatic. “It was so evident, merely from the masses of stone and brick that still represented the palaces and temples and baths, that imperial Rome must have been one of the most revolting and ugly and depressing cities the world has ever seen,” Merton wrote in The Seven Storey Mountain. It seemed to him that the best one could say of ancient Rome was that it would have been an ideal set for a Cecil B. DeMille film epic with a cast of thousands.

Perhaps we would never have heard of Thomas Merton had it not been for what happened when he made his way from the guidebook’s four-star attractions to those with three or two stars, or even one, and thus came to know some of Rome’s most ancient churches — Cosmas and Damian, San Clemente, Santa Sabina, Santa Maria Maggiore, the Lateran, Santa Costanza, Santa Maria in Trastevere, San Prassede and others. These moved him in an unexpected and extraordinary way. On the walls of many of these churches he was meeting his father’s deathbed drawings.

These were all churches of sober architecture whose main decorations were mosaic icons, images of profound stillness, bold lines, vibrant colors and quiet intensity that have little in common with the more theatrical art that was eventually to take over in Rome. They house some of the best surviving examples of the art of Christianity’s first millennium. In Santa Maria Maggiore, two lengthy tiers of mosaic icons date from the fifth century.

Merton’s first such encounter with ancient Christian art was with a fresco in a ruined chapel. Later he discovered a large mosaic over the altar at Cosmas and Damian of Christ coming in judgment with a fiery glow in the clouds beneath his feet against a vivid blue background. This was not at all the gravity-free, effete Jesus that he had so often encountered in art of the baroque period down to the Pre-Raphaelites.

“I was fascinated by these Byzantine mosaics,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I began to haunt the churches where they were to be found, and, as an indirect consequence, all the other churches that were more or less of the same period. And thus without knowing anything about it, I became a pilgrim.”

The excited memory of those days of eager discovery was still fresh when he was writing The Seven Storey Mountain fifteen years later:

What a thing it was to come upon the genius of an art full of spiritual vitality and earnestness and power — an art that was tremendously serious and alive and eloquent and urgent in all that it had to say …. [an art] without pretentiousness, without fakery, that had nothing theatrical about it. Its solemnity was made all the more astounding by its simplicity … and by its subservience to higher ends, architectural, liturgical and spiritual ends which I could not even begin to understand, but which I could not avoid guessing, since the nature of the mosaics themselves and their position and everything about them proclaimed it aloud.

Through these icons, he began to understand, not simply who Christ was but to experience who Christ is. In this crucial section of his autobiography, the crescendo come in two intense paragraphs that read more like a litany than ordinary prose:

And now for the first time in my whole life I began to find out something of whom this Person was that men call Christ. It was obscure but it was a true knowledge of Him, in some sense, truer than I know and truer than I would admit. But it was in Rome that my conception of Christ was formed. It was there I first saw Him, Whom I now serve as my King, and Who owns and rules my life.

It is the Christ of the Apocalypse, the Christ of the Martyrs, the Christ of the Fathers. It is the Christ of Saint John, and of Saint Paul, and of St. Augustine and St. Jerome and all the Fathers — and of the Desert Fathers. It is Christ God, Christ King.

The intensity of the experiences reflected in this powerful litany may be due in part to the fact that Merton was alone in Rome. There is something about solitary, unmediated, face-to-face contact that can increase one’s vulnerability to a work of art. There is no schedule to keep, no guide or professor to explain, no bus to board in fifteen minutes, no idle chatter with people more interested in menus than mosaics.

Eager to decipher the iconographic images that so arrested his eyes, Merton put aside the D.H. Lawrence novels that had weighed down his rucksack and bought a Bible. “I read more and more of the Gospels,” he recalled, “and my love for the old churches and their mosaics grew from day to day.”

The attraction of icons wasn’t simply due to Merton’s newly-gained appreciation of the aesthetics of iconography but to a profound sense of peace he experienced within the walls of churches graced with such imagery. He had, he said, “a deep and strong conviction that I belonged there.”

Merton desperately wanted to pray, to light a candle, to kneel down, to pray with his body as well as his mind, but found the prospect of publicly kneeling in a church alarming and, even worse, embarrassing. Finally one morning he climbed to the top of the Aventine Hill on the east side of the Tiber, crowned by the fifth century church of Santa Sabina, one of the oldest and least spoiled churches in Rome. Once inside, he found he could no longer play the guidebook-studying tourist. “Although the church was almost empty,” he later wrote, “I walked across the stone floor mortally afraid that a poor devout old Italian woman was following me with suspicious eyes.” He knelt down at the altar rail and, with tears, recited the Our Father over and over again.

At age eighteen, Merton had undergone, without realizing exactly what it was, a mystical experience: that is an encounter with the living Christ. From that moment he had something against which to measure everything, whether himself or religious art or the Church in history. He knew what was phony, not because of some theory but because of an experience of Christ that, in his case, had been mediated through iconography.

The pilgrimage that followed was nothing like an arrow’s direct flight to faith, baptism and the Church. The coming winter at Clare College was to prove a disastrous time in his life, the “nadir of winter darkness,” as he put it in Seven Storey Mountain. He did more drinking than studying and seems to have fathered an illegitimate child. His guardian in London wanted no further responsibility for Owen Merton’s wayward son and sent him packing to his grandparents in America.

Four years after arriving in New York, while a student at Columbia, Merton was received into the Catholic Church. Three years later, in December 1941, he arrived at the Trappist monastic community of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Yet his encounter with icons was far from finished.

Of the many books Merton wrote during his years at the Abbey of Gethsemani, it is striking to discover that only one of them got as far as being set in type and yet wasn’t published. The title was Art and Worship. It was to have gone to press in 1959. The galleys sheets survive at the Thomas Merton Center in Louisville. Unfortunately his publisher had second thoughts about the project, fearing the book would damage Merton’s reputation.

What Merton had hoped to do with his small book was to sensitize his readers to an appreciation of iconography, a tradition which in the West, at least, had been abandoned since the Renaissance and was all but forgotten. “It is the task of the iconographer,” he declared in Art and Worship, “to open our eyes to the actual presence of the Kingdom in the world, and to remind us that though we see nothing of its splendid liturgy, we are, if we believe in Christ the Redeemer, in fact living and worshipping as ‘fellow citizens of the angels and saints, built upon the chief cornerstone with Christ’.”

An art expert who had read galleys of the book convinced the publisher that such an opinion was disconcertingly dated. The iconoclastic Sixties were about to unfold, but even in the Fifties nothing could have been more out-of-fashion than icons.

Merton reluctantly gave up on the book, yet he was never weaned of his love of this art form. Occasionally he returned to the topic of icons in letters. Only months before his death, he was in correspondence about icons with a Quaker friend, June Yungblut, in Atlanta. He confessed to her that books which presented Jesus as simply one of history’s prophetic figures left him cold. He was, he wrote to her, “hung up in a very traditional Christology.” He had no interest in a Christ who was merely a great teacher who possessed “a little flash of the light.” His Christ, he told her, was “the Christ of the Byzantine icons.”

June was puzzled. In a letter sent to her in March 1968, Merton explained what he meant by the “Christ of the Byzantine icons.” The whole tradition of iconography, he said,

represents a traditional experience formulated in a theology of light, the icon being a kind of sacramental medium for the illumination and awareness of the glory of Christ within us. … What one ‘sees’ in prayer before an icon is not an external representation of a historical person, but an interior presence in light, which is the glory of the transfigured Christ, the experience of which is transmitted in faith from generation to generation by those who have “seen,” from the Apostles on down. … So when I say that my Christ is the Christ of the icons, I mean that he is reached not through any scientific study but through direct faith and the mediation of the liturgy, art, worship, prayer, theology of light, etc., that is all bound up with the Russian and Greek tradition.

We come upon a final clue to the place icons had in his inner life when we consider the short list of personal effects that were returned with his body when it was flown back to the monastery from Thailand. Among the items was “1 Small Icon on Wood of Virgin and Child.”

Now what about the place of icons in the life of Henri Nouwen?

First, an icon-related aside: A few days after his death, I learned from his brother Laurens that, while on his final trip, Henri had been reading page proofs of a book of mine, Praying With Icons. A friend teased me that my writing had done Henri in, but then kidly reassured me that it was Henri’s ultra-vulnerable heart that was to blame. “If anyone had a heart that wasn’t made of stainless steel,” she said, “it was Henri Nouwen.”

Henri managed not only to write but to publish a book on icons that Merton would have loved: Behold the Beauty of the Lord. This thin volume remains among the best introductions to icons — very accessible, not at all technical, with a directness and sobriety that one can only describe as icon-like. With his usual immediacy, Henri explains how one icon and then several others gained a place in his life. He shares with his readers what he had so far learned from long periods of living with four of them: St. Andrei Rublev’s “Holy Trinity” icon, an icon of Mary holding the Christ child in her arms, an icon of the face of Christ (also by Rublev), and finally an icon of the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles at Pentecost.

Of course Henri had seen icons in art history books, museums, churches and monasteries many times, but it wasn’t until his first visit to the L’Arche community in Trosly, France, in 1983 that he began to see icons with wide-open eyes. Barbara Swanekamp, assistant to L’Arche founder Jean Vanier, had put a reproduction of Rublev’s icon of the Holy Trinity on the table of the room where Henri would be staying. “After gazing for many weeks at the icon,” Henri noted in Behold the Beauty of the Lord, “I felt a deep urge to write down what I had gradually learned to see.”

Those of you who knew Henri or are familiar with him through his books know that he was profoundly sensitive to the visual arts. It was a family trait. In the introduction to his book on icons, he remembers a Chagall painting his parents had purchased in Paris early in their marriage when Chagall was little known — a watercolor of a vase filled with flowers placed on a sunlit window ledge, a simple yet radiant work that made one aware of God’s silent energy. I recall seeing it when Henri brought me with him to stay overnight at his father’s house. There were many other beautiful works of art in the house — the house was a small museum of fine art — but the Chagall watercolor stood out from the rest and still remains a fresh memory. “The flowers of Chagall,” Henri writes, “come to mind as I wondered why those four icons have become so important to me.”

The connection doesn’t surprise me. Chagall was deeply influenced by iconography. In some of his paintings the link is explicit, but it is always there in more subtle ways. Chagall was never a slave to the rules of perspective or to the physics of gravity in his work. People and animals fly. Fiddlers play on rooftops. Husbands and wives embrace while floating in the kitchen. There is no vanishing point. Like an iconographer, Chagall made his canvases windows opening onto the invisible world and the life of the soul. It may be that the Chagall painting Henri grew up with helped awaken in him a capacity to appreciate icons and understand their special language.

I remember Henri coming to visit us in Holland following his stay at Trosly, a year or two before publication of Behold the Beauty of the Lord. He was very excited about the gift he had brought with him, a reproduction of the Holy Trinity icon he had purchased that morning at a shop in Paris. Though he had not yet seen the actual icon — it is in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow — yet he was confidant that the print came as close to the real thing as print technology would allow.

Though I had seen icons from time to time, no icons or icon prints were hanging in our house. Until that day I had taken only a meager interest in them. I hadn’t yet written Living With Wisdom, still less Praying With Icons. Merton’s enthusiasm for icons was still a mystery to me. It wasn’t until Henri’s visit that finally I began to see them with a similar excitement.

I vividly recall sitting at Henri’s side as he explored, with childlike enthusiasm, every detail of the Holy Trinity icon. It was, he explained, inspired by Abraham and Sara’s hospitality to the mysterious guests they received under the oak of Mamre, a story told in Genesis. Throughout the Genesis account, the three angelic guests act in perfect unity and speak with one voice. They are both guests, plural, and also guest, singular; they are both one and three. It’s the first biblical hint of the Holy Trinity. Henri remarked on the utterly submissive, sister-like faces of the three angelic figures, each inclined toward the other in a silent dialogue of self-giving love. He commented on their profound stillness, yet their warmth and vitality. Then we looked at the colors Andrei Rublev had chosen, though I later discovered that even the best reproduction can only hint at what Rublev had actually achieved, as I was to see for myself not long afterward when I first visited the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The colors are thinly layered — their transparency cannot be reproduced in photography. Henri traced the circle of perfect unity that subtly, invisibly contains the three angels. Then he traced a cross within the circle and then the trinitarian triangle it also contained. All this quiet geometry reveals key elements of the icon’s theology, yet none of it is heavy-handed. Then there is the table around which the three figures are placed — the eucharistic altar with golden chalice. Above the three figures are three objects: a house with an open door, a tree, and a mountain. The open-doored building on the upper left is both the Church and a house of hospitality. For Henri the Holy Trinity icon was an icon of “the house of love” — the Church as God intends it to be, the doors of which are never close and which need no locks. The tree in the center is the Tree of Life and also the Life-giving Cross. The mountain is the both Mount Sinai and the Mount of the Beatitudes.

Henri also spoke about the history of the icon, how Rublev had painted it as the principal icon for the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity at a monstery north of Moscow where the body of one of Russia’s most beloved saints, St. Sergius of Radonezh, had been placed. St. Sergius was a monk, woodworker and toymaker who lived in the 14th Century. He left no writings. The only words that come down to us from St. Sergius are these: “The contemplation of the Holy Trinity destroys all enmity.” Through this icon, placed in a iconostasis adjacent to the resting place of St. Sergius, Rublev sought to provide the opportunity for the contemplation of the Holy Trinity.

It may have been from Henri that I first heard the comment of one of the martyrs of the Soviet era, the physicist, mathematician, theologian and priest, Pavel Florensky, who wrote: “Because of the absolute beauty of Rublev’s Holy Trinity icon, we know that God exists.” Henri understood this way of thinking — beauty bears witness to the existence of God. Again and again he found works of art that were windows to heaven. One thinks of the place in Henri’s life of Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son and many paintings by Van Gogh.

Henri linked his response to icons with the question: “What do we really choose to see?” In Behold the Beauty of the Lord, Henri stresses that it is a matter of enormous importance what we look it and how we look at it. He writes:

It makes a great difference whether we see a flower or a snake, a gentle smile or menacing teeth, a dancing couple or a hostile crowd. We do have a choice. Just as we are responsible for what we eat, so we are responsible for what we see. It is easy to become a victim of the vast array of visual stimuli surrounding us. The “powers and principalities” control many of our daily images. Posters, billboards, television, videos, movies and store windows continuously assault our eyes and inscribe their images upon our memories. We do not have to be passive victims of a world that wants to entertain and distract us. We can make decisions and choices. A spiritual life in the midst of our energy-draining society requires us to take conscious steps to safeguard that inner space where we can keep our eyes fixed on the beauty of the Lord.

Henri proposed a theology of seeing, or gazing, the verb he preferred. To really see something beautiful, such as a well-painted icon, so that its beauty becomes a sacramental reality, one has to do much more than glance.

For both Merton and Nouwen, the icon is the primary visual art of the Church. Nor could they see icons as meaningful apart from the Church. The icon becomes a rootless plant when it becomes simply a “work of art,” a “collector’s item,” an aesthetic object. For both Merton and Nouwen, icons were intimately connected with eucharistic life and daily prayer. They saw icons as aids to prayer.

In both their lives there was a realization that the icon, far from being merely an artistic image that directs our attention away from the world we live in with all its agonies, is a school of seeing. It is meant to help reshape the way we see and relate to other people. The icon — the Greek word for image — is a reminder that each person, no matter how damaged in his or her life, is a bearer of God’s image and, like those whom we regard as saints, has the potential to reclaim the lost likeness.

It is one thing to believe intellectually that each person is made in the image of God, no less than Adam and Eve, and yet another to actively seek that image and to relate to the other in ways that bear witness to that awareness. It’s the most basic and challenging task that’s given to us. Each of us is an icon — each of us bears the image, the icon, of God, even if we hide it well. Nothing is more basic than the connection between spiritual life and our response to our neighbor, even when that neighbor is an enemy. If the burning of icons and the vandalizing of mosaics distresses us, how much more should be horror-struck at the destruction of human beings, icons bearers made by God?

Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton: two contemplative men with a great deal in common. Both were explorers of eastern Christianity. Both were drawn to icons both on wood and in flesh. Both never ceased trying to open their eyes a little bit wider. May they encourage us to do the same.

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text as of 20 September 2017
* * *

(This is similar to the afterword I wrote for my biography of Dorothy Day, All is Grace, published by Orbis Books.)

 

by Jim Forest

I first met Dorothy Day a few days before Christmas in 1960 while on leave from the U.S. Navy. After reading copies of The Catholic Worker that I had found in my parish library, and then reading Dorothy’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness, I decided to visit the community she had founded. I was based not so far away, in Washington, DC.

Arriving in Manhattan for that first visit, I made my way to Saint Joseph’s House — then in a loft on Spring Street, on the north edge of Little Italy in the Lower East Side of New York City. Discovering that it was moving day, I joined in helping carry boxes from an upstairs loft to a three-storey brick building at 175 Chrystie Street, a few blocks to the east. Jack Baker, one of the other people assisting with the move that day, invited me to stay in his apartment in the same neighborhood.

A few days later I visited the community’s rural outpost on Staten Island, the Peter Maurin Farm. Crossing Upper New York Harbor by ferry, I made my way to an old farmhouse on a rural road just north of Pleasant Plains near the island’s southern tip. In its large, faded dining room, I found half-a-dozen people, Dorothy among them, gathered around a pot of tea at one end of the dining room table.

At the time, Dorothy was only sixty-three, though to my young eyes she seemed old enough to have known Abraham and Sarah. But what a handsome woman! Her face was long, with high, prominent cheekbones underlining large, quick eyes, deep blue and almond shaped, that could be teasing one moment, laughing the next, then turn grave an instant later. Her gray hair, parted in the middle, was braided and circled the back of her head like a garland of silver flowers. She had a fresh, scrubbed look with no trace of cosmetics. The woolen suit she wore was plain but well-tailored and good quality. (I only recently learned from her goddaughter, Johannah Hughes Turner, that her suit was probably a gift from her sister, Della Spier. “Dorothy was tall and hard to fit,” Johannah told me. “Rarely did she find anything in the Catholic Worker clothing room that she could use. Della enjoyed dressing Dorothy and could afford to provide her with solid, classic suits and dresses.”)

I gave Dorothy a bag of letters addressed to her that had been received in Manhattan. Within minutes, she was reading the letters aloud to all of us.

The only letter I still recall from that day’s reading was one from Thomas Merton, the famous monk whose autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, had held many people in its grip, including me. In 1941, Merton had withdrawn from “the world” to a Trappist monastery in Kentucky with a slam of the door that eventually was heard around the world. I had assumed that he wrote to no one outside his family. Yet here he was in correspondence with someone who was not only in the thick of the world, but one of its more engaged and controversial figures.

In his letter, Merton told Dorothy that he was deeply touched by her witness for peace, which in recent years had five times resulted in her arrest and imprisonment for refusing to take shelter during civil defense drills. “You are right going along the lines of satyagraha [Gandhi’s term for nonviolent action]. I see no other way…. Nowadays it is no longer a question of who is right but who is at least not criminal…. It has never been more true than now that the world is lost in its own falsity and cannot see true values…. God bless you.” This was one of Merton’s first letters to Dorothy. Ten months later, he published an essay in The Catholic Worker — “The Root of War is Fear” — and immediately got into trouble with his religious superiors and others both inside and outside the monastery.

Merton was one of countless people drawn to Dorothy and influenced by her. She had a great gift for making those who met her, even if only through letters or her published writings, look at themselves in a new light, questioning previously held ideas, allegiances and choices.

I was another of those whose life took an unexpected turn thanks to Dorothy Day. Five months after that first encounter, I was granted an early discharge from the Navy on grounds of conscientious objection. At Dorothy’s invitation, I became part of the staff at Saint Joseph’s House in New York.

One of my predecessors was Jack English, who had joined the New York Catholic Worker in its early years and remained close to Dorothy into her old age. Recalling his first impressions of Dorothy in a taped interview with Deane Mowrer in 1970, he said he was still impressed with Dorothy’s ability to engage with so many individuals. “She occasionally talks in terms of the abstract, but she never talks or operates except person to person.” Jack had learned from her that “each human being is unique, totally unique, and that each time I meet and have a real encounter with another human being, I am changed somehow, whether for good or bad.”

The qualities that so impressed Jack were just as striking to me: her ability to focus on the person she was talking to, not to see just a young face but your face, not discerning just a vague, general promise, but your particular gifts. Through Dorothy, you glimpsed exciting possibilities in yourself that you hadn’t seen before.

When I joined the Catholic Worker, there was just one house in Manhattan, Saint Joseph’s. It was so cramped a building that only one person actually lived there as nighttime care-taker. The rest of us, Dorothy as well, lived in $25-a-month cold-water flats located nearby that were usually occupied by two people. By chance, Dorothy’s room (shared at the time with a woman we knew as Saint Louis Marie) was next to the one I shared with Stuart Sandberg, a recent graduate of Cornell University who, later in life, was ordained a priest. We were on the sixth floor of a Spring Street tenement. There were four small apartments per floor, each with a bathtub next to the sink. The one toilet on each floor was in a closet-sized space in the hallway.

As I had discovered that first day at the farm on Staten Island, Dorothy was a tireless story-teller, often using incoming letters as a starting point. I recall her reading a letter aloud one day from the Gauchat family, founders of a Catholic Worker community in Ohio. Dorothy told us how the Gauchats had taken in a six-month-old child who was expected to die at any time. The child, they were told, was deaf and blind, with a fluid-filled lump on his head larger than a baseball. “Bill Gauchat made the sign of the cross over that child’s face,” Dorothy said, “and he saw those dull eyes follow the motion of his hand. The child could see! Within a year David — that was his name — was well enough to be taken home by his real parents. His life was saved by the love in the Gauchat home.”

A letter from a Catholic Worker community that was trying to help a prostitute get free of her pimp reminded Dorothy of a prostitute named Mary Ann with whom she had been in jail in Chicago in the early 1920s. At the time, Dorothy had been living a bohemian life with no plans of ever becoming Catholic or joining any church. She hadn’t intended to be arrested and was terrified of the guards. “You must hold your head high,” Mary Ann advised her, “and give them no clue that you’re afraid of them or ready to beg for anything, any favors whatsoever. But you must see them for what they are — never forget that they’re in jail, too.”

Hearing stories like these, we were learning something about life that you don’t get in newspapers, classrooms or even in many churches. At the core of each story there were always just a few people, perhaps just one, for whom following Christ was the most important thing in the world.

Stories gave Dorothy occasion to draw on her massive supply of sayings. How many times have I heard her repeat Saint Catherine of Siena’s remark, “All the way to heaven is heaven, because Jesus said, ‘I am the way.’” There was a passage from George Bernanos’s novel, Diary of a Country Priest, that she often used: “Hell is not to love anymore.” Just as often, she made use of a saying from Saint John of the Cross, “Love is the measure by which we will be judged.” Another favorite was a sentence from Dostoevsky: “The world will be saved by beauty.” There was also Saint Augustine’s declaration: “All beauty is a revelation of God.”

Beauty! Dorothy had an astonishing gift for finding beauty in places where it was often overlooked — in determined flowers blooming in a slum neighborhood, in grass battling upward toward the sky between blocks of concrete, in the smell of an herb growing in a pot on a tenement window ledge, in the battered faces of people who survived on the economic fringes of society.

Music was important in Dorothy’s life, especially opera. One had to have a very good reason for knocking on her door on a Saturday afternoon when she was absorbed in the weekly radio broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera, though she was willing to have company to listen with her so long as no attempt was made at conversation. (Dorothy said once to Willa Bickham, a member of the community at the time, “If I am reincarnated, I hope I come back an opera singer. Then I’ll bring joy to everyone instead of always having to tell what’s wrong with the world.”)

More than anything else, Dorothy was a writer. There was always a notebook in her bag. She seemed endlessly to be taking notes and writing. Note-taking and journal-keeping were as much a part of Dorothy as breathing. Time and again every day she made note of something that had been said or jotted down a passage from the book she was then reading. During the weekly Friday night meetings at the Catholic Worker, Dorothy’s note-taking was usually nonstop. When she traveled, she kept track of everyone she met and what had been said. Her notes in turn became raw material for her monthly column, “On Pilgrimage.” (Dorothy’s more substantial work, the several books she wrote, were mainly written at the several Staten Island beach cottages she had lived in over the years, places of retreat and solitude.)

Dorothy was an avid reader. She had loved books since childhood. She once told me that “the hardest part of living in community is the loss of so many books.” In a 1952 diary entry, she reports with distress how she found her copy of the writings of Saint John of the Cross under an apple tree, soaked by rain. Her engagement in the world seemed only to fuel the reading side of her life — or was it that her reading fueled her engagement? She read certain Russian classics over and over again. She returned again and again to the novels of Charles Dickens. More than once she told young people like me that we could only understand the Catholic Worker by reading Dostoevsky.

Certain books had a huge impact on her life. One can wonder whether Dostoevsky shouldn’t be regarded as a co-founder of the Catholic Worker, so much did his books help shape Dorothy’s understanding of Christianity. In The Brothers Karamazov, the elderly monk, Father Zosima, made an exceptionally deep impression on her, especially his words, “Love in action is often a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams,” a passage Dorothy recited so often that she made it her own.

I have never known anyone more disciplined in her spiritual life than Dorothy — daily Mass, devotion to the rosary, frequent confession, times of private prayer and intercession each day. How often I have seen her on her knees at one of the nearby parish churches or at the chapel at the Catholic Worker farm. (The Archdiocese of New York permitted a chapel on the farm and reservation of the Blessed Sacrament within it.) While praying, I noticed she often referred to pieces of paper. One afternoon, Dorothy having been summoned from the farm chapel for an urgent phone call, I looked in the prayer book she had left on the bench and discovered page after page of names, all written in her careful italic script, of people, living and dead, for whom she was praying.

It seemed to me Dorothy prayed as if lives depended on it, and no doubt some did. The physician Robert Coles of the Harvard Medical School credited Dorothy’s prayers with the miraculous cure of his wife. She had been dying of cancer but — to the astonishment of her physicians — recovered.

Dorothy had a special list with the names of people who had committed suicide. I once asked Dorothy, “But isn’t it too late?” “With God there is no time,” she responded. She went on to say how a lot can happen in a person’s thoughts between initiating an action that will result in death and death itself — that even the tiny fraction of a second that passes between pulling a trigger and the bullet striking the brain might, in the infinity of time that exists deep within us, be time enough for regretting what it was now too late to stop, and to cry out for God’s mercy.

I recall a story Dorothy once told me about persistence in prayer. For many years, she said, she had been a heavy smoker. Her day began with lighting up. Her big sacrifice every Lent was giving up smoking, but having to get by without a cigarette made her increasingly irritable as the days passed, until the rest of the Catholic Worker household was praying she would light up a cigarette. One year, as Lent approached, the priest who heard her confessions at the time urged her not to give up cigarettes that year but instead to pray daily, “Dear God, help me stop smoking.” She used that prayer for several years, she told me, without it having any impact on her addiction. Then one morning she woke up, reached for a cigarette, and realized she didn’t want it. She never smoked another.

Without prayer and the sacraments, Dorothy felt, the Catholic Worker would be blown away like dust in the wind. “We feed the hungry, yes,” she told Bob Coles. “We try to shelter the homeless and give them clothes, but there is strong faith at work; we pray. If an outsider who comes to visit us doesn’t pay attention to our praying and what that means, then he’ll miss the whole point.”

Dorothy went to Mass every day until her body wasn’t up to it and, even then, received daily communion, carefully preparing before and giving plenty of time afterward for thanksgiving. She loved the rosary and prayed it often. “If we love enough,” she once noted, “we are importunate: we repeat our love as we repeat Hail Marys on the rosary.”

She could be as fierce and determined as one of those resolute Russian women who repaired Moscow streets and kept going to church even in the years of Stalin. Her direct, at times electrifying way of getting to the heart of things was much in evidence one night when she was speaking to a Catholic student group at New York University in a packed and smoky room in a building near Washington Square Park. It was in the fall of 1961 — the Cold War was at its most frozen. The explosion of nuclear weapons in the Nevada desert had become too ordinary an event to qualify as front-page news. A much repeated slogan of the time was, “Better dead than Red.” Clearly some of those present considered Dorothy a Red, meaning a faithful servant of the Kremlin with its blood-red flag. One student demanded to know what Dorothy would do if the Russians invaded the United States. Would she not admit, in this extreme, at least, that killing was justified, even a sacred duty? “We are taught by Our Lord to love our enemies,” Dorothy responded without batting an eye. “I hope I could open my heart to them with love, the same as anyone else. We are all children of the same Father.” There was a brief but profound stillness in the room before Dorothy went on to speak about nonviolent resistance and efforts to convert opponents rather than kill them. Which of his enemies had Christ slain?

Dorothy had an intense devotion to the saints — Christ’s mother Mary, first of all, but then to so many others. One of the least likely was Joan of Arc, famous for her military exploits (though, except in statues, she never wielded a sword) and finally for being burned at the stake for refusing to deny her visions. I once noticed a small statue of Joan, clad in armor, on the table next to Dorothy’s bed. Responding to my surprise at her devotion to a military saint, Dorothy explained, “Joan of Arc is a saint of fidelity to conscience.” This was, she said, her second such statue of Joan. The first had been stolen years earlier, but recently Bishop John Wright of Pittsburgh had given her another.

Joseph, the foster father of Jesus and patron saint of all working people, was among the most important for Dorothy. The Catholic Worker house of hospitality I had become part of was dedicated to Saint Joseph. We had a finely carved wooden statue of him that the artist had donated. Under it, during periods when the community’s financial well was dry or nearly so, Dorothy would place all the bills awaiting payment. “Keeping us going is your responsibility,” she would remind Saint Joseph.

Dorothy had much in common with another of her favorite saints, Teresa of Avila. Both Dorothy and Teresa had animated the foundation of many communities, and both were tireless travelers. Both were reformers who went through periods of being regarded with suspicion by the hierarchy. Both were outspoken and fearless.

Another saint that greatly inspired Dorothy was Therese of Lisieux, a contemplative Carmelite nun of the nineteenth century who, after her death, came to be known as “the Little Flower.” She lived an obscure life, never traveling and never founding anything, and had died only two months before Dorothy’s birth. So significant was she to Dorothy that the only completed biography Dorothy ever wrote was about Therese and her “little way.” What most impressed Dorothy was Therese’s certainty that nothing, even the most hidden action, is ever wasted. As she put in her “On Pilgrimage” column for the December 1965 issue of The Catholic Worker: “Paper work, cleaning the house, dealing with the innumerable visitors who come all through the day, answering the phone, keeping patience and acting intelligently, which is to find some meaning in all that happens — these things, too, are the works of peace, and often seem like a very little way.”

I don’t know when or how often Dorothy made her famous remark, “Don’t call me a saint — I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.” Very likely it was only once, but since her death even the briefest article about her is almost certain to include it. It is the quotation from Dorothy Day. But what was the context? Dorothy found great inspiration in the lives of those people — saints — who had been placed on the calendar of the Church, and she had done what saints do: attempt to follow Christ. At the same time she didn’t want the word “saint” to be used in order to place people who attempted to live according to the Gospel in a special category of irrelevancy.

Dorothy believed we are all called to sanctity. In 1967, when Tom Cornell and I were editing the first edition of A Penny a Copy, an anthology of Catholic Worker writings, we read through thirty-four years of back issues. The front page that most impressed me had a banner headline — the kind of ultra-bold, all-caps headline that in a conventional newspaper would be used for the assassination of a president or the outbreak of war — that declared “WE ARE ALL CALLED TO BE SAINTS.” The headline sums up what Dorothy regarded as absolutely basic. Why else would anyone attending the liturgy receive communion? Why receive Christ unless you hope to become more Christ-like? Why call yourself a Christian if you have no interest in trying to live the Gospel? If someday Dorothy is added to the Church calendar, one benefit is that we will have a saint whose sins and shortcomings will be impossible to airbrush out. She will be a saint who really bears witness to the possibility of flawed people, with pasts that embarrass them, never giving up in their efforts to rise from their falls and stumble along in the general direction of the kingdom of God.

Dorothy’s embarrassment and sometimes annoyance in the face of admiration was only in part due to modesty. Rather she felt that many people would view her more critically if they knew her better — knew her faults, and knew more about her past. She felt she had helped create an idealized image of herself by leaving out of her autobiographical writings certain events preceding her entrance into the Catholic Church that she found particularly shameful, and also saying little about the faults she struggled with every day of her life.

Only years later did I come to realize that nothing in her past distressed Dorothy more than the decision to abort her first child, an event that took place in her early twenties, years before her conversion. I recall how distressed she was when I asked her if I might borrow her first book, The Eleventh Virgin. Somehow I had become aware that, as a young woman, she had written a novel with that title. She didn’t have a copy, she told me, regretted that it had ever been published, appealed to me not to mention it again, and asked me not to look for it. It wasn’t until late in her life that a friend who dealt in rare books presented me with a copy. Only when I read it did I understand why Dorothy had responded to my question with such anguish. The end point of this autobiographical novel was an abortion, carried out in the desperate hope that the man she was in love with at the time, her unborn child’s unwilling father, would not leave her. He left her even so.

In a letter to a young woman written in February 1973, Dorothy refers to her abortion as well as to two suicide attempts she made as a young adult: “Twice I tried to take my own life, and the dear Lord pulled me through that darkness — I was rescued from that darkness. My sickness was physical too, since I had had an abortion with bad after-effects, and in a way my sickness of mind was a penance I had to endure.” A few sentences later, Dorothy added, “I love you, because you remind me of my own youth, and of my one child and my grandchildren. I will keep on praying for your healing, writing your name down in my little book of prayers which I have by my bedside.” (This is one of many letters by Dorothy included in All the Way to Heaven, edited by Robert Ellsberg.)

Dorothy once told Robert Coles about the effort she had made earlier in her life to find and destroy every copy of The Eleventh Virgin. Finally she brought her book-burning effort to the attention of the priest who was then hearing her confessions. He laughed. “My, my,” he said. “I thought he was going to tell me to stop being so silly and mixed up in my priorities,” Dorothy told Coles. “I will remember to my last day here on God’s earth what the priest said: ‘You can’t have much faith in God if you’re taking the life He has given you and using it that way.’ I didn’t say a word in reply. The priest added, ‘God is the one who forgives us, if we ask Him; but it sounds like you don’t even want forgiveness — just to get rid of the books.’”

Normally Dorothy she went to confession every Saturday, not simply because it was, at that time, common Catholic practice, but because she always found that by the end of the week she had a lot to confess. A journal entry Dorothy made in 1951 makes a typical summary note: “This afternoon [I had] glimpses of my own ugliness, vanity, pride, cruelty, contempt of others, levity, jeering, carping. Too sensitive to criticism…” Weeks later she added other sins: “flippancy, criticalness, [a] gibing attitude, lack of respect and love for others.” The following year she wrote: “I fail people daily, God help me, when they come to me for aid and sympathy. There are too many of them, whichever way I turn … I deny them the Christ in me when I do not show them tenderness, love. God forgive me.”

Confession was part of the basic architecture of Dorothy’s life. On the first page of her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, she writes about what hard work it was going to confession, “hard when you have sins to confess, hard when you haven’t … you wrack your brain for even the beginnings of sins against charity, chastity, sins of distraction, sloth or gluttony. You do not want to make too much of your constant imperfections and venial sins, but you want to drag them out to the light of day as the first step in getting rid of them.” Note that sins against love top the list.

Confession was, for Dorothy, a means of overcoming the sense that she was fighting a losing battle. She once gave Joe Zarrella a card on which she had written: “We should not be discouraged at our own lapses … but continue. If we are discouraged, it shows vanity and pride. Trusting too much to ourselves. It takes a lifetime of endurance, of patience, of learning through mistakes. We all are on the way.” Rosalie Riegle tells me that Joe carried the card in his wallet until his death.

No one knew her shortcomings better than Dorothy herself, as has become clearer than ever following the recent publication of her diaries, The Duty of Delight. She was painfully aware that there were some who came to live in community with her who looked back on the experience with more pain than joy, nor could she blame them. She also felt that, due to the demands of leading the Catholic Worker movement, she had at times failed at being the ever-attentive, patient mother to her daughter Tamar that she so wanted to be. (On the other hand, given the circumstances and the fact that she was a single parent, it’s remarkable how good a mother Dorothy was, and later how devoted a grandmother. In 1964, she spent four months taking care of her grandchildren in Vermont while Tamar took a course in practical nursing.)

One of Dorothy’s most impressive gifts was that she was never reluctant to apologize when she felt she had been wrong or too harsh. She could do so with passion and without reservation or excuses. I am among those who received letters from Dorothy in which she begged forgiveness for something she had said or written or done which, on reflection, she deeply regretted. The last such letter I had from her along these lines was spattered with tears that had made the ink run. It had been written, she said, on her knees.

Confronted by a camera, Dorothy rarely smiled. If you study photos of her, you might form the idea that she had a dour personality. It’s easy to see that she was at times a person of the utmost seriousness, but it’s harder to imagine her warmth. In ordinary life, much of her time was spent sitting at a table, sipping tea or coffee, in comfortable conversation with whoever happened to join her — friend or stranger, sane or insane, young or old — often just listening, saying very little.

When Dorothy was present, she was completely present, but often she wasn’t there at all. She was away visiting other Catholic Worker houses, speaking at churches and colleges, writing at her beach cottage on Staten Island, visiting Tamar and her many grandchildren, or enjoying the relative peace and quiet that reigned at Peter Maurin Farm. In the New York house, her periods away left a hole that no one else could fill. Each member of staff had somehow acquired particular responsibilities: having charge of the kitchen, taking care of the address list, writing thank you notes, handling the household money, managing the paper — though, even in absentia, Dorothy was definitely the paper’s editor and publisher. But no one was in a position to make a significant decision in her absence that everyone else would accept. In the New York house, in our somewhat splintered state, Dorothy alone could lay down the law.

I look back on being part of the Catholic Worker in New York City in those days as a major blessing, but it was not an easy blessing. In the early sixties, the New York house probably was one of the least happy communities in the Catholic Worker movement. In fact we were hardly a community at all. We had no community meetings and not all of us got along with each other. There was no formation program for the integration of new volunteers and few conditions of engagement. Nor was there any pay – though whoever handled community money could dispense small amounts as needed. It was exhilarating and exhausting, inspiring and discouraging.

I recall a decision made by our two-person kitchen crew that the occasional pound of butter or box of eggs contributed to the house would go to those on “the line” rather than to “the family.” This was a change in custom, they recognized, but was, in their view, in line with the Gospel verse, “The last shall be first.”

“The line” referred to those people who turned up for meals but whose names were unknown to most of us. “The family” was the much smaller group of people who had become regulars, were known by name, were living at the Catholic Worker and, in many cases, had chores to do within the household. “The family” ate after “the line.” Traditionally anything special that turned up in small quantities was saved for them. As a result of this change in policy, members of the family, who had seen many volunteers come and go, were outraged, and the staff itself — six or eight people at the time — divided. Conflicting quotations from Dorothy’s writings began to appear on the community bulletin board, each faction hurling verbal fragments of Dorothy at the other. On the one hand there might be a quotation from Dorothy declaring that we must be ready to roll up in old newspapers, giving our beds to those who needed them — and, on the other hand, a text in which Dorothy humbly reflected that voluntary poverty sometimes meant accepting one’s limitations.

Dorothy was soon back again. Without bothering to sort out the paradoxes posed by the quotations from her writings, she said — with the finality of a monastery’s abbess — that the butter and eggs were to go, as before, to the family. In the end, two people resigned, disappointed that Dorothy had failed to live up to some of her own quotations.

Such events, while petty and even comical when viewed from the outside, were grueling from the inside. There were many staff blow-ups during the forty-seven years that lay between the founding of the Catholic Worker and Dorothy’s death in 1980, not to mention divisive controversies within the Catholic Worker movement as a whole, such as the debate about pacifism during World War II. It is an endless cause of wonder to me that, despite all these trials, she nonetheless retained her capacity for faith, hope and love down to the last day of her life. She occasionally spoke of “the duty of hope.”

Perhaps her survival was not only thanks to remaining resolutely hopeful, but also to her taking time away, whether in the solitude of her Staten Island beach cottage or in Vermont visiting Tamar and her grandchildren.

It was in the aftermath of “the great butter crisis,” late in 1961, that Dorothy appointed me as managing editor of the paper. She had to find someone — one of the two who had just left was my predecessor. Having just turned twenty, I was the youngest person ever to have held that post. Eventually, I too became a casualty of the early-sixties stress within the New York Catholic Worker community. When I was poised to get arrested for participating in an act of civil disobedience protesting U.S. resumption of nuclear weapons tests, Dorothy insisted that I instead go south to Tennessee and write about a civil rights project she admired. I said that, having been one of the organizers of the protest, I couldn’t back out. I would have to go to Tennessee afterward. It wasn’t a good moment to work out a compromise with Dorothy — earlier that same day she had been infuriated by the irresponsible actions of several other staff members. She gave me an ultimatum: “Either go to Tennessee or you are no longer part of this community.” At the time, I felt I had no option but to do what I had helped plan and had promised to take part in. From Dorothy’s point of view on that short-tempered day, I was simply being self-willed.

Only later in life, having gone through the white water of parenthood and having worked with many young volunteers in other contexts, did I realize that, had I gone back to Chrystie Street once I completed my month in jail, no one would have been happier to see me than Dorothy. But I was too young to realize the about-face adults can make after a good night’s sleep. Moving timidly, it took me the better part of a year to renew my relationship with Dorothy.

Dorothy often described the Catholic Worker as a school. Certainly it was for me. One of the things I learned was that the poverty-stricken, the addicted and the insane — the people for whom our house of hospitality existed — were often easier to live with, and more patient and compassionate, than young volunteers who knew more about ideology than love. Yet for all our shortcomings and conflicts, we volunteers managed to get a great deal done: food begged or purchased, meals cooked and served, clothing received and given away, dishes washed, floors scrubbed, sheets laundered, the paper mailed out, those with medical needs assisted, hospital patients visited, and thank-you notes sent out to each and every donor, no matter how small the gift — all that and much more.

Not the smallest problem in the house was the noise. I recall one day trying to carry on a conversation with Dorothy about an article we were thinking about using in the next issue of the paper. We were at her desk in a tiny office next to the front door of the house on Chrystie Street, adjacent to the area in which meals were served, easily the noisiest part of the house. We could hardly hear each other. In the middle of a sentence, Dorothy got out of her chair, opened the door, and yelled, “Holy silence!” Silence briefly reigned at Saint Joseph’s House such as a Trappist monk might admire.

One of Dorothy’s striking qualities was her respect for Christians of other churches, especially those in the Orthodox Church. What was at the root of her affinity to Orthodoxy, I don’t know. Perhaps it had to do with her Russian friendships and the special role Dostoevsky had played in the formation of her faith and vocation. The first time I visited an Orthodox church, it was with Dorothy, and the first time I attended the magnificent Orthodox Liturgy, it was with her as well. In the early sixties, she was a friend of a priest serving at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral on East 97th Street in Manhattan, Father Matthew Stadniuk from Moscow. (In 1988, having returned to Moscow some years before, he was the first priest in Russia who got his parishioners into publically-visible voluntary service at a local hospital, thanks to the new climate of religious tolerance inaugurated by Gorbachev. For the first time since Lenin, religious believers were no longer excluded from openly performing the works of mercy.)

Dorothy’s longing for the repair of the centuries-old schism dividing Eastern and Western Christianity drew her into the Third Hour group, founded by her Russian friend, Helene Iswolsky. This may have been the only association in America at the time in which people of various churches came together who had in common a deep respect, even love, for the Orthodox Church. I remember sitting next to Dorothy at a Third Hour meeting at an apartment in mid-town Manhattan, trying to make sense of the Russian words and phrases she and others used so comfortably. Among those present were the poet W.H. Auden, the Orthodox theologian, Alexander Schmemann, and Alexander Kerensky, who nearly half a century earlier had been prime minister of Russia in the brief period between the last tsar’s abdication and the Bolshevik Revolution.

Dorothy’s own commitment to the Catholic Church was never at issue — she wasn’t window-shopping for another, “better” Church. In fact it disturbed many people, including many in the Catholic Worker movement, that Dorothy was so conservative a Catholic — so wholehearted in her acceptance of Catholic teaching and structure. She was critical not of what the Church taught, but rather of its failures in living out its own teaching. “I didn’t become a Catholic in order to purify the Church,” Dorothy once explained to Robert Coles. “I knew someone, years ago, who kept telling me that if we [Catholic Workers] could purify the Church, then she would convert. I thought she was teasing me when she first said that, but after a while I realized she meant what she was saying. Finally, I told her I wasn’t trying to reform the Church or take sides on all the issues the Church was involved in; I was trying to be a loyal servant of the Church Jesus had founded. She thought I was being facetious. She reminded me that I had been critical of capitalism and America, so why not Catholicism and Rome? … My answer was that I had no reason to criticize Catholicism as a religion or Rome as the place where the Vatican is located…. As for Catholics all over the world, including members of the Church, they are no better than lots of their worst critics, and maybe some of us Catholics are worse than our worst critics.”

Though there are millions of Catholics who seem to be more nationalist than Christian in their core identity, Dorothy found Catholicism the Christian body least contaminated by nationalism. Even the most nation-centered, flag-waving Catholic was at least vaguely aware of being part of a Church that was confined by no national or linguistic borders. Still more significant to Dorothy, it was a church crowded with the poor. Most important of all, it was a dispenser of sacraments without which life, for her, was barren. Part of the value of the Church for Dorothy was that it brought people together across many lines of division — political, ideological, economic, geographic, even the borders drawn by time. She agreed with G.K. Chesterton’s remark that “tradition was democracy extended through time” — a democracy in which not only the living had a vote, but the dead as well.

Dorothy often stressed obedience (the root meaning of which is “listening”), insisting that if she were ordered by her bishop to stop publishing The Catholic Worker, she would do so, though not without trying first to change the bishop’s mind. “Would that mean,” I asked her one day, “if Cardinal Spellman says we have to give up our stand on war, we give it up?” “Not at all,” she said. “But then we might only use quotations from the Bible, the sayings of the saints, extracts from papal encyclicals, just nothing of our own.” But she said that if there was no alternative but to stop publishing the paper, she would do so, hoping others might carry on in some way. Then she quoted the Gospel: “Unless the seed fall into the ground and die, it cannot bring forth new life.”

Dorothy’s devotion to the Church was rock solid but not without a critical edge. Borrowing from Romano Guardini, she sometimes spoke of the Church as being “the cross on which Christ was crucified.” Though the metaphor sounds poetic, it was no compliment. Similarly Dorothy occasionally remarked that the net Peter had lowered into the human sea, once Jesus made him a fisher of men, “caught many a blowfish and quite a few sharks.” There were priests and bishops who reminded her “more of Cain than of Abel.”

Dorothy had very little sense of owning anything — she regarded what she possessed as being “on loan.” What she had was often given away. A friend complained that none of the sweaters she had specially knit as gifts remained with Dorothy for long — sooner or later, usually sooner, each was given away. The same happened with many books. As far as I could see, Dorothy never indulged herself, though she often accused herself of being self-indulgent, as she did one afternoon when we had gone for a walk in the neighborhood. I don’t recall any goal, only that it was a warm day. Passing a small kosher restaurant at a corner somewhere along Ridge Street, Dorothy suggested we stop for a glass of cold beet borscht with a spoonful of sour cream. Once it had been served, Dorothy was slightly scandalized at herself – “Borscht with sour cream! What luxury! This isn’t voluntary poverty.” But then she laughed. The voluptuous treat was only ten cents a glass.

Dorothy, who never seemed to be overly anxious about how little money there was in the community bank account, frequently set an example of passing on what was given as quickly as possible. In one memorable instance, a well-dressed woman visiting the Worker house one day gave Dorothy a diamond ring. Dorothy thanked the visitor, slipped the ring in her pocket, and later in the day gave it to an unpleasant old woman — Catherine Tarengal. Catherine, a bitter complainer second to none, was known in the community as “the weasel.” She lived with her handicapped son and often ate meals at Saint Joseph’s. We paid her rent each month. One of the staff suggested to Dorothy that the ring might better have been sold at the Diamond Exchange on West 47th Street and the money used for paying Catherine’s rent. Dorothy replied that the woman had her dignity and could do as she liked with the ring. She could sell and buy whatever she wanted or take a trip to the Bahamas — or she could enjoy having a diamond ring on her hand just like the woman who had given it to the Worker. “Do you suppose,” Dorothy asked, “that God created diamonds only for the rich?”

In the early days of the Catholic Worker, those who came to the door were often the unemployed rather than the unemployable. Dorothy’s attitude toward hospitality, much admired during the Depression, often came under criticism in later years on when those being helped struck many observers as considerably less worthy. We were no longer helping the “deserving poor,” we were told, but no-account drunkards, addicts, loafers and thieves. Why did we have no employment or rehabilitation programs? Didn’t we realize that the clothes the Worker gave away were often sold or bartered for drink or drugs? Dorothy responded by pointing out that those who ask such questions also use their money and possessions as they please, and often no more wisely than the down-and-out.

Another often repeated objection was, “Didn’t Jesus himself say that the poor would be with us always? Why make such a fuss about them?” “Yes,” Dorothy replied again and again, “but we are not content that there should be so many of them. The class structure is our making and by our consent, not God’s, and we must do what we can to change it. We are urging revolutionary change.”

There was a social worker who asked Dorothy how long “clients” of the Catholic Worker were permitted to stay. “We let them stay forever,” Dorothy answered testily. “They live with us, they die with us, and we give them a Christian burial. We pray for them after they are dead. Once they are taken in, they become members of the family. Or rather they always were members of the family. They are our brothers and sisters in Christ.”

While Dorothy was an enthusiastic and unapologetic borrower of other people’s ideas, her way of seeing was very much her own. I think, for example, of what happened one day when my room-mate, Stuart Sandberg, and I were clearing out rubbish from a small apartment one flight up in a cold-water tenement on Ridge Street. Dorothy was having increasing trouble managing the five flights to the apartment on Spring Street. These two rooms could be reached without such a climb, but first many layers of linoleum and wallpaper had to be removed and white paint applied to the walls.

Stuart and I dragged box after box of debris down to the street, including a hideous — so it seemed to us — painting of the Holy Family. Mary, Joseph and Jesus had been painted in a few bright colors against a battleship gray background on a piece of plywood. We shook our heads, deposited it in the trash along the curb, and went back to continue cleaning. Not long afterward Dorothy arrived carrying the rejected painting. “Look what I found! The Holy Family! It’s a providential sign, a blessing.” She put it on the mantle of the apartment’s extinct fireplace. I looked at it again and this time saw it was a work of love and faith, however crudely rendered. If it was no masterpiece of iconography, it had its own unlettered beauty, but I wouldn’t have thought so if Dorothy hadn’t seen it first.

Dorothy is no longer with us. We can’t sit down and have a cup of coffee with her anymore, or send her a letter and await her response. But she remains a vital presence. Many regard her as a saint, and not as a way of keeping her at a safe distance or because of ignorance regarding the darker moments in her life. If by the word “saint” we mean a person who helps us see, by both precept and example, what it means to follow Christ, surely Dorothy is such a person.

Dorothy helped bring about a conversion of heart that greatly influenced many people in the Church, especially in America, but has reached far beyond it. It is not a reformation of theological doctrine, but one rooted in the sacredness of life. Dorothy has helped us better understand one of the primary biblical truths: that each person, no matter how damaged or battered by the events and circumstances of life, is a bearer of the image of God and deserves to be recognized and treated as such. She has reminded us of the real presence of Christ in the least person. “Those who fail to see Christ in the poor,” Dorothy said, “are atheists indeed.” Thanks to her, many have come to realize that the opposite of the works of mercy are the works of war. Dorothy gave an astonishing example of hospitality and mercy as a way of life. “We are here to celebrate Him,” she said time and again, “through the works of mercy.”

In my own life, every time I think about the challenges of life in the bright light of the Gospel rather than in the gray light of money or the dim light of politics, her example has had its influence. Every time I try to overcome meanness or selfishness rising up in myself, it is partly thanks to the example of Dorothy Day. Every time I defeat the impulse to buy something I can get along without, Dorothy Day’s example of voluntary poverty has had renewed impact. Every time I give away something I can get along without — every time I manage to see Christ’s presence in the face of a stranger — there again I owe a debt to Dorothy Day. Every time I take part in efforts to prevent wars or end them, or join in campaigns to make the world a less cruel place, in part I am in debt to Dorothy. What I know of Christ, the Church, sacramental life, the Bible, and truth-telling, I know in large measure thanks to her, while whatever I have done that was cowardly, opportunistic or cruel, is despite her. She has even shaped my reading life — one could do worse than to get to know the authors whose books helped shape and sustain Dorothy’s faith and vocation. It isn’t that Dorothy is the point of reference. Christ is. But I can’t think of anyone I’ve known whose Christ-centered life has done so much to help make me a more Christ-centered person.

In 1997, seventeen years after Dorothy’s death, one of her grandchildren, Kate Hennessy, wrote in The Catholic Worker: “To have known Dorothy means spending the rest of your life wondering what hit you. On the one hand, she has given so many of us a home, physically and spiritually; on the other, she has shaken our very foundations.”

I am one of the many whose foundations were shaken. I am still wondering what hit me.

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Jim Forest / Alkmaar / text as of August 2010
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Dorothy Day at draft card burning Union Square NYC 6 Nov 1965 (photo by Jim Forest)

by Jim Forest

Early in The Brothers Karamazov, a wealthy woman asks Staretz Zosima how she can really know that God exists. The Staretz tells her that no explanation or argument can achieve this, only the practice of “active love.” He assures her that really there is no other way to know God in reality rather than God as an idea. The woman confesses that sometimes she dreams about a life of loving service to others — she thinks perhaps she will become a Sister of Mercy, live in holy poverty and serve the poor in the humblest way. It seems to her such a wonderful thought. It makes tears comes to her eyes. But then it crosses her mind how ungrateful some of the people she is serving are likely to be. They will probably complain that the soup she is serving isn’t hot enough or that the bread isn’t fresh enough or the bed is too hard and the covers too thin. She confesses to Staretz Zosima that she couldn’t bear such ingratitude — and so her dreams about serving others vanish, and once again she finds herself wondering if there really is a God. To this the Staretz responds with the words, “Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”

I mention this story to you because I doubt any figure in literature had more importance to Dorothy Day than Father Zosima. How often I heard her repeat the words, “Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.” It was partly through Dostoevsky that she formed her understanding of Christianity, seeing it not simply as an institutional structure but as a way of life in which nothing was more important than seeing Christ in others.

I have no doubt she was a saint, that is someone who in a remarkable way shows us what it means to follow Christ. An effort is under way to promote her canonization, and this has the active support of the Cardinal O’Conner, head of the diocese in which she lived all her adult life. I think of her as a modern sister of St. Francis of Assisi.

The link with St. Francis is close. They have in common an attraction to the poor which led them to live among them and to practice what Dorothy called “voluntary poverty.” Like Francis, she formed a commitment to live out the most radical teachings of Jesus, including the renunciation of violence. Like Francis, she started a movement that could involve anyone, not only the unmarried. The Catholic Worker movement she began in 1933 has led to the foundation of houses of hospitality in many parts of the United States. The newspaper she edited until her death in 1980, The Catholic Worker, had and still has 100,000 subscribers.

Some biographical details: She was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 8, 1897. Her father was a journalist, a profession nearly all of his children followed. She was eight years old when her family moved into a six-room tenement flat over a tavern on 37th Street on the South Side. It was a big step down for the Day family. They had been practically wiped out by the San Francisco earthquake. The family had lost their house and John Day was without a job. The curtains Dorothy’s mother Grace made from remnants were hung from fishing rods. Fruit crates served as book cases. Nail kegs became kitchen stools. Dorothy was so ashamed of her home that, returning from school, she would enter the door of a better, more impressive building so that her classmates wouldn’t know the kind of circumstances she was living in. Her mother suffered blinding headaches and went through several miscarriages. Dorothy’s understanding of the shame people feel when they aren’t making it surely dates from this time.

It was in this period of her life that Dorothy began to find in the Catholic Church, an institution despised by her father, something inspiring. Dorothy would often recall later in life the impact of discovering a friend’s mother, a woman named Mrs. Barrett, praying on her knees at the side of her bed. Without dismay or embarrassment, she looked up at Dorothy, told her where to find her daughter, and returned to her prayer. “I felt a burst of love toward Mrs. Barrett that I have never forgotten, a feeling of gratitude and happiness that warmed my heart,” Dorothy wrote in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness.

When John Day finally got the job of sports editor of a Chicago daily paper, the Day family moved into a large and comfortable house on Webster Avenue on the North Side. Dorothy need no longer be embarrassed by her domestic circumstances.

The great events in Dorothy’s life at the Webster Avenue house often had to do with books. Though her father was a man with many prejudices, he was a reader and book lover, and this rubbed off on his eldest daughter. In the library of the house, Dorothy first read Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and Little Dorritt, and many other books that stirred her awareness of injustice in the world and also offered images of sanctity, books she would read again and again for the rest of her life. Books remained Dorothy’s cherished companions throughout her life. She appreciated Erasmus’s confessional boast: “When I have money I buy books, and if anything is left over I buy food and clothes.”

The book that had the most impact on her in her mid-teens was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Unlike books about social injustice by Dickens and Hugo, here was a story set in the present, and not in Europe but Chicago, in the area of the city’s stockyards and slaughter houses. Sinclair’s hero was a Lithuanian immigrant, the only member of his family not utterly destroyed by squalor and injustice. He finally commits himself to struggle for a just social order by joining the Socialist Party. Sinclair’s vivid description of filth and violence in the meat industry so shocked its readers that the book is given credit for Congressional passage of tough meat inspection laws, although what Sinclair had hoped for was to stimulate more profound social change. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” he said, “and by accident hit it in the stomach.”

But he did reach Dorothy Day’s heart. She had responsibility for much of the care of the newest addition to the family, her baby bother John Day, and stirred by Sinclair’s novel, began to push his baby carriage further and further southwest, not far from the parts of the city she had once been so glad to leave behind. “I walked for miles, exploring interminable grey streets, fascinating in their dreary sameness, past tavern after tavern, where I envisioned such scenes as the Polish wedding party in Sinclair’s story.”

As would be typical of Dorothy for the rest of her life, she found a kind of beauty in the midst of urban desolation. “There were tiny gardens and vegetable patches in the yards. Often there were rows of corn, stunted but still recognizable, a few tomato plants, and always the vegetables bordered by flowers.” Drab streets were transformed by pungent odors: geranium and tomato plants, garlic, olive oil, roasting coffee, bread and rolls in bakery ovens. “Here,” she said, “was enough beauty to satisfy me.”

Only fifteen years old, she looked at the world with wide open eyes and a vulnerable heart many of us might envy. Pondering the lives of the people living in these hard-pressed neighborhoods, yet rich in so many ways, she had a vivid sense of who she would become. “From that time on my life was to be linked to theirs, their interests would be mine: I had received a call, a vocation, a direction in life.”

An exceptionally bright student, at age sixteen she won a full scholarship to the University of Illinois. She was delighted no longer to be living with her parents, but the academic world held her attention only briefly. Long before she might have received a degree, she abandoned her studies and moved to New York City where, at age of eighteen, she became a reporter for New York’s socialist daily newspaper, The Call. At the time she was probably the youngest working journalist on a New York paper, and also one of the very few woman journalists writing about something other than social news or cake recipes.

A year later, she joined the editorial staff of Masses, a radical publication silenced by the US government following America’s entry into World War I, for the publication was outspoken in its opposition to the war and encouraged men to refuse to fight in it. Just after her nineteenth birthday, Dorothy was jailed with other feminists who had gone to the White House to protest the exclusion of women from political affairs.

The horror of war challenged her to do something more concrete about suffering than simply to protest or write articles. Dorothy became a nurse in a Brooklyn hospital, but a love affair with a fellow journalist she met at that time led her back to Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan. The affair ended with an abortion. This was the catastrophe of her life, an event still causing her grief in her old age. Just after the war, she was briefly married to a New York literary figure and went with him to Europe, where she wrote her first book, an autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin, that centered on the love affair that had led to her pregnancy and the abortion with which it ended.

Back in the US, Dorothy joined the staff of The Liberator, a Communist magazine in Chicago though Dorothy, always impatient with ideology, never joined the Communist Party. In fact she never cast a vote in any election nor encouraged anyone also to do so as she was convinced that the only vote of significance was how she you lived her life day by day. Also she simply couldn’t imagine voting for someone whose views and priorities were so at variance with her own.

In 1922, she was arrested and jailed again, this time in one of the government’s “anti-red” raids. She went back to reporting work, first for a Chicago newspaper, then one in New Orleans. In 1925 — her novel published and film rights for the book sold to Hollywood — she returned to New York, where she met a British botanist and intellectual disciple of Kropotkin and fell deeply in love with him. The pregnancy that resulted from this relationship was the turning point in her life.

That she should be carrying a child again seemed to her not only remarkable but nothing less than a miracle. The abortion five years earlier left her feeling guilty. She also sensed that her body had been damaged and that she had been made sterile. She believed that she could never conceive again. Whether it was a miracle or not, I don’t know, but certainly it filled her with an overwhelming sense of God’s mercy that was to remain with her for the rest of her life.

She found that whenever she went walking, she was praying, and the prayers were entirely of joy and gratitude. As the months passed, she decided she wanted her child baptized in the Roman Catholic Church; and then she realized she wanted to become a Catholic herself. To the man she lived with, however, as to many radicals, the Catholic Church was one of the world’s more oppressive structures, complicit in almost every evil for many centuries. Dorothy saw it in quite a different way: for her it was the church of the poor, a church with ancient roots reaching back to the beginning of Christianity, a church free of the constraints of national borders. Arguments flared, doors slammed. Their relationship disintegrated.

Dorothy’s daughter, Tamar, was baptized in July, 1927, and Dorothy — now a single parent — was herself baptized in late December. Then began Dorothy’s six-year search for a vocation that could bridge her radical political convictions with her new-found religious commitment.

In May 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, Dorothy founded The Catholic Worker, initially intended only as a small monthly publication. This step had been proposed to her by a remarkable French immigrant, Peter Maurin, who looked like a bum and actually lived like a bum, but a brilliant and saintly man. The paper sold, and still sells, for a penny a copy — the smallest coin, what a kopek used to be in Russia, and perhaps what a ruble is today. Though there was much in it to interest intellectuals, the paper was aimed at ordinary people, many of them out of work in that period. Dorothy’s first editorial said The Catholic Worker would show its readers that the Catholic Church is concerned not only with spiritual welfare but material welfare. The paper caught on. Within a few months there were thousands of readers.

What had been launched only as a newspaper quickly became a movement. First in New York, then in other cities, Catholic Worker houses of hospitality were formed. They were both places of welcome for homeless people (the houses are in the down-out-and areas like New York City’s Bowery) and centers for dialogue about community, the Gospel and the Church, but also for what her collaborator Peter Maurin called a “green revolution” — efforts to inspire social change through entirely peaceful means.

While there were many people in the Catholic Church who supported the initiatives she was taking, not only lay people but priests and bishops, you can image that others found her some kind of strange Protestant or perhaps a Communist pretending to be a Christian.

Dorothy’s methods were also dismissed as “impractical” because of her non-institutional approach of hospitality for people who were living ragged lives on the street. A social worker visiting the Catholic Worker house in New York asked Dorothy how long her guests were “allowed” to stay. Dorothy answered, “We let them stay forever. They live with us, they die with us, and we give them a Christian burial. We pray for them after they are dead. Once they are taken in, they become members of the family. Or rather they always were members of the family. They are our brothers and sisters in Christ.”

Perhaps all would have gone quite well between the Dorothy and the Roman Catholic hierarchy in America had it not been for the stand she took in failing to support Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War. Practically all Dorothy’s friend, being people on the left, whole-heartedly supported the republican side, but Dorothy couldn’t support a force that was murdering priests and nuns and destroying churches. Similarly she could not in any way support the fascism that Franco represented, no matter how many bishops regarded him as their hero and protector. In fact there was a still deeper problem for Dorothy, for she could not imagine Christ blessing anyone to kill. She wrote essays about Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior, who has chosen to live in a society suffering military occupation by the Romans but had sent none of his disciples to join the Zealots, the national group undertaking violent resistance. He had responded mercifully to people on every side, even the Roman centurion who sought his help. She recalled the witness of Christians in the first three centuries, when it was regarded as far better to lay down one’s own life than to shed anyone’s blood.

There had been no overtly pacifist movement in the Catholic Church for centuries, until the Catholic Worker. Perhaps more than any Catholic since St. Francis, Dorothy Day began a process within her church that put Jesus, rather than the theologians of the just war, at the center of the church’s social teaching.

Dorothy was often imprisoned as a result of her activity in peace, civil rights, and labor demonstrations. Usually this happened in the fifties, when year after year she sat on a park bench in front of New York’s City Hall while air-raid sirens were howling and everyone was required by law to take shelter in what was nothing other than a mass dress rehearsal for nuclear war. But she was occasionally arrested for other reasons, for example with farm workers in California when they were founding a labor movement. One of my favorite photos of her, taken in 1973, shows her holding the dress she wore the last time she was a prisoner. All the women jailed with her signed their names on the rough prison garment, making it a treasure to her.

At the center of Dorothy’s faith was her certainty that we are saved not because we are clever or are often found in churches (though mind you daily Mass was part of the structure of her life) but because of our loving response to “the least.” The Catholic Worker way of life is to practice daily “the works of mercy” that Jesus speaks of in the 25th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, taking in the homeless, caring for the sick, and being with prisoners. This same teaching led Dorothy to oppose all those systems that cause suffering. “We see that the works of mercy oppose the works of war,” she said. Often she quoted St. John of the Cross: “Love is the measure by which we shall be judged.”

Dorothy died November 29, 1980. It was a widely marked event in America, not only noticed by Christians of every variety but by many people in other religious traditions, or outside every religion. By then many regarded her as one of Christianity’s great reformers and a modern saint, though Dorothy herself had sometimes said, “Don’t call me a saint–I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.”

After the funeral, an editor of The Catholic Worker was asked whether the movement would be able to continue without its founder. “We have lost Dorothy,” Peggy Scherer said, “but we still have the gospel.”

The most extraordinary monuments to Dorothy Day are the many houses of hospitality that stretch from Oakland to Amsterdam, places of welcome that not only offer a caring response to the homeless and runaways but centers of work for a nonviolent society. We can say there is still a greater monument, though much less tangible, and that is a renewed understanding of Christianity. She was like a restorer of icons who, after removing layer upon layer of paint left by various generations, comes to the deepest level and finds an image painted by the hand of the Apostle Luke.

“It is the living from day to day,” she once commented, “taking no thought for the morrow, seeing Christ in all who come to us, and trying literally to follow the Gospel that resulted in this work.”

What can we learn from Dorothy Day?

First, we see in her that the heart of life is prayer.

I have never known anyone, not even in monasteries, who was more a praying person than Dorothy Day. When I think of her, I think of her first of all on her knees praying before the Blessed Sacrament. I think of those long lists of names she kept of people, living and dead, to pray for. I think of her at Mass, I think of her praying the rosary, I think of her going off for confession each Saturday evening.

“We feed the hungry, yes,” she said. “We try to shelter the homeless and give them clothes, but there is strong faith at work; we pray. If an outsider who comes to visit us doesn’t pay attention to our prayings and what that means, then he’ll miss the whole point.”

If you find the life of Dorothy Day inspiring, if you want to understand what gave her direction and courage and strength to persevere, her deep attentiveness to others, consider her spiritual and sacramental life.

Second, she reminds us that social justice is not just a project for the government or certain agencies or radical movements designing a new social order in which all the world’s problems will be solved. It’s for you and me, here and now, right where we’re standing. Jesus did not say “Blessed are you who give contributions to charity” or “Blessed are you who are planning a just society.” He said, “Welcome into the Kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world, for I was hungry and you fed me . . .”

At the heart of what Dorothy did were the works of mercy. For her these weren’t simply obligations which the Lord imposed on his followers. As she said on one occasion to Bob Coles, “We are here to celebrate Him through these works of mercy.”

Third: The most important thing we can is to try to find the face of Christ in others, and not only those we find it easy to be with but those who make us nervous, frighten us, alarm us, or even terrify us. “Those who cannot see the face of Christ in the poor,” she used to say, “are atheists indeed.”

Dorothy was an orthodox Catholic. This means she believed that Christ makes himself present to us both in the Eucharist and in those in need. “What you did to the least person, you did to me.”

Her searching of faces for Christ’s presence for Christ extended to those who were, at least in a functional sense, her enemies, but also, she always tried to remember, victims of the very structures they were in charge of. She sometimes recalled the advice she had been given by a fellow prisoner named Mary Ann, a prostitute, when Dorothy was in jail in Chicago in the early ‘twenties: “You must hold up your head high, and give them no clue that you’re afraid of them or ready to beg them for anything, any favors whatsoever. But you must see them for what they are — never forget that they’re in jail too.”

Fourth: We can learn from her that beauty is not just for the affluent.

I recall a donor coming into the Catholic Worker and giving Dorothy a diamond ring. Dorothy thanked her for it and put it in her pocket. Later a rather demented lady came in, one of the more irritating regulars at the CW house. Dorothy took the diamond ring out of her pocket and gave it to the woman. Someone on the staff said to Dorothy, “Wouldn’t it have been better if we took the ring to the diamond exchange, sold it, and paid that woman’s rent for a year?” Dorothy replied that the woman had her dignity and could do what she liked with the ring. She could sell it for rent money or take a trip to the Bahamas. Or she could enjoy wearing a diamond ring on her hand like the woman who gave it away. “Do you suppose,” Dorothy asked, “that God created diamonds only for the rich?”

Fifth, Dorothy teaches us that meekness does not mean being weak-kneed. There is a place for outrage as well as a place for very plain speech in religious life. She once said to a person who was counseling her to speak in a more polite, temperate way, “I hold more temper in one minute than you will hold in your entire life.” Or again her lightning-like comment, “Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy rotten system.”

Sixth: We see in Dorothy the value of the Little Way. The phrase was one Dorothy borrowed from St. Therese of Liseux, widely known as the Little Flower. Change starts not in the future but in the present, not in Washington DC or Wall Street but where I stand. Change begins in the ordinary actions of life, how I live minute to minute, what I do with my life, what I notice, what I respond to, the care and attention with which I listen, the way in which I respond. It happens when we practice hospitality of the face.

As she once put it, “Paper work, cleaning the house, dealing with the innumerable visitors who come all through the day, answering the phone, keeping patience and acting intelligently, which is to find some meaning in all that happens — these things, too, are the works of peace, and often seem like a very little way.”

What she tried to practice was “Christ’s technique,” as she put it, which was not to seek out meetings with emperors and important officials but “obscure people, a few fisherman and farm people, a few ailing and hard-pressed men and women.”

Seventh: Dorothy provides an example of love of ;;the Church. It is, of course, easy to see the faults of the Church — I mean not the Mystical Body of Christ but the social institution. Dorothy used to say that the net Peter lowered when Christ made him a fisher of men caught “quite a few blowfish and not a few sharks.” Quoting Romano Guardini, she often said that “the Church is the Cross on which Christ is crucified.” She said that when she saw the Church taking the side of the rich and powerful, forgetting the weak, or saw bishops living in luxury while the poor are thrown the crumbs of “charity,” she knew that Christ was being insulted and once again being sent to his death. “The Church doesn’t only belong to the officials and bureaucrats,” she said. “It belongs to all people, and especially its most humble men and women and children.”

Instead of focusing on the human failings so obvious in every church. Dorothy concentrated on what the church sets it sights on. We’re not here to pass judgement on our fellow believers, whatever their rank or role in the church, but to live the Gospel as wholeheartedly as we can and make the best use we can of the sacraments and every other resource the church offers to us.

“I didn’t become a Catholic in order to purify the church,” Dorothy once told her friend Bob Coles. “I knew someone, years ago, who kept telling me that if [the Catholic Workers] could purify the church, then she would convert. I thought she was teasing me when she first said that, but after a while I realized she meant what she was saying. Finally, I told her I wasn’t trying to reform the church or take sides on all the issues the church was involved in; I was trying to be a loyal servant of the church Jesus had founded. She thought I was being facetious. She reminded me that I had been critical of capitalism and America, so why not Catholicism and Rome? . . . . My answer was that I had no reason to criticize Catholicism as a religion or Rome as the place where the Vatican is located . . . . As for Catholics all over the world, including members of the church, they are no better than lots of their worst critics, and maybe some of us Catholics are worse than our worst critics.”

I learned from Dorothy that the Church is more than an institutional structure but really is the Mystical Body of Christ and as such links together all those who struggle to follow Christ no matter what the shortcomings of the particular church they belong. She herself longed for the unity of the divided Church. She occasionally took me to the small meetings of a group in New York City, The Third Hour it was called, that brought together Catholic and Orthodox Christians, as well as at least one Anglican, the poet W.H. Auden. The first time I met an Orthodox priest and took part in the Orthodox Liturgy, it was thanks to Dorothy Day. I doubt Dorothy intended that I should become an Orthodox Christian, but that slow pilgrimage in my life had its beginning at the Catholic Worker.

Last but not least: I learned from Dorothy day that I am here to follow Christ. Not the Pope. Not the Ecumenical Patriarch. Not the President of the United States. Not even Dorothy Day or any other saint.

Christ has told us plainly about the Last Judgment and it has nothing to do with belonging to the right church or being theologically correct. All the church can do is try to get us on the right track and keep us there. But we will be judged not on membership cards but according to our readiness to let the mercy of God pass through us to others. “Love is the measure,” Dorothy said again and again, quoting Saint John of the Cross.

Hers was a day-to-day way of the cross, and just as truly the way of the open door. “It is the living from day to day,” she said, “taking no thought for the morrow, seeing Christ in all who come to us, and trying literally to follow the Gospel that resulted in this work.”

Commonweal / 22 May 1992

by Jim Forest

Joseph Brodsky was introduced to an audience at the John Adams Institute in Amsterdam December 15 not as a poet but as the poet. “In him,” said his friend and translator Kees Verheul, “we are faced with the poet, or rather the carrier of the poet.” Listening impassively to the introduction, Brodsky fiddled with an unlighted filter cigarette, occasionally placing it in his lips, until after about ten minutes, ending a drawn out silent drama that upstaged his introducer, Brodsky finally lit it, inhaling deeply, then blowing out the smoke in a long thin stream. His toying with the cigarette resembled an erotic play.

His first task was the unveiling of a bronze bust of himself, the work of the sculptor Sylvia Willink. “The only respect in which this head differs from the one I carry on my shoulders,” Brodsky commented after admiring the Caesar-like image, “is that it can’t speak — and it can’t kiss.”

Brodsky’s English is fast, fluent, almost reckless, a special variety that has the smell of a Jewish bakery in Manhattan’s lower east side. He may have been born and raised in Leningrad/St. Petersburg but his voice is at home in the New World.

He started off reading with “A Song,” a poem with the refrain, “I wish you were here, dear,” which concludes, “What’s the point of forgetting / if it’s followed by dying?” (It was, he confessed, a pastiche of Auden’s “Twelve Songs.”) Then came “Epitaph to a Centaur” with the line “…his animal part turned out to be less durable than his humanity.” Then “The Butterflies” about a life one-day long, a space in time just right for the blaze of a poem.

Especially when reading in his native language, Brodsky recites like a deacon singing the Gospel in a Russian church, a kind of liturgical chant, the recitation of each line governed by strict rules of rhythm with definite places for rising and falling stresses, that are impartial to the content of the words. This way of reading creates a cathedral space around him and us and a sense of no longer being in ordinary time or space. He reminds me of watching Vladimir Horowitz performing in a concert hall in Moscow, playing with total detachment as if, far from playing, he was listening, and perhaps not even listening to this particular piano. His fingers moved, but hardly more than if he were absent- mindedly drumming a table top in a café while waiting for someone who was late. Similarly Brodsky’s face, even while he chants the poetry with such concentrated purpose, such spiritual discipline, seems a face in the audience rather than belonging to the poet. His eyes wander toward the large windows and the view they offer of the sky and street and other buildings, like a child in school waiting for recess.

In the pause I asked him to sign my copy of his book of essays, Less Than One. He looked with surprise at my pen, a black and green Pelikan I bought in Assisi in 1986 to mark the passage from organizational employment to the more adventurous life of freelance writing. He pulled from his shirt pocket an identical Pelikan and said, “I have two of them.” We agreed that there is something sacred about a good pen. I told him about how his way of reading reminded me of the chanting of the Gospel or the way a cantor sings the prayers in the synagogue. “Of course they are deeply related,” he said.

I made a similar comment in the public discussion that followed. The deacon, the cantor and the poet are all practicing the “melic art,” Brodsky responded, pausing like a good teacher to spell “melic”. [OED: “Melic: Of poetry; Intended to be sung; applied spec. to the strophic species of Greek lyric verse. Hence applied to poets who compose such verse.”] “It is quite deliberate. Meters are meters. There is music in poetry. I try to bring out the euphonic aspect of the poem. My manner of delivery goes back to the training I received in my Russian high school. A good teacher requires a lot of memorization of poetry and requires you to deliver. Your recitation makes it clear to the teacher what you have understood.”

The poet in the west in this century, Brodsky continued, has the problem “of almost always being on the defensive, aware of the sardonic listener who will smirk at the poet’s raptures.” Thus he tends to read diffidently, taking some distance from his poem. And this is a great pity because in fact “poetry is an act of mental aggression upon the audience. The self-effacing poet should perhaps take the next logical step and shut up altogether.”

A question was asked about nihilism. Brodsky replied that according to Aristotle there are four different temperaments and each has to do with the location of bile in the body. “I have no philosophy, only temperament.” (Later he quoted a Japanese poet: “I’ve got no principles, no convictions — just nerve.”) His own temperament leads him to shrug off the problem of death, as if to say, “You know you are going to lose. So what?” Someone with another temperament may be quite irritated and preoccupied with the problem and even develop a philosophy of nihilism. But for himself, he went on, “nothingness is a lousy subject. How can one make a philosophy out of it?”

“In Russian we have the word nichtoe — nothing. It’s an interesting word with too many consonants. It doesn’t give you a sense of limit. It suggests a journey.” (Later, commenting on the euphony that exists in every language, he noted that “Russian words are two, three syllables, minimum. To utter a Russian word is an acoustic event.”)

He noted that experience of extraordinary events does not necessarily produce a poem. “Extremes of experience have a tendency to bring out banal expressions. You can survive Hiroshima or 25 years in a concentration camp and not write a single line, or experience a one-night stand and write an immortal lyric.”

“Art,” he said, “is older than any form of social organization. It started, shall we say, a long time ago.”

The question was asked whether poetry could have anything to do with politics. Brodsky said no, the reason being that the task of the poet is to avoid cliches, to create precedents, to make something new. “The artist is trying not to repeat his predecessors, to say the least.” Thus it is sometimes said of a poet that he is ahead of his time. This is an incorrect perception, he explained. “A poet is never ahead or behind his time, just operating on his own frequency.”

He also said he hears people complain, “I don’t care for modern poetry.” He said the reason for this is that poetry builds on itself, it has a kind of development through time. You could understand modern poetry if you began with the poetry you do understand and work from there. Reading modern poetry “is like boarding a runaway train. You may decide you don’t like the train. Its route, well, it’s not yours, that’s all.”

Someone commented on how striking the contrast was between the original poems that Brodsky had recited, and the reading by the translator of the same poems in Dutch. Brodsky said this was due not so much to differences in the verbal content of the poem in its two forms but “how you read” and that this is greatly shaped by one’s national background. “Russian stresses the music. Otherwise you are just counting syllables.”

He was unhappy about the “big infusion of English words” into modern Russian. But language has its own life, refusing to behave according to the tastes of a balding poet, even when he has the Nobel Prize. “Language is a generational thing. You have very intimate pet words that have to do with your generation and place. It was different in my generation to be in St. Petersburg than to be in Moscow. In St. Petersburg we said ch-toe while in Moscow it was stow.”

Wasn’t it hard for the writer to have to live in exile, he was asked, and isn’t it a pity so many writers are exiles? Brodsky found it not so remarkable. “You have guest workers and boat people, not only exiled writers. This takes the orchid out of the writer’s lapel. To live elsewhere is a norm in the twentieth century. There’s nothing very significant about it. It’s just more palatable when it’s a writer than with those possessing other skills.” There was something to be said for the writer packing his bags. “The further away from his homeland the writer is, the better for literature.” One’s address isn’t so important.

“A poet,” he concluded, “is like a bird. He chirps no matter what twig he lands on — and mistakes the rustle of leaves for applause.”

* * *

by Jim Forest

“And then came the dark times, when the clever shut up, fools were talkative, and the scum got rich.”—Ivo Andric (1892-1975), Serbian recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1961; from Signs Along the Road

Wednesday, March 9, 1994, Belgrade

Because of sanctions there are no flights to Belgrade. Jim Douglass and I flew to Budapest, then took a minibus to Belgrade. Having with us two large cartons of medication for children contributed by Franciscan sisters in Rome, we waited on the Hungarian side of the border with anxiety. Under the sanctions, medicines are permitted into Serbia only by special permit obtainable through a complex UN bureaucratic process that takes months. After waiting an hour, there was spot checking of baggage in the van but luckily our two boxes were buried under suitcases and weren’t opened.

Several hours later we arrived at the flat of Women in Black in the center of Belgrade not far from a big outdoor market. The actual address is not publicized because of death threats the women have received. Their postal address is at the Center for Antiwar Action elsewhere in the city.

There must have been 15 or 20 women crowded into these two rooms plus a small kitchen. The place was bursting at the seams, everyone talking at once, the phone ringing constantly, and coffee being served. Among the many posters on the walls were photos of the vigil against the war that Women in Black have every Wednesday afternoon in the center of Belgrade. After years of being saturated with news about murderous Serbs, it’s refreshing to be talking with Serbs who kill no one, oppose all violence, and help the victims of war. Sadly such people are rarely noticed by the world press.

By midnight everyone was gone and we had the flat, suddenly intensely silent, to ourselves. For beds, we used two mattresses that serve as a couch during the day.

Thursday, March 10

We met with Patriarch Pavle, head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, for more than an hour this morning, as gentle a man as I’ve ever met. He is short, with attentive eyes and a white beard, and utterly modest in his manner. He is the only leader of any church I have heard of who normally travels by public bus and tram.

The main subject of the discussion was our hope that he and Pope John Paul, along with Moslem and Jewish leaders, would together go to Sarajevo in a joint witness of peace, repentance and forgiveness.

Patriarch Pavle began his response by recalling his ten years as a student in Sarajevo. “As a school boy my friends included Croatians and Moslems. I still have their photographs. When I think of Sarajevo and the suffering there, I think of my friends.” When Jim showed the Sarajevo banner with its western and eastern crosses, Moslem crescent and Star of David that he has been using on St. Peter’s Square whenever Pope John Paul appears, Patriarch Pavle immediately stood up and started to pray for all the religious communities of Sarajevo: Moslem, Jew, Catholic and Orthodox.

“Concerning me as a person, I am ready to meet Pope John Paul, here or in Sarajevo or anywhere,” said Patriarch Pavle. “I am really ready to meet with anybody for the sake of peace, even if we could only get one centimeter closer to peace. But I don’t represent only myself and my own opinions. I represent the whole Serbian Orthodox Church. According to the order of the our Church, the Patriarch is only the President of the Assembly of Bishops and of the Holy Synod. I have to think of the totality of the Church. The Patriarch cannot make such a decision by himself but rather with the Assembly. This has to do with the way conciliarity [sabornost in Serbo-Croatian, sobornost in Old Slavonic] is practiced in our Orthodox Church. Also I have to underline the fact that this would be the first meeting of the Serbian Patriarch with the Pope in history. Concerning this matter, our sister Orthodox Churches also have to be consulted as the Serbian Church is only a part of worldwide Orthodoxy.”

His view of the war is that not only Serbians but everyone shares in the blame, the governments of former Yugoslavia plus the rest of Europe and the United States. “Everyone is guilty.”

Speaking about war crimes, he said: “There are criminals on every side. God alone knows who has the greatest blame or who has committed the most sins.” As for the Church, “it must condemn all atrocities that are committed, no matter what the faith or origin of the person committing them may be. No sin committed by one person justifies a sin committed by another. We will all face the Last Judgment together where each of us must answer for his sins. No one can justify his sins by saying someone else is guilty of a crime.”

He recalled a letter he had received from a Moslem who quoted a passage from the Holy Koran: “Whoever kills another innocent person has killed the entire human race.” “This must also be the attitude of Orthodox believers,” the Patriarch commented.

Clearly the main obstacle to his taking part in an interfaith act of witness with the Pope is the poor state of relations between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. While the Patriarch has had meetings with Cardinal Franjo Kuharic, president of the Croatian Bishops’ Conference, the Pope is seen by the Serbian population as taking a partisan role in the war. (The non-Orthodox reader needs to be aware of the resentment toward the Catholic Church that still smolders within the Orthodox world. From the Crusader sacking of Constantinople to the missionary efforts the Catholic Church is currently making in Russia, Catholicism is seen as constantly using every method at its disposal to suppress the Orthodox Church.)

Even so the Patriarch reminded us that from the early days of Christianity the Bishop of Rome was regarded as first among equals among all bishops and that, despite the 1000-year of division between the Orthodox and Catholic Church, “he is still respected as such by our Church.”

A two-day meeting of the Holy Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church will be getting underway later today, we were told. The interfaith pilgrimage to Sarajevo is on the agenda, but an action of this significance will have to be decided by the Assembly of bishops, a group of about 30 that will meet in mid-May.

The fact that the Patriarch personally is prepared to meet the Pope, to go to Sarajevo, and that he was so welcoming to us, as was everyone we met and talked to at the Patriarchate, suggests that there may be a positive response even though it will take time. If it does happen, Patriarch Pavle’s involvement will not only be a personal gesture but an action of the Serbian Church done with the blessing of other Orthodox Churches.

After the meeting, Jim and I went across the street to pray in the cathedral, Saborna Tserkva, a church in good repair on the outside but desolated within, the walls of the church black as chimney smoke, the icons almost ruined, and decaying scaffolding in the cupola. One sees in the condition of the cathedral what the political events of this century have done to the Serbian Orthodox Church. It bears witness to what Serbian friends had told me in Holland, that Tito’s anti-religious policies had been less bloody but more effective than those used against religious believers in Russia.

Friday, March 11

While Belgrade literally means White City, this is definitely not the case. There is no city greyer than Belgrade. Maybe it’s cigarette smoke that has made the city the color of ashes. Those who don’t smoke are few and far between; it seems Serbs are born smoking. Except on a few streets every building seems to have an eroded facade. There aren’t many cars on the streets because of the shortage of fuel and its high cost — a small gain for the lungs of city dwellers. Buses are as packed as a Russian church for the Easter vigil.

Stores are well stocked but very little is being sold because people have nearly empty pockets and the prices are as high as anywhere in western Europe. One person’s monthly salary might be 40 New Dinars. I spent 8.44 New Dinars for three ordinary items at a nearby grocery store. It was 2.88 ND just for a jar of pickled red peppers. It isn’t uncommon to see a store in which there is no one inside but the person waiting by the cash register. There were six McDonalds in the city; only two remain open. Not enough people with money for hamburgers… Again, like the situation with cars, one might mark this up as a plus, but I doubt there are many people in the city would agree.

We had a long visit this afternoon with Father Andreas, secretary to Bishop Irinej, a young monk whose passionate love of Orthodox spirituality is very evident. At one point in our meeting he sang prayers in English to several saints.

We asked him in what ways the Church responds to conscientious objectors. Father Andreas said that while there are many avoiding military service, few seek recognition as conscientious objectors while those who go into the army are so caught up in the fever of war they don’t think about the issue. He added that soldiers in the Yugoslav army are not sent to Bosnia or Croatia and so the issue of soldiers in the Yugoslav army taking part in the war doesn’t exist at present. The combatants are mainly people from Bosnia-Herzegovina. Any non-Bosnian Serbs fighting in Bosnia, he said, go with paramilitary groups that cross the border illegally.

It remains hard to know to what extent and in what ways the Miloševic-led government helps Serbian forces in Bosnia and Croatia. Jasmina Arsova, a university student active in Women in Black who is our main helper and translator, has told me about a soldier from the Yugoslav army she has been visiting in the hospital who was forcibly sent to Bosnia for four months. However it’s possible, as claimed by Miloševic, that this form of intervention is no longer government policy.

Jasmina pointed out a helicopter flying overhead that at least once a day delivers badly wounded soldiers from the war in Bosnia to one of the city hospitals, but this sort of involvement in the war is regarded as humanitarian aid.

As we respond to questions about our meeting with Patriarch Pavle, we are told many stories about him. It was especially striking to hear how he took part in a huge demonstration in 1991 which protested the war and the policies of the Miloševic government. He was riding the tram on his way to visit his sister, as he does every Sunday afternoon, when he saw crowds of people with their protest signs. He got off the tram and walked with them for two kilometers.

We also saw a quotation from him which I gather has been ignored in the government-controlled mass media: “We do not need a greater Serbia paved with new mass graves such as those we had in World War II.”

Saturday, March 12

As I get to know Serbs better, I can better understand that many of them see a parallel between the suffering of the Jewish people and themselves. During World War II, Serbian resistance to the Nazis and their Croatian Ustasha allies cost them approximately one million lives. Earlier in their history they lived under oppressive Turkish rule that now contributes to anti-Moslem fears that help fuel the war.

There is a joke about a Serb meeting a Moslem and immediately hitting him on the head, though the Moslem had done nothing offensive. “What did you hit me?” the Moslem asked. “I was just recalling the fallen Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo,” the Serb replied. “But that was in 1389,” said the Moslem. “Yes, but I blame it on you,” the Serb said.

The past is very present here and with Serbs at least has to be very much taken into account when one talks about the present and future. The propaganda machine that Miloševic manipulates so skillfully reinforces terrible memories which have made many Serbs feel they are a people the rest of the world wants to be rid of, or at any rate a people left alone to defend a Europe that doesn’t yet understand the threat of Islamic expansion.

We had a visit this morning with Father Radomir Rakic, an editor and translator on the staff of the Patriarchate who is also active with the Church Relief Committee. He spends much of his time doing translation work for the Patriarch, but has to do it all on a typewriter half a century old. “This is my computer,” he said, pointing to the venerable black machine by his desk. “At least it was well made. You could drop it from an airplane and still it would type. Only the letter A gives me some problems.” I told him I would try to find some people in the Serbian Orthodox Church in Holland who would give him a real computer and printer.

Thanks to Father Radomir’s help we were able to visit with Bishop Lavrentije of Šabac, a member of the Holy Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church. He responded positively to the interfaith pilgrimage to Sarajevo. He went on to say that the Serbian memory is heavily burdened with tragedies in the past that stand in the way of such gestures. “We cannot forget but we must forgive. We must think how we can live together as neighbors. We have to think what is needed for body and soul. For the body we must end the embargo. For the soul we must forgive.”

Jim Douglass’s fast began in Rome February 12, a prayer for peace in former Yugoslavia and for the interfaith pilgrimage to Sarajevo. He has been on fruit juice ever since. To connect this first part of the fast to Ramadan, he has been drinking juice only after sundown.

Because of his fast and the need to conserve energy, as he now tires easily, Jim stayed in Belgrade while I went with Jasmina Arsova to Pancevo to visit the Peace Action Group “M” (M for Mir, meaning peace). Pancevo is a 20-minute train ride northeast of Belgrade across the Danube River. It’s in Vojvodina, which under Tito was an autonomous republic with its own president, but which has now been merged with Serbia.

The actions of Peace Action Group “M” include lighting candles and displaying a banner for half an hour every Saturday night in the town square, the text of which is “For All the Victims of War.” The person chiefly responsible for this simple witness, which has been going on since the war began, is Senka Mandrino. As we were carrying the banner to the square, she told me, “I do this for my country, the old Yugoslavia, not the new one, but the Yugoslavia for everyone.”

Senka described a larger action they organized recently when there wasn’t only the one banner but another on which all the besieged and destroyed cities and towns of former Yugoslavia were listed: Sarajevo, Mostar, Vukovar and many more. Candles were lit for each place. That evening the vigilers were approached by a soldier from the Bosnian Serb army. “I worried he would shout at us ‘Traitors, why don’t you tell it to the Moslems and Croatians’ or that he would tear up our signs. Instead he hugged us and thanked us, saying, ‘Why don’t you do more like this, then this stupid war will end.’ ”

Senka has a sister in Sarajevo and her husband, Mirko, one of the leading members of the group, is a conscientious objector. “I will continue with the Saturday night vigil until the war ends,” Senka told me.

Using a local book shop as a meeting room, Mirko and Jasmina co-chaired a crowded public meeting that evening at which two journalists from the independent magazine Vreme, Dimitrije Boarov and Zoran Jelecic, were discussing the impact of the war on the economy and the current campaign to stabilize the dinar after more than a year of hyper-inflation. Inflation was 60 to 70 percent per day much of last year. As a souvenir of that period I have a 50,000,000 dinar note in my wallet which was worth about one Deutsch Mark before it became completely worthless; there was even a bill issued for 500,000,000,000 dinars — eleven zeros! Now you see them tacked to walls as grim reminders of the economic chaos of 1993. The New Dinars now in circulation seem to be stable; at present one New Dinar equals one DM.

According to the journalists from Vreme, hyper-inflation was a government-organized method of skimming off huge amounts of money, in the form of the stable Mark, for war related and other purposes, or simply to line a few pockets. The end result is that the middle class no longer exists in the new, shrunken Yugoslavia; the mass of people are either poor or desperately poor.

While most of those at the meeting were clearly educated people, at least one was a working man in ragged clothes who turned up in the hope that someone present might help him find the medication — Forma Berbiton — for his 13-year-old epileptic son. Senka Mandrino talked with him after the meeting, taking down his address and promising to try to find what he needs but warning him she had no idea if she would succeed.

Living near the Mandrino flat, Dirko Mandrino told me, is a grandmother and granddaughter who share one room without electricity or running water. The little girl needs insulin. So far the Mandrinos have been able to find it but it is a month-to-month struggle.

Sunday, March 13

After leaving the St. Sava Church today, Jasmina Arsova told me more about her visits to people in hospitals. One of those she sees every week is a young woman of Serbian nationality, a refugee from Bosnia, who was raped by some of her Moslem neighbors in her village after the war had created a climate of mutual hatred. (The word “Moslem” in former Yugoslavia has nothing to do with religious belief, only what is regarded as nationality.) “She became pregnant, came to Belgrade as a refugee, and gave birth to her child. For two months afterward everything seem fine in her life. Then she had a breakdown and became dangerous to herself and her child. SOS Telephone found a family to take care of the baby. Everyday people are coming to see the mother, but she is still not at all well.”

Today Jim fast entered its second phase: water only until April 3, Easter on the western calendar. As Ramadan is over, he allows himself to drink water at any time in the day. While definitely on the lean side, Jim is in good spirits and health but tires easily.

Monday, March 14

Trivo Indji, a sociologist we met today in the Women in Black office, shares the view that regular soldiers of the Yugoslav army are no longer being sent to Bosnia by the Miloševic government, and also no weapons. He said the only material help sent by the government as such is humanitarian aid. Bosnia has long been one of the most war-prepared areas in all of Europe. Tito saw Bosnia as the impregnable fortress of Yugoslavia and for that reason much of the arms industry was established there. Jim responded that things look very different from Sarajevo. He finds it hard to believe there could be a siege of Sarajevo were it not for Miloševi.

Trivo said one of the worrying events of late in Belgrade is publication of the notoriously anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book Hitler used to justify sending Jews to concentration camps. He had seen a copy in a local book shop.

A high point today was meeting Father Arsenije Nikitovi, a monk with a weather-beaten but radiant face who is the Belgrade director of an Orthodox Church program — the People’s Kitchen — that distributes food to a thousand families who are otherwise in danger of starvation. His office, in a building linked to the main railway station, has been loaned to him gratis. “It isn’t hard to find families desperately in need of food,” he said. “And now we stretch what we give to 1100 families, but it is far from enough.” He hoped we might help find someone to give them a van because they have a lot of delivery problems. And they need more donations of food. At present the main donor is the Lutheran Church in Germany.

Father Arsenije was overjoyed when he heard what Jim’s wife Shelley is doing in Birmingham, Alabama, where Mary’s House provides a temporary home for homeless families. He immediately gave Jim a big hug.

We talked briefly about the war. “Who is most guilty,” he said, “I have no right to judge. Only we must do what Jesus said, to feed the hungry, to help and visit those who are sick. God will judge us for what we do and what we fail to do, and he will judge those who caused this suffering. He will judge, I cannot and don’t even want do.”

He told us something someone told him many years ago that has meant a great deal to him: “When you think there is no way out, keep looking and you will find three more possibilities.” “I have learned he was right, thank God,” Father Arsenije said. He also told us, “Whoever hits another person is not courageous, but rather the one who refuses to hit back.”

We had a long visit at the end of the day with Dragiša Krsmanovic, who has written occasional reports from Belgrade for Peace Media Service, and Milan Radovanovi, a student at the Orthodox Theological School here in Belgrade, a decrepit building across the street from the Patriarchate. A conscientious objector, Milan decided it wasn’t enough not to fight in the war. He wanted to get to know some of those people many Orthodox regard as the “enemy,” that is Catholics, and so has been a volunteer with the Catholic relief organization here, Caritas.

Tuesday, March 15

Jim and I talked with Saša Kovacevic about her life, her two years as a student in Sarajevo (leaving literally on the eve of the outbreak of war) and what brought her to Women in Black. At age 22, she is one of the group’s youngest members.

Saša told us what a relief it had been going from her home in Montenegro to the far more open atmosphere of Sarajevo where she began her university studies in journalism. “In Montenegro everything is hermetically closed, everything locked in custom. It is especially hard for women as they have an old view of women. There were times when I really thought people would beat me on the street. How different Sarajevo is! You can’t imagine how easy it was to live there. No one told me what was wrong with me. I quickly found many friends. I only hope they are all still alive. Now I am in Belgrade, still studying journalism, but I am here with only half my heart. The other part is in Sarajevo. If you are there for only two years, you feel as if you were born there because of the way they accept you.”

She discovered Women in Black through her friend and fellow student, Jasmina Arsova, and quickly became part of the group. “It was not just because of their protest against war and the work with refugees, but because I found they had a name for every opinion I had in my head about women’s rights. In Montenegro they just said I was crazy. But here I found a name for what I believed. Can you imagine that happiness? To find a name for what you had in your head a long, long time, since you were small, and you then come here and find a name for it. So I was really happy to find these women.”

She is not optimistic about the Miloševic government losing power in the near future. “He and his regime may stay in power another five or even ten years. He has succeeded in making everything — all the pressures, even the sanctions — work for him. He has managed to make himself into a hero. The opposition is weak, totally exhausted. They have no new ideas about how to put another government into power. Just imagine, a couple of years ago people were thinking normally, but now you get the impression no one remembers that time. You see what propaganda can do. People are afraid if they say anything critical, they will be accused of wanting to sell the country to its enemies. In many people you see a mentality of total paranoia — the whole world against us, enemies everywhere: Croatians, Moslems, Catholics, Jews, everyone not Serbian. For many people it was the UN sanctions that proved to them everything Miloševic was saying. They accepted the idea that the only solution is for the Serbian people to be completely united — otherwise who knows what will happen to us. So people get very irritated when you try to say that Miloševic didn’t help us but destroyed us.”

“What destroys us is hating people,” Saša added. “When you are born, no one asks you what you would like to be. So how can we hold it against another person in what family she is born?”

At mid-day we had a two-hour meeting with Rabbi Cadik Danon, Chief Rabbi of Yugoslavia. “I was Chief Rabbi of big Yugoslavia and am now Chief Rabbi of small Yugoslavia,” he said when making us welcome in his apartment across the river in New Belgrade.

Discussing the possibility of Pope John Paul coming to Belgrade, Rabbi Danon felt that there would be a welcome here only if there were preliminary actions taken by the Pope that would convince the Serbs the Pope is not their enemy. If he spoke out against the sanctions, that would immediately change public opinion in his favor. In that connection he described the appalling situation in local hospitals. “In some cases operations have to be performed without anesthesia. Whole sections of hospitals have been closed. The mortality rate goes up and up.”

He also said a visit by the Pope to the Jasenovac concentration camp would have tremendous impact on Serbs and no doubt many others. Jasenovac, east of Zagreb, was a huge concentration camp where a vast number of Serbs, Jews and gypsies were killed. How many is a point of contention but 700,000 is the figure one often hears. The camp was mainly staffed by Hungarian Nazis and Croatian Ustashi. “The way people were murdered at Jasenovac was even worse than in Polish camps,” Rabbi Danon said. Among the victims were his mother and father. In all he lost 60 members of his family. If the Pope were to go there, as he has gone to Auschwitz, it would be a very powerful symbolic action.

Rabbi Danon also mentioned, as Trivo Indjic had yesterday, the publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He had heard the book was published by the Orthodox Theological Faculty.

It was providential that in the evening while Jasmina Arsova, Jim and I were out walking on Knez Mikhajlova, the wide pedestrian shopping street in the heart of the city. There we ran into Milan Radovanovic, from the Theological Faculty, and Dragiša Krsmanovic, the two people we had been visiting with last night. I asked if they knew anything about the publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Not only did they know about it but said they would show it to me in Plato, the book shop we were standing in front of. In fact the shop had no more copies; staff had bought 30 copies a few days before but they were sold out.

It turned out the publisher — Vladimir Maksimovic, whose press is called Velvet — was in the shop at the time. He was pointed out to us browsing in a section of used English-language books. He is a man of about 30 with short black hair and a harsh face who said neither he nor his press had any connection to the Orthodox Church.

I asked him why he published a book which was well known as a forgery and which had cost so many lives. “Because it’s the truth,” he said. “It’s no forgery.” I said I would be glad to send him information on the history of the text and how it was produced by the Czarist Secret Service in the 1890s, if he would give me his address. After some hesitation he gave me his card and I gave him mine. I asked when the book had been published. Three days before, he said, in an edition of 3,000 copies. This was the fourth Serbian edition in this century, he added. The last one was published in 1941 — in other words in the time of Nazi occupation.

Afterward Milan and Dragisa took us to a nearby book shop where a copy of the book was on display in the window, a yellow book subtitled “The Jewish Conspiracy.” I took a photo.

While it was a relief to know that the book has nothing to do with the Orthodox Church, still it is alarming to think this murderous book so dear to Hitler is for sale in Serbia for the first time since the Nazi occupation.

Jasmina and I called Rabbi Danon as soon as we got back to the Women in Black office to tell him what we had learned and to give him the publisher’s name and address.

Wednesday, March 16

In a small building next to an ancient mosque in central Belgrade, we were warmly received by the Grand Mufti of Yugoslavia, Shiek Yusufspahic. He was delighted to be photographed with Jim’s Sarajevo banner, though his mind was less on Sarajevo than the needs of the Belgrade’s Moslem community. A new, larger mosque is needed but permission to build it has been refused year after year.

From the mosque we went to the offices of B92, Belgrade’s independent radio station. Discussing sanctions with Veran Matic, the stations’ editor-in-chief of, he told us “the one and only thing sanctions haven’t touched has been the flow of weapons. That sanctions have had a disastrous effect on health care and have made it extremely hard for independent structures like ours to survive.”

Standing on Republic Square in the heart of Belgrade in mid-afternoon, watching the weekly one-hour vigil of Women in Black, I was relieved that they were not the object of harassment and that many people passing by accepted their leaflet.

Sanctions again came up when we met Dubravka Velat of the Center for Antiwar Action, a large, well-equipped office coordinating many projects for the defense of human rights, help to refugees, and opposition to the war. Dubravka said sanctions have only convinced Serbs that Miloševic was right in saying the world is trying to destroy the Serb people. “Sanctions didn’t work. The international community wanted to punish the government but only punished the ordinary people and made Miloševic stronger. It isn’t so bad now as it was last year, when there was pure hysteria, but still there is a widespread feeling, people believing the whole world is against them, a new conspiracy against Serbs. On the one side you have sanctions being used as a way of trying to get people to change the government, and on the other the government using the sanctions as a way to shatter its opposition, and that is basically what has happened. If you go to the hospitals or any social institution, you will see what sanctions have done. More than 50 percent of the people are now below the poverty line. There are 600,000 refugees in the new, small Yugoslavia, and for almost all of them, their situation is desperate. Now there is a stable dinar and for the first time in two years you see the shelves in the stores aren’t bare, but only the rich can buy anything but absolute necessities. The only sanctions that should be applied are against importing weapons into any part of former Yugoslavia.”

She doesn’t accept the claims of the Miloševic government that it has nothing to do with the war is Bosnia. “It’s no longer so open as it was, but it’s common knowledge that the government is involved in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example allowing men in refugee camps to be recruited into the Bosnian Serb army.”

I asked if she was worried about the Center for Antiwar Action being banned. “They regard people like us as traitors, but they don’t suppress us because we serve as a proof this is a democracy.”

I asked if sometimes fear kept her awake at night. “Only once, when my husband, a television director, broadcast a program about the Serbian Radical Party, analyzing the reasons for that party’s political success. That night I put the table and chairs against the front door.”

Thursday, March 17

At 9:30 we were at the mansion of the Italian ambassador for a meeting with Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, Pope John Paul’s personal emissary, who was due to meet with Patriarch Pavle, Bishop Lavrentije, Bishop Irinej and Bishop Danielou at 11. Msgr. Paglia is pastor of the Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome, a church Nancy, Anne and I visited in the summer. We felt especially at home there; its ancient mosaic icons make it a place where the eastern and western churches still embrace each other.

We found Msgr. Paglia had a similar understanding of the obstacles to Pope John Paul being welcomed by the Serbian Orthodox Church and a similar approach to overcoming them. He said Pope John Paul made a statement critical of the sanctions while in Denver last year but his statement was ignored by the press because President Clinton met the Pope that day and used the occasion to make a speech in favor of bombing Serb positions in Bosnia. The press managed to make it look like the Pope was Clinton’s Amen Chorus.

Msgr. Paglia thinks there are practical difficulties about the Pope going to Jasenovac concentration camp, one being that it is close to the front lines. It is hard enough, he said, for the Pope to get to the three cities he hopes to visit: Sarajevo, Zagreb and Belgrade. But he thought other symbolic gestures by the Pope were possible, for example upon arriving in Belgrade going as a pilgrim directly to the Church of St. Sava, founder of the Serbian Church and recognized by the Orthodox Church as Equal to the Apostles, and praying there for repentance and forgiveness. I assume this event would happen in the ancient Church of St. Sava next to which a huge new church in the style of Hagia Sofia has been under construction since 1986. The Pope could make at this time a gift for the new church.

Both before coming and also while here in Belgrade the Pope could speak out against the suffering being caused by the sanctions. He told us the Pope is acutely aware of the grim situation in the hospitals, the malnutrition touching those in the lower strata of society, and has been speaking to various ambassadors and guests about it. It was the first topic he raised during a recent meeting in Rome with Theovald Stoltenberg, co-chairman of the Geneva Conference responsible for the UN presence in former Yugoslavia.

Visiting Father Andreas at the Patriarchate later in the day, we found Bishop Danielou, a member of the Holy Synod, and met with him in a quiet corner of another office. We gather from his report that what Msgr. Paglia had said to us in the morning was repeated in his meeting with Patriarch Pavle, with stress on Pope John Paul’s dismay with sanctions. In contrast, Bishop Danielou compared a recent statement by WCC General Secretary, Konrad Raiser, in which he said that the World Council of Churches still supports sanctions against Serbia, with Pontius Pilate washing his hands to clear himself of responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus. (On several occasions bishops and clergy in Belgrade expressed bewilderment and shock about Raiser’s statement.)

We visited the small church of St. Sava, next to the vast new church now under construction, where we prayed that the Pope and Patriarch will embrace each other and pray side by side for peace, repentance and reconciliation.

In the late afternoon we met for nearly an hour with Mons. Salvatore Pennacchio, the Apostolic Vice Nuncio (the nuncio is in Rome). It turned out that Jim and he have a mutual friend in Father Tom Michel, SJ, who heads the Office of Islam of the Pontifical Commission for Interreligious Dialogue at the Vatican; Father Michel is one of the signers of the call for the Interreligious Fast and Pilgrimage to Sarajevo.

Coming and going from that meeting, we rode in buses in which I felt like a sardine in an unopened tin. To my amazement Jasmina told me that buses are relatively spacious compared to the situation two or three months ago. “Now you can breathe,” she said.

Returning to the flat of Women in Black, I talked with Jadranka Milicevic, much involved in refugee work, and Jasmina Mustovi, the group’s press officer.

“I got involved in Women in Black,” Jasmina said, “because it gave me a way to take a stand against violence. Earlier I was a volunteer with SOS Telephone which was helping women and children in danger from violent men. But then some of us wanted to do something to protest against war, and that’s how Women in Black began. Our first vigil was on October 9, 1991. We were following the example of Women in Black in Jerusalem where Jewish and Palestinian women protest together every week against the occupation. Since then we continue with the vigil but we have also started other projects — work with refugees, publications work and so forth.”

Like so many people in former Yugoslavia, Jasmina cannot claim a single nationality. Her father is Moslem and her mother from a mixed marriage. “I never had the idea that there was any group I should hate.”

Jadranka arrived in Belgrade from Sarajevo in May, 1992. At first she lived in a camp and now lives in her cousin’s house.

“As soon as I heard about Women in Black I wanted to be part of it. In the beginning I was also active in SOS Telephone but now the work of Women in Black takes all my time. I wanted to be part of a group that could take a stand against the war and also protest the arrest of dissidents.”

Jadranka has never been arrested herself but several times has been ordered by the police to appear for questioning. “They wanted to know how we get the money for our work, how we function, how we get the medicines we bring to refugee camps. They asked why I, as a refugee, am taking part in such a group. They wanted information about my relatives in Sarajevo.”

Jadranka said that many groups in other countries which are trying to help refugees have lost confidence in big official structures like the Yugoslav Red Cross, because aid intended for refugees is sometimes delivered to non-refugees in place of a salary. “It means part of refugee aid is used not for refugees but to buy social peace. So foreign groups sometimes are looking for independent groups they can trust will really give the aid to refugees.”

“The refugees are mainly women and children,” said Jadranka. “Our work with them is not just to give medicines but to help them feel their own worth. So we have a project to make things which we sell for them, especially knitting and embroidery. Now we are also thinking about what we can do with women whose skills are mainly verbal and intellectual. So we started the ‘I Remember’ program which asks them to write stories about what was important in their lives before the war: love, family, home, work. We are making what they write into booklets, postcards and posters. It is good work we are doing, only not enough. We are active in four refugee camps, but there are 235 camps.”

The response of the state-controlled media to Women in Black has been uniformly hostile. “We are described as atheists, marginal people, traitors, even as people who are not ‘racially clean’ because ‘true Serbian woman would never act like that.’ The ‘true’ Serbian woman gives birth to warriors, she doesn’t protest against war.”

I asked about the impact of sanctions. “Right now Yugoslavia isn’t even the third world,” said Jasmina. “We are actually being used for experiments — to see how long one diabetic can survive without insulin, or to study the spread of typhus and tuberculosis under these circumstances. They’re spreading fast. We have less and less basic medical equipment that can be used. Machines in hospitals and clinics break down and replacement parts cannot be obtained because of the sanctions, or even if they can be obtained no one can afford to buy them.”

Meanwhile the armies on every side seem to have no end of money. “You know one bullet costs one mark,” Jasmina said. “If they shoot one bullet in one second, you can imagine how many marks are spent just for those bullets in four years? I don’t want to calculate it. And I’m not even talking about grenades and bombs and all the other military equipment.”

She said people are becoming numb to violence. “It’s no longer shocking when you hear on the radio that people were killed in the war yesterday. It’s awful. We hear the news. It’s no longer people’s names, just numbers. In the beginning there were names. Now there are only numbers. People are just numbers. We hear that in Sarajevo 60 people were killed and 200 injured. Just numbers. I keep thinking, maybe tomorrow I will be one of those numbers.”

Despite his fast, Jim is his usual self, his sense of humor thriving and persistent as ever. The water he drinks is either boiled before use or is bottled mineral water.

Friday, March 18

Jim and Jasmina took the train to Voljevo this morning, a three-hour train ride to the southeast. The train station was filled with brass bands seeing off hundreds of 18- and 19-year-old conscripts heading for training camps. In Voljevo they visited the wife and son of a friend Jim has in Sarajevo, a deserter from the Bosnian army who lives in hiding. The wife and son escaped two years ago. A moving and painful day, Jim says.

I went with Jadranka, Rada and Violeta to a refugee camp northwest of the city, Kovilovo, where about 135 people from Bosnia are living. With running water and showers, a dispensary and a large garden, it is regarded as one of the best camps and as such has been displayed to visiting UN officials.

While there we visited with a middle-aged woman named Sena Markovi, a former teacher. She is one of 12 people sharing a room filled with narrow beds. The most grueling aspect of life in a refugee camp must be the complete lack of privacy.

As part of its “I Remember” project, Women in Black has just published a small multi-lingual booklet with a short essay be Sena. Here it the text:

AFTER THE LAST CLASS

The 3rd of April, 1992. Friday. My first class: a test in V13. The little pupils are half-blue and half-asleep but serious. The auxiliary verb to be: I am, I shall be, it was… Their cheeks are flushed with — strain. In the second row near the window the twins: Ivana and Bozo, Samir and Sanela. The sisters are trying to help their brothers who are a little less good than they. I pretend not to see…I never had a brother. Because of the war — fifty years ago.

“The children are to go home” — a colleague announces hurriedly, unbelievably serious. Oh, yes. That morning, at the crack of day, a grenade had exploded near my bed — or so it seemed to me. The first grenade on the Kupres Plateau…

April 3rd, 1992… Our colleague D has been taken away! It is true that I cursed both Croatia and Serbia — and God! It’s not true that two snipers were found in my house. What would I do with them? I taught your parents…

Never again will I go into the classroom. After the last class I don’t have anything more to say.

Do you remember the time when we read touching texts? We were so quiet. If we could read them to the end…

You used to say: “Teacher, crying is not shameful!”

Had my words not become speechless, I wish we had only one more class: we would scream, scream so much that the whole world would hear us. We would scream to heaven, to God, my children!

Your teacher, Sena

Sena showed me a drawing she had made of her house and garden, the house burning and the flowers broken. Apparently the charge that snipers had been hiding in her house was the pretext for burning her home. She said, “I don’t know why they wanted to destroy the garden as well. All those beautiful flowers!” Another drawing showed several houses burning on the hillside.

Rada told me that for a long time after becoming a refugee, Sena was truly speechless, living in silent, deep depression. Now she has become a vital person again, a human fireplace warming her crowded room at the refugee camp. She hugged us all, made us coffee, and was full of joy to see the first copy of her booklet. Later we had lunch in the austere cafeteria: a plate of beans, a little sauerkraut and two slices of bread.

Rada (who comes form Mostar, the town once famous for its ancient bridge and now famous for the bridge’s destruction) had a letter today from someone very close to her. Inside was a pressed rose and a four-page letter. The letter contained news that someone close to her had been killed in the war. Jadranka and Violeta were crying after Rada read the letter aloud.

Rada always wears a necklace that has a copper image of the Mostar bridge as it was before its destruction.

In the late afternoon, back in Belgrade, I went to one of the university buildings in central Belgrade to meet with Sonja Prodanovic, Zdenka Milivojevic and Marina Blagojevic. Sonja is a well-known architect and also active in Women in Black. Marina and Zdenka are professors of sociology. They want to start a center that at the present they call the Museum of Antiwar Resistance. Their symbol is the Mostar Bridge.

What they have in mind isn’t a museum in the usual sense, more a place, as Marina said, “which in a variety of ways would treat what is usually called history — that is mainly the history of wars — as the history of failures, but failures which can help us learn how to live together without more such failure.”

“People here have become more and more compartmentalized, every little group in its own small box,” Marina said. “We need to develop projects that draw people together and that generate energy — for example concerts and exhibitions.”

“We want to make the other side of history visible,” Sonja explained. “What is not generally known in the world, and even to most of the public in ex-Yugoslavia, is how many people opposed the war and how many people did what they could to help others during the war.

“Official pro-war ideologies in ex-Yugoslavia have relied on the negative picture of the ‘other’ created in mass media, with each nation pictured as a victim of another nation. Peaceful history was reinterpreted as a history of hidden hatred. But in reality many people continued to live together and to help each other, even during the war. Many of us have survived owing to help and solidarity from other people. Many of us still believe that peace is still possible. We believe that human solidarity is stronger than hatred.

“Although we have been constantly exposed to stories of violence and destruction, we still tell each other ‘little’ stories about good will, help and sacrifice. In this way we know there is another side of a history. It is exactly in the time of war that peace initiatives should be supported. It is exactly now that we must start remembering and preserving that other side of our history.”

“Just as war was created by an interpretation of history as a history of wars and hatred,” said Marina, “peace can be created and nourished by the interpretation of history as a history of living together. Even in the Balkans, people were living together longer in peace than fighting wars.”

Their vision, I realized, has much in common with the work of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, which is not just a place to remember Anne Frank and her family or what the Nazis did in the areas they ruled, but a place that tries to equip visitors to respond to Nazi-like movements of the present time: to save the Anne Franks alive today. I proposed they contact the Anne Frank staff and see if they could be invited to come to Amsterdam. I also suggested they try to make arrangements to bring the Anne Frank travelling exhibition to Belgrade.

Saturday, March 19

Again and again people I talked with in Belgrade insisted that Jim and I had to visit at least one monastery. Bojan Aleksov, a draft refuser and member of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship who is one of the several men working with Women in Black, told me it was a sin to come to Serbia and not to experience one of its centers of spiritual life.

With all our meetings in Belgrade, such a trip seemed impossible. Then Bishop Irinej of Novi Sad — sometimes described as the Foreign Minister of the Serbian Orthodox Church, the “right hand of Patriarch Pavle” — invited us to come with Father Andreas to the Kovilj Monastery and meet with him there after Vespers.

At the Kovilj Monastery, which lies in southern Vojvodina, we found a finely-made stone church in the Byzantine style. The fifteen monks living here, most of them adult converts to Orthodoxy, are a young community. In the last part of the Tito era, only two elderly monks lived here. For years the monks’ cells were used by Serbian artists, and still there is a close link between the monastery and both intellectuals and artists.

Bells summoned us, along with about a dozen other guests, to join the monks for Vespers in a small dimly lit chapel. Through several small windows there was a view of an orchard.

Bishop Irinej, spiritual father of Kovilj, was present for Vespers. At the end of the service he spoke in his surprisingly quiet voice about the deeper meaning of the Great Fast that had begun that week. “It is the season to clean our hearts.”

With the abbot, Father Porfirijie, and several other monks, Jim and I talked for more than an hour with Bishop Irinej, meeting in an upstairs room. He is a young bishop, thin, with a long dark beard, wearing thick glasses, speaking in a quiet, reflective voice. There is about him a profound gravity and a sense of grief.

Like Patriarch Pavle, he stressed that the Church must practice conciliarity — sabornost — in its actions, not unilateral gestures. If the Patriarch meets the Pope, it must be an action of the whole Church. “We Bishops must listen to each other, listen to our people, and listen to the other Orthodox Churches.” He spoke of encounters involving the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church in Croatia as well as his own recent meeting with Pope John Paul in Rome. Regarding the latter, which happened “despite protests from our own people,” he wasn’t convinced Pope John Paul yet understands the principle of conciliarity that stands at the center of Orthodoxy.

He felt a large share of the blame for the tragedy of former Yugoslavia belongs to the mass media. “Our situation is so complex that even we cannot understand it, so we know how difficult it is for any reporter. But I have come to the conclusion that there are no morals at all in the profession of journalism. In their oversimplifying of what has happened here, the world is given the image of Serbs as a demonic people. And what this does to the Serbian people is convince them that outside political powers want to destroy them. It is a common feeling. We see ourselves being made to fill a role formerly played by Soviet Russia. My personal opinion is that the West has behaved like an elephant, and the result has been a much longer and much more cruel war. Neither do I think the Vatican, which so quickly took the western, German position, can be proud of its role so far. I am aware that the Pope himself doesn’t call for the bombing of the Serbs, yet he doesn’t object to those who make it seem this is his position. In Belgrade, people were preparing to be bombed and thinking that the Pope was one of those who wanted that to happen.”

Returning to criticism of the media, he noted that the activities of the Serbian Orthodox Church in opposition to war and to help the war’s victims are almost entirely unreported. “People in other countries are given the idea that the Church is actually in support of the war, even fomenting it. Whatever we do to save the lives of others, not only Serbs but Moslems and Catholics, is ignored. The western press says not one word about any good deed. And this of course makes it easy to justify and maintain the sanctions.”

“Sanctions kill people just as effectively as weapons of war,” he said. “Please understand, people are suffering, children are dying, unborn children are punished in their mothers’ wombs because they cannot get the medication needed. Truly Christ is suffering. It is a kind of brutality such as was practiced by the Gestapo of Hitler. Hitler had the idea of collective guilt which he assigned to the Jews. Now it is the Serbs who are guilty as a people and must be punished. Our nation has been made into a ghetto. In principle the sanctions are not supposed to be a barrier to medicines but in reality they are. We have seen shipments of medicines wait on the border for months before being permitted into our country, and by that time many of them were too old to be used. Though we know the Pope has made some statements critical of sanctions, somehow they are never reported and so his opposition to them remains unknown to the public and perhaps even to political leaders.”

Bishop Irinej noted there were indications that the Vatican is changing direction and may become outspoken on the issues of sanctions. Days before the Serbian Orthodox Church had received a large gift of medical aid from the Catholic relief agency, Caritas, and there were meetings underway with Msgr. Paglia, a personal emissary of Pope John Paul. “What we wait for now is a clear public statement from the Pope so that our people and the world will know he opposes what sanctions are doing to us. We need prophetic steps from him.”

He spoke about the political double standard. “We know the Croatian army is fighting in Bosnia, but Croatia is not under sanctions. Not that we want such a thing to happen! Only we want a single standard of morality, not one for Serbs and another for everyone else.”

He said America’s “new world order” was another kind of prison. “In the Soviet prison you got to sleep on the ground. In the American prison you get a bed and a TV. But it is still prison.”

I asked what signs of hope he saw. “There is no hope in politicians. They say one thing today, and tomorrow the opposite. If there is an act of terrorism, they immediately blame it on the Serbs and then, if later they find they were mistaken, they lose not a minute of sleep. Except for Christian acts of witness, I don’t see any other light. There is a planetary illness. The only cure is spiritual. It needs prayer and fasting to make a decisive step toward repentance.”

The symbolic and prayerful action of Patriarch Pavle and Pope John Paul being together in Sarajevo, Belgrade and Zagreb is clearly something that Bishop Irinej recognizes as potentially contributing to a cure to the planetary illness which Sarajevo has come to symbolize. If only Pope John Paul can work in the coming weeks and months to help remove the obstacles and misunderstandings that impede Catholic-Orthodox relations…

Toward the end of our conversation monks sang for us in Serbo-Croatian, Greek and English. Then outside the monastery we looked up at a sky whose stars, even to my book-worn eyes, seemed to be no further away than the roof of the church.

Sunday, March 20, Novi Sad

The city cathedral is in the Catholic architectural tradition and the iconography inside also shows the unfortunate influence of the baroque period and the era when Novi Sad was under Austrian rule, but the Liturgy itself, a three-hour celebration, was intensely Orthodox. The church gradually filled until there were hundreds of standing people filling the building, men and women, old and young. It was impressive to see nearly everyone receive communion. Afterward we had lunch with Bishop Irinej — for Jim consisting of one glass of mineral water — and then hurried to the train station with Father Andreas, catching the 2 o’clock train to Budapest with one minute to spare.

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