Category: Jim Essay

For the presentation 24 March 2018, at Koningshoeven Abbey in North Brabant, of Leven met wijsheid, the Dutch translation of Living with Wisdom:

Friends,

There have been a number of editions in various languages of my biographies of Thomas Merton but none has pleased me so much as the translation of Living with Wisdom into Leven met wijsheid. The reason is that, although I speak Dutch poorly, the Dutch-speaking region of Europe has become my much-appreciated home. I have been here forty-one years, well over half my life. Living a few centimeters above sea level in North Holland, so close to the North Sea that I can get to its shore by bicycle in less than an hour, was not a destiny I ever imagined for myself as a child studying globes and world maps and gazing at photos in National Geographic magazine. This land of polders, canals and sand dunes was not one of the environments that attracted me as a boy. My fantasies were of someday living in France, Italy, Spain, Greece or Great Britain, not the flat water-soaked delta that divine providence brought me to in 1977.

I came here to lead the staff of a Dutch-based peace organization, the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. For twelve years working for IFOR was my more-than-fulltime employment. By 1988, when I shifted to work as a writer and editor, our family had taken root in the Lowlands. In 1995, Nancy and I became Dutch citizens. In both our cases, it was a return to parts of our family roots. Nancy’s paternal grandparents had been born in Gelderland while one of my ancestors, Hendrik Hendrickson, was born in Utrecht in the late sixteenth century. Hendrickson was my mother’s maiden name and is my middle name. According to family legend, Hendrik Hendrickson was navigator of the Dutch ship, the Halve Maen, that sailed up the Hudson River in 1609. Later on he settled in Nieuw Amsterdam. His house stood next to the settlement’s wall at the southeast corner of what today is the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street. Probably it’s a great blessing we don’t still own that parcel of land. The New Testament doesn’t recommend wealth.

Thomas Merton moved with me to the Netherlands. He had become one of the major influences in my life since first reading The Seven Storey Mountain when I was eighteen. Though by necessity I had to leave quite a few books in America when I flew to Amsterdam, not one fragment of my Merton library was abandoned.

The work I was doing occasionally brought me to London, where I made it a habit to spend a little time during each visit at a remarkably beautiful and hospitable church, Westminster Cathedral. I loved its Byzantine mosaic decoration and its huge Stations of the Cross that had been carved by Eric Gill during the First World War. I loved its sung Masses. I loved its kindness to homeless street people. I also loved it as a place to confess my sins. There was no language barrier to navigate and there seemed to be a priest available in .one of the confessionals no matter the day or the hour.

One of the things one found in the adjacent cathedral bookshop was a rack full of booklets published by the Catholic Truth Society. These were inexpensive, well-written tracts on a wide variety of subjects — theology, liturgy, prayer, the sacraments, religious history and other topics. A good many were short biographies of saints or notable Catholics. Noticing that there was no booklet devoted to Thomas Merton, in 1978 or ’79 I decided to contact the Society’s editor, Brendan Walsh, and volunteer to fill the gap.

I felt reasonably well-suited to the task. I had been one of Merton’s frequent correspondents and occasional visitors the last seven years of his life, and I was a journalist as well. And it wasn’t, after all, a major undertaking. Most of the Society’s booklets were pocket-sized and brief — 24 to 32 pages — roughly two thousand words. So it was agreed. I was even offered a payment — fifty pounds on delivery, as I recall. As my salary was quite meagre, this made the project even more attractive.

And so I set to work. The only problem was that before I had gotten past Merton’s teenage years, I had already written at least a thousand words. I found myself trying to fit a Frisian cow into a confessional. I wrote to Brendan and raised a question: How about publishing a small book instead of a booklet? And, thinking like the lover of photography that I am, including some photos? I proposed as the title Thomas Merton: A Pictorial Biography.

Happily Brendan’s answer was a cheerful yes.

Then came the idea of making the book a trans-Atlantic project with a co-published edition in America. Don Brophy at Paulist Press quickly took to the idea and even suggested the book be designed by Emil Antonucci, whose work with Jubilee magazine, Commonweal and many publications by Merton’s close friend, Bob Lax, I greatly admired.

Meanwhile I had work to do. I recall with pleasure many nights, after the children had gone to bed, banging away on my beloved Hermes portable. “Banging” is indeed the word — even Swiss typewriters are noisy tools! I used the kitchen counter as my desk as it was the furthest point in the apartment from the kids’ room. They needed their sleep. Volumes of Merton were spread out left and right in that cramped space.

Thomas Merton: A Pictorial Biograph, my very first book, was published in the Fall of 1980. Exactly a hundred pages long, it offered the reader a compact overview of Merton’s life and was enriched by many marginal quotations from his writings. In mid-December I had the honor of presenting a copy to Pope John Paul II and was surprised to discover how familiar he was with Merton’s writing, thanks to Polish translations issued by John Paul’s own publisher. On that occasion I was accompanying my friend and colleague Adolfo Perez Esquivel who a few days before had received the Nobel Peace Prize for his human rights leadership in Latin America. It had been Adolfo’s decision to give John Paul this gift. He told the pope of the important role Merton had played in his own spiritual formation.

That first book marked a turning point in my life, launching me into a late vocation as a writer. Since 1980, there have been more than twenty books — books on the basic teachings of Jesus, religious imagery and iconography, pilgrimage, confession, and overcoming enmity. There have been two books on religious life in Soviet Russia in the USSR’s last few years, and a book on the resurrection of religious life in post-Communist Albania. I’ve also written two other biographies, one of Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day and one about Daniel Berrigan. Not least, there have been five children’s books.

In 1989, after the Paulist edition of the Merton biography had gone out of print, Robert Ellsberg of Orbis Books suggested I write a new, expanded edition. The content was so changed that the book got a new title, Living with Wisdom. And then, in 2008, a revised and substantially enlarged edition of Living with Wisdom was issued by Orbis that drew on Merton’s hitherto closed private journals and correspondence. It’s the Dutch translation of this third edition we’re celebrating today, a book that would not exist had it not been for the Dutch-Flemish Merton society, Mertonvrienden, and especially Willy Eurlings, who may now know the book better than I do. Married as I am to a translator and counting a number of translators among our friends, I know what a special skill good translation is. It’s a fortunate author whose work is converted into another language by the right person.

Meanwhile I’ve had one more Merton book to write, The Root of War is Fear: Thomas Merton’s Advice to Peacemakers. Published two years ago, it focuses on the contribution Merton made during his last decade in helping prevent nuclear war, articulating a theology and praxis of peacemaking, and giving spiritual guidance to peace activists like myself.

To sum up: The major goal of my several Merton biographies has been to present a reasonably complete portrait of a complex, multifaceted and yet integrated man. His engagements and interests, not to mention his talents, were so numerous: writer, poet, monk, hermit, artist, photographer, teacher, scholar, translator, correspondent, journal keeper, editor, friend, spiritual guide, environmentalist, explorer of other religious traditions, monastic beatnik, voice of socially engaged Christianity, and mystic… And this is not a complete list. The challenge has been to try to show how all these strands are woven into a harmonious whole and at the same time allow Merton to speak for himself.

Though Merton is now half a century in his grave, his writings remain fresher and more timely than today’s newspaper. My sense is Merton is someone many Dutch readers will find worthwhile and challenging.

Willy Eurlings asked me to add to these remarks some comments about how I cme to meet Merton and what were my first impressions.

It was thanks to Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, that I came into personal contact with Merton. Knowing I had read several Merton books, Dorothy began to share with me the occasional letters she received from him. One day in the summer of 1961 she gave me a letter of his to answer. He had sent her a poem about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, “Chant to Be Used Around a Site for Furnaces.” Dorothy asked me to write to Father Louis, as she called him, letting him know of our appreciation of the poem and our plans to publish it in the next issue of The Catholic Worker. A few weeks later, she received another submission, this time an expanded version of a chapter, “The Root of War is Fear,” from the book he was then writing, New Seeds of Contemplation. It was an impassioned anti-war essay that, once in print, got Merton into a great deal of trouble within his order. Once again, Dorothy asked me to respond, letting Merton know it would be in our October issue.

Not many days later I had a response from Merton in which he noted that we live in a time of war and the need “to shut up and be humble and stay put and trust in God and hope for a peace that we can use for the good of our souls.” This proved to be the beginning of an intense correspondence between us that lasted the rest of Merton’s life.

In December, Merton suggested that perhaps I would like to come to the monastery for a visit. Traveling by thumb, a co-worker, Bob Kaye, and I set off for Kentucky early in February 1962. The going was slow. I recall standing in nighttime sleet at the side of a highway somewhere in Pennsylvania watching cars and trucks rush past, many of them with colorful plastic statues of an open-armed Jesus of the Sacred Heart on the dashboard. Sadly, this image of divine hospitality seemed to have little influence on those at the wheel behind the statue. It took us two-and-a-half exhausting days to travel the thousand miles to the Abbey of Gethsemani.

Finally we reached the monastery. After the Guest Master, Father Francis, showed us our rooms, my first stop was the monastery church, but my prayer was cut short by the sound of distant laughter so intense and pervasive that I couldn’t resist looking for its source. Laughter was the last thing I expected to hear at a penitential Trappist monastery.

The origin, I discovered, was Bob Kaye’s room. As I opened the door the laughter was still going on. The main source was the red-faced monk lying on the floor, wearing black and white robes and a broad leather belt, his knees in the air, hands clutching his belly. Though more well-fed than the broomstick thin Trappist monk I had imagined, I realized instantly that the man on the floor laughing with such abandon must be Thomas Merton. His face reminded me of photos of Pablo Picasso. The inspiration for the laughter? It proved to be the intensely smell of unwashed feet that had been kept in shoes all the way from the Manhattan to Gethsemani and were now out in the open air. If the Catholic Worker had manufactured a perfume, this would have been it.

After that week-long stay at Gethsemani, The Seven Storey Mountain became a different book. No wonder that Merton had twice mentioned the films of Charlie Chaplin in its pages.

The abbot, Dom James, though a most hospitable man, was not initially quite so positive about a visitation of ragged Catholic Workers. In those days most American men had frequent haircuts, but, as far as Bob and I were concerned, haircuts were a massive waste of money. Merton apologetically explained that our shaggy hair did not please the abbot. If we were to stay on at the abbey, Dom James insisted we have haircuts. Merton hoped we wouldn’t object. No problem, we replied. On our second morning at the abbey, we took it in turns to sit in a chair in the basement room where the novices changed into their work clothes. The room also served as a barber shop. While the novices stood in a circle laughing, a good deal of hair fell to the concrete floor. Going from one extreme to the other, Bob and I were suddenly nearly as bald as apples.

Not every monk appreciated Merton, I discovered. Merton and I were walking down a corridor that linked the guest house kitchen to the basement of the main building. There was a point in the corridor where it made a turn, and standing there, next to a garbage container, was an older monk, Father Raymond, who was not so much reading as glaring at the latest Catholic Worker, which he held open at arm’s length as if the paper might be toxic. There was an article of Merton’s in it, an; essays about the urgency of taking steps to prevent nuclear war. Father Raymond looked up, saw us coming his way, balled the paper up in his fist, hurled it into the garbage container, and strode away without a word, leaving a trail of smoke.

One evening a day or two after our arrival later when Merton knocked on my door. He was on his way to Vespers and already had on the heavy white woolen choir robe the monks wore during winter months while in church. It was an impressive garment. I reached out to feel it thickness and density. In a flash Merton slid out of it and placed it over my head. I was astonished at how heavy it was! Once again, Merton laughed. The robe met a practical need, he explained, as it was hardly warmer in the church than it was outside. Without it, the monks would freeze to death.

The guest master knew I was at the monastery at Merton’s invitation and thought I might be able to answer a question which puzzled him. “How did Father Louis write all those books?”

I had no idea, no more than he, but I got a glimpse of an answer before my stay was over. A friend at the Catholic Worker had sent a letter to Merton in my care. He urged Merton to leave the monastery and do something “more relevant,” such as join a Catholic Worker community. (Over the years Merton received quite a few letters telling him that he was in the wrong place.) I was a little embarrassed to be delivering such a message.

What is most memorable to me about this particular letter was the experience of watching Merton the writer at work. He had a small office just outside the classroom where he taught the novices. On his desk was a large gray typewriter. He inserted a piece of monastery stationery and wrote a reply that seemed to issue from the typewriter at the speed of light. I had never seen anyone write so quickly. You will often see a stenographer type at such speed when copying a text, but even in a city news room one rarely sees anyone writing at a similar pace.

I wish I had made a copy of his response. I recall Merton admitted that there was much to reform in monasteries and that monastic life was not a vocation to which God called many people, yet he gave an explanation of why he thought the monastic life was nonetheless an authentic Christian vocation and how crucial it was for him to remain faithful to what God had called him to. It was a very solid, carefully reasoned letter, filling one side of a sheet of paper, and was written in just a few minutes.

When I first met Merton, more than two years had passed since the Vatican’s denial of his request to move to another monastery where he might live in greater solitude. By the time of my visit, he was able to spend part of his time in a newly built cinderblock building that stood on the edge of the woods about a mile north of the monastery. It had initially been intended as a conference center where Merton could meet with non-Catholic visitors, but he saw it primarily as his hermitage. Merton had lit the first fire in the fireplace just two months before. There was a small bedroom behind the main room. Merton occasionally had permission to stay overnight, but it would not be until the summer of 1965 that he became a fulltime hermit.

Our visited ended abruptly. A week after our arrival, a telegram came from New York with the news that President Kennedy had announced the resumption of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, thus another escalation of the Cold War and yet another indication that nuclear war might well occur in the coming years. Anticipating such a decision, I was part of a group of New Yorkers who had planned to take part in an act of civil disobedience, a sit-in at the entrance to the Manhattan office of the Atomic Energy Commission, the federal agency responsible for making and testing nuclear weapons. The abbot provided money for our return to New York by bus. Not many days later, now with a slight stubble of hair, I was in a New York City jail known locally as “The Tombs.”

Merton played a part even in that event. I recall a letter from him, sent care of the Catholic Worker, being hand delivered to me during the hour or two that we sat on the frigid pavement awaiting arrest. (My monastic haircut made me interesting enough to be featured on the front page of one New York newspaper the following morning.)

* * *

photos of the abbey and the book presentation are in this album:

 

[an extract from The Road to Emmaus: Pilgrimage as a Way of Life by Jim Forest, published by Orbis Books]

By Jim Forest

The oldest and most important pilgrimage center for Christians is Jerusalem. Despite all its sorrows, Jerusalem remains a city crowded with thin places, chief of which is the Church of the Resurrection, as it is called by Orthodox Christians; or the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, as it is known to Christians of other traditions.

Pilgrims often find themselves unready once they arrive, no matter how much preparation they have been made. Standing at the door of the Church of the Resurrection, many pilgrims are in a state of exhaustion and irritation rather than astonishment and exaltation. They have endured the wear and tear of simply arriving only to meet the obstacle of slow-moving lines once inside the church. Many pilgrims find themselves struggling to lay aside all their frayed nerves as they attempt to focus their thoughts on what happened there two millennia ago. After all this hard work, the pilgrim may not be in a receptive state. On top of that, there may be the disappointment of what time has done to such a place. Nothing inside the Church of the Resurrection looks anything like it did twenty centuries ago.

For most pilgrims stepping into that dimly lit, time-worn church, the first stop is the chapel on Golgotha, where Jesus gave up his life on the cross.

The Golgotha chapel, reached by ascending a narrow stone staircase just inside the main entrance, is dominated by a life-sized icon of Christ on the cross in front of which is a marble altar standing on four thin pillars. Dozens of candles burn constantly while numerous ornate silver lamps, large and small, hang from the ceiling. Glass panels on either side of the altar reveal the rough stone surface on which the cross was erected outside the city walls that stood nearby in the days of Roman occupation. (Following the city’s destruction in 70 AD, Jerusalem was rebuilt within new walls, at which time the western wall was moved further west, enclosing Golgotha.)

Cluttered as it is with pre-Reformation religious imagery, this chapel can be a disconcerting place for Protestant visitors. They may also be disconcerted to witness the physical veneration exhibited by pilgrims belonging to the older churches. Yet once inside the chapel, the most undemonstrative visitor tends to be moved by the climate of quiet, heartfelt devotion shown by pilgrims from the more ancient churches. Even a tourist with a head full of religious doubts may feel obliged to speak in a whisper. Visitors who regard the resurrection as nothing more than a pious legend may be moved by the realization that here, on this very spot, a man who had harmed no one — a man of mercy and healing — was stripped, nailed to a cross, and left to die while soldiers threw dice to determine who would take possession of his blood-stained robe. Nearly all visitors kneel in front of the altar, then reach through an opening in the marble floor to touch the rock of Golgotha.

Another significant resonance for this place is the tradition that Adam and Eve were buried at Golgotha, the very place where Christ was later crucified. In any icon of the Byzantine tradition, Adam’s skull appears in a tiny black cave just under the foot of the cross.

Leaving the Golgotha chapel, most pilgrims stop at the place where, according to Christian memory, Christ’s body was laid out before burial. The stone tablet set into the floor, placed there many centuries ago and now as smooth as silk, has received not only millions of kisses but also a river of tears and a nearly constant flow of perfume, the latter poured mainly by women pilgrims. Each day brings many hundreds of mourners who pause at this small area just inside the church’s main entrance. The pilgrims among them know the significance of this rectangle of stone on which no one steps, while tourists are mainly puzzled and perhaps embarrassed by the intense emotion they see displayed by the people kneeling there.

The next stop for pilgrim and tourist alike is the tomb in which Christ rose from the dead. It’s about thirty meters west of the Golgotha chapel and directly beneath the church’s main dome.

When Jesus was crucified, this was the Garden of Golgotha, full of olive trees and flowering plants. Many people were buried here. What was once a small and ordinary burial place — a simple niche chiseled out of a stone embankment, one among many — has become an elaborately carved, chapel-like structure. The surrounding embankment and the adjacent tombs have been completely cut away since the fourth century.

To accommodate pilgrims, Christ’s tomb has been made larger than it was. The structure encasing the tomb — called the Aedicula — now has within it both an outer and inner room, the latter with the narrow shelf, now covered with a thin sheet of marble, on which Christ’s body was laid.

Worn nerves and aching feet notwithstanding, pilgrims always find it a blessing to enter this constricted enclosure. At the very least, the Gospel accounts of the mystery of Christ’ triumph over death become more real. It probably crosses even the atheist visitor’s mind that what occurred here may not be merely an ancient fable. Something happened in this small space that every subsequent generation has had to consider — a mysterious event that has shifted culture and history and even altered the way we look at each other. The place of the resurrection continuously attracts people from near and far, touches both intellect and heart, providing a summons to live the rest of one’s life the freedom that comes from no longer dreading death.

The Church of the Resurrection is more than an enclosure for two sacred places. The pilgrim who has time will discover many unexpected surprises by wandering alone through this maze-like church.

One of my most memorable experiences inside this ancient church occurred during Easter in 1985. How fortunate I was! It’s all but impossible to get inside the Church of the Resurrection on Pascha. One must have an invitation. Providentially, George Hintlian, a leader of Jerusalem’s Armenian Christian community, had given me one. It was a precious gift. Each of the several Christian communities in Jerusalem is allotted only so many. Once the guests are inside the church, the doors are locked and bolted. The area immediately around the tomb is densely crowded.

At a certain moment the Patriarch of Jerusalem, having entered the tomb and been locked inside, lights the “holy fire.” Flame bursts out of the tomb’s small windows. The sealed doors are opened, and the Patriarch comes out bearing two candles which are then used to light the candles everyone holds. Few people hold only one; more often each holds ten or twelve. Each candle will later become a gift to a friend or relative who couldn’t be present. Meanwhile, guests utter cries of joy not unlike those one might hear in a crowded sports stadium at the moment a winning point is scored in a crucial game. As at a sports match, some exultant young men ride on the shoulders of friends. It’s an amazing sight. The space around the tomb quickly becomes hot from the proximity of so many people. So many living flames — so many people packed so tightly! Those who suffer from claustrophobia may find it slightly terrifying.

During the hours when we were locked inside the church, I twice retreated from the crowd to empty areas away from the tomb.

First I went back to Golgotha. How strange it is to be at a place normally crowded with pilgrims and to be the only one there. It is a rare blessing to be entirely alone at the exact spot where Christ gave himself for the life of the world.

On my second walk away from the tumult surrounding the tomb, I went as far as the east end of the Church. Walking down the stairway to St. Helena’s Chapel and from there to another deeper level, I entered the Chapel of the Discovery of the Cross.

While all visitors to the church visit the place of the crucifixion and the tomb in which Christ’s body was laid, far fewer visit this remote corner. Many visitors don’t have time. People often travel long and far to reach Jerusalem and then face a tight schedule once they arrive. As a result, they see relatively little of this huge, somewhat chaotic, ancient building with its many passageways, staircases, chapels and places of veneration. In fact, many Protestant tour groups, suspicious of relics and uncomfortable with devotion to saints, intentionally avoid this subterranean chapel. “The true cross? Found here?” one may hear a visitor say. “Hogwash! All these so-called relics! It was a hoax — just some old wood in the ground passed off as the real thing by swindlers.”

The pilgrim descends via a stone staircase. Step by step the air gets cooler and damper. One goes slowly, perhaps pausing to notice the carefully carved graffiti on the walls left by the pilgrims of earlier eras. Finally the pilgrim reaches an exceptionally quiet, womb-like area beneath the huge church.

There is something remarkable about the special quietness of this deep, damp chapel. Even when there is a steady stream of people coming and going, it seems to absorb and muffle every sound. The unhurried visitor can feel a numinous quality here that may be harder to experience in places where people are waiting in slow-moving lines. In a subterranean enclosure entirely abandoned at Easter, I found myself more aware of the risen Christ than when I stood outside his tomb. An ancient garbage pit has become the thinnest of thin places.

I was also aware of being in the footsteps of St. Helena, whose pilgrim journey in the year 326 inspired the discovery of the cross. Twenty years later, St. Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, declared, “[The Cross] has been distributed fragment by fragment from this spot and already has nearly filled all the world.”

* * *

By Jim Forest

Billy Graham died yesterday, 99 years old. His passing triggered memories of time spent with him in Russia in 1988, when we were both guests of the Russian Orthodox Church during the celebrations of the 1000-year anniversary of the baptism of Rus’.

“I had many letters from people in the U.S. who were praying in support of the meeting of President Reagan and Secretary Gorbachev in Moscow,” he said in a speech in the Kremlin. “Most people never dreamed a person of such conservative convictions as President Reagan would participate in a breakthrough like this. We have been too isolated from each other.” Graham, a Baptist, paid his respects to Orthodoxy: “The Russian Orthodox Church has much to teach us. One of the great experiences of my life has been getting to know Russian Orthodox Christians. They have deepened my life, made me more aware of the power of the resurrection, and that the crucifixion and resurrection are the central facts of history.”

In 1982 and again in 1988, he repeatedly spoke in favor of universal nuclear disarmament.

At the airport waiting for our flight to Kiev, I asked Graham what had led him to undertake his first trip to the USSR in 1982 despite advice from Vice President Bush not to go. “I had been briefed at the Pentagon about what would happen if there was a nuclear war,” he replied. “I had been to Auschwitz and seen how limitless is our capacity for evil. And I was thinking about Paul saying in his first letter to the Corinthians that he was called to be all things to all people. I realized I had closed myself to the people in the Soviet Union. So I felt I had to say yes to the invitation I received from the Russian Orthodox Church inviting me to take part in a peace conference they were preparing in Moscow.”

Speaking in Kiev, he gave a vintage Graham sermon: “My grandfather never dreamed of the changes that have happened in our world — space travel, color television, travel from continent to continent in a few hours by jet airplane. But some things never change. Interest in religion never changes. The nature of God never changes.” He spoke about God’s love for each person, a love we cannot damage by our sins. Graham recalled a Moscow lady who told him, “I am a great sinner.” He responded, “I too am a great sinner, but we have a great savior.” He recalled Prince Vladimir and his conversion. “He turned away from idols and destroyed them, opening a new path in life not only for himself but for millions of others right down to our own time. God never changes, but you and I must change just as Prince Vladimir changed a thousand years ago.” He ended his sermon saying, “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

The congregation replied in one voice, “God save you!”

(extracts from my book Religion in the New Russia published by Crossroad in 1989)

* * *

By Jim Forst

My Russian vocabulary is quite small, I’m sorry to say. While I studied conversational Russian one summer at the University of Novosibirsk, my progress was not impressive. The only language I seem to have any talent for is English. Linguistically, I am a beggar. However, thanks to Fr Sergei Ovsiannikov, there are two Russian words that I have come to know quite well: miloserdiye and svoboda.

I first met Fr Sergei and Aliona in Moscow in June 1988. At the time I was in Russia writing a book about the rapid changes occurring in religious life in the USSR. On that occasion I was in the company of Fr Alexis Voogd, co-founder and the first priest of our young parish of St Nicholas of Myra in Amsterdam, and also father of Aliona and father-in-law of Fr Sergei. To make the best use of available light, I recall sitting bird-like on a hotel window ledge while taking a photo of the recently married couple.

Fr Alexis and I were in Moscow to take part in a very special moment in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church: the thousand-year anniversary of the baptism of Rus’.

One of the events that stands out in my mind occurred in that same hotel room the night of June 20th. The four of us had turned on the television to see what coverage there was of the Church’s millennial celebration. We were not disappointed. Three items stand out in my memory. There was a very skillfully-made documentary film entitled “The Temple” [Xpam] – about Orthodox Church life. There was also a film drama that was inspired by the life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, since recognized as St Maria of Paris. And there was a long news report on the linkage that had just been established between Moscow’s Epiphany Cathedral and a nearby hospital. An agreement had been signed providing the opportunity for church members to offer volunteer service to patients.

The dean of the cathedral, Fr Matvei Stadniouk, was asked by the television interviewer what had led the Church to help in this way. “Our Orthodox people are part of society,” he answered, “and I’m very glad that now the opportunity has come to help people. It is perestroika and democratization at work. The time has come for common feeling. It means seeing what you can do today – tomorrow may be too late. This work is a moral reward for the people. The way people respond already shows that the conscience of our people has not been destroyed. We expect that many in our church will take part. The hospital is our neighbor. We hope to give help every day. After all, to have any success in healing you have to have love.”

“If you have a feeling of mercy in your heart,” said one of the church volunteers at the hospital, “you will do this.” A priest was shown making the sign of the cross over a woman too ill to raise her head. In another room a nurse was standing next to a frail patient. “Do you feel pushed aside by these volunteers coming from the church?” the nurse was asked. “Oh no,” said the nurse, crossing herself, “I am a believer myself!”

Fr Sergei, at that time a deacon, was very excited. “It is the first time,” he said, “that anything like this has happened since Lenin. In the past it has been said that the state provides social services and needs no help in doing it. But it’s far from true. At most hospitals the nursing staff is much too small.”

It was that evening that I first became aware, thanks to Fr Sergei, of the word miloserdiye – in English “works of mercy” or “works of a merciful heart.”

Some months later Fr Sergei sent me a text, co-signed by Aleksander Yablonsky and Georgi Krylov, addressed to Christians in the west. My Russian-speaking co-worker Joe Peacock translated it into English and we sent it far and wide. Here are some extracts:

“We are Christians living in Russia who seek to live in a truly Christian manner. Today for the first time [since Lenin] we are confronted by the question of Christian works of mercy [miloserdiye]….

“There was a time when we Christians were persecuted and believed that we would soon completely disappear. How did we live then? In fact, we [Russian Christians] lived more simply and more freely than we live today. We bore no great responsibility and we did not answer to the activities of the government’s machine of oppression.

“The period of the persecuted Church was in a sense the happiest of her historical experience. To be embroiled in combat with the state’s militant atheism was simpler than serving God and neighbor in the more banal lives we live today. To be a hero is simpler than to be a simple doer, a sower on divine soil. But the period of catacomb Christianity came to an end in Russia….”

But now, the letter continued, we are entering a new period of Russian history.

“We seemed to be like deep sea fish which can live only in the extreme conditions of external pressure and fear, but now we were coming close to the surface, where demands are placed on us for active service to our neighbor. In the west this is often called ‘social service’. In Russian there exists a word that is both precise and rich, though it resists definition – miloserdiye.”

Side by side with that unfamiliar word came another word with special significance for Fr Seregi: svoboda – freedom. Again I quote from his letter:

“All of this we began to understand clearly about two years ago [1986]. We did not expect great political freedoms, and, in any case, politics does not determine Christian freedom – svoboda.”

Let me pause to make a comment. Often freedom is defined politically – freedom of expression, freedom of assembly – but for Fr Sergei, freedom – svoboda – is a word that describes entering into the paschal state. It is embracing a life that takes its shape around the risen Christ. Because I am no longer a prisoner of fear, no longer in the hell of fear, I can make choices that are shaped by mercy and love rather than avoidance of punishment and death, I am free to be fully alive. Fear is longer the mainspring of my life. I am free.

It was the experience of such freedom that, while he was in solitary confinement in a military prison several years earlier, led Fr Sergei to certainty that God exists. This in turn let him to read the Gospels. Here he learned that we can meet Christ in each other, especially in those who are in need, for he said, “I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was naked and you clothed me, I was homeless and you opened your door, I was sick and you cared for me, I was a prisoner and you came to visit me. I tell you solemnly, what you did to the least person, you did to me.”

In his letter, Fr Sergei and his friends wrote in detail about the thousands of people in Leningrad who were in so many ways abandoned by society: widows, orphans, the demented, the insane, the invalids, the chronically ill, the amputees and the prisoners.

The Christian Seminar he belonged to in Leningrad recognized one cannot just read the Gospels and be socially passive. As Fr Sergei wrote, “We realized that our secret prayer services and underground [Christian] seminars were insufficient for following Christ today.”

A Christian life without mercy is not a Christian life. The letter continued:

“It is hard to recall how the question of miloserdiye arose in our small Christian seminar, who first said, ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy.’ We are all co-authors with Christ. Like Christ, we must walk in the world in order to share in his pain and suffering. And in Russia to do this one does not have far to go.”

The letter reported that a social breakthrough had now occurred in Russia – it was no longer illegal for Christians as Christians to practice miloserdiye.

“The state’s monopoly on social care has been broken…. The state, living for the utopia of tomorrow – the eternal tomorrow – was in fact unable to be charitable…. The idea of miloserdiye is not an abstract concept but rather a living empathy which arises toward this particular person, at this moment, seen from these eyes which previously had always been averted from the pain. And so, as a beginning, those in our group began to visit hospitals and children’s homes. Six months after our first actual experiences offering such help there arose in our city an official society of miloserdiye…. We participated in the establishment of this society and went to its meetings, while our group still maintained a specifically Christian orientation of compassion. We studied how to be and to live as Christians.”

Let me finish by recalling a visit to our house by Fr Sergei last July during which Nancy and I recorded a conversation with him. Here are some extracts from what he said. The main themes of which were fear and freedom.

He recalled an insight that occurred during his first weeks in prison.

“I was with other people and we had good discussions. But when we walked to work together, we were followed by a soldier with a machine gun. Not so pleasant. It was at this time I realized that we are [whether in prison or not] always being followed by such a soldier, only usually he is invisible. In normal life you don’t see him. But somewhere inside of you he is controlling what you think and what you say, controlling your behavior. You had to become your own guard, your own censor. You must abide by the system.”

I commented that it’s all based on fear.

“Yes,’ Fr Sergei agreed. “In fact the prison was to create fear. At some moment I shared this thought with someone else, another prisoner. He told one of the jail administrators what I had said and this resulted in my being put in solitary confinement. I was there three months. This was hard. You can do nothing. You can’t really sleep – the floor is wet. You cannot read – there are no books. You cannot write – no paper, no pencil. You have four walls and that’s it…. Light comes in but the window is too high to look through it. So all you can do is think. It was in this situation that I realized I didn’t know how to think. I had thought that thinking is a very easy thing. I used to be a physicist so I thought about physics, laws of physics, formulas. But after a few days, perhaps a week, these topics were exhausted. Finished! Then you have to really think, but I didn’t know how. Then something happened. I began to think about freedom. What happened next is very difficult to describe. Maybe I can say there was a kind of light. I heard the words ‘freedom is in God.’ But – a big but – I knew nothing about God! I didn’t believe in God!”

Here Fr Sergei paused to laugh.

“This was a problem – freedom is in God but I didn’t believe in God! But it seems God believed in me. I experienced joy. Only much later did I realize that it is comparable only to one thing, the joy you experience on the night of Pascha. Easter night. Finally I came to realize that the state you enter on Pascha night is intended to be the natural state of the human being. In fact many people experience this joy at the all-night Pascha service, but we lose it again and again, some after a few hours, some after a couple of months.”

We can say that the risen Christ visited Fr Sergei in prison. As he put it, “I was given this joy while in solitary confinement. This kind of joy is indescribable and unbelievable. I lost my fear. That was the most important thing. I realized if they sent me to a labor camp with a long sentence it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because I was free. Of course gradually I came to realize freedom is not just given – you have to take responsibility for it. You have to do something about it every moment of your life. Anyway it was a beginning. I understood that I had to know about God. I had to read the Gospel… They couldn’t take away my freedom. They could do what they liked to my body but I was not afraid anymore.”

“Sometimes,” he added, “people tease me for speaking so often about freedom. It’s such an important topic. It is what we lost in the Garden of Eden. It’s at the center of the story of Adam and Eve. That’s where the problem started. After eating the forbidden fruit they tried to hide from God. God said to Adam, ‘Where are you?’ And Adam responded, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid.’ This is the first time in the Bible we hear about fear. In place of freedom Adam and Eve got fear. Human nature was damaged. All of us are damaged. We are not born in freedom but there is the chance to find the way to freedom. We have to pass through the difficulties of life, but the chance is quite big. We have somehow to be born in freedom. Christ is awaiting our freedom. Christ wants only free people. Of course he accepts many other people too, but he wants free people….

“Christ is so often described as a physician. Perhaps the most important thing he does is heal the heart and open our eyes. One consequence is that we become capable of seeing beauty. One of the favorite sayings used by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom was ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ What does that mean? It doesn’t mean that beauty is something we can manipulate. Yes, you must open your eyes, but not only your eyes. You must enlarge your heart. Otherwise we see beauty only partially or not at all. If the heart is too narrow, the beauty that we see will seem ugly. What you see depends on you – on you and your spiritual condition.”

Each person in this parish has unique memories of Fr Sergei – some special attention he gave us at a difficult time, some words of guidance, some loving gesture, his attentive face, a sermon of his that opened a window, an assurance of God’s forgiveness, a moment of healing laughter. We are rich in such memories.

But to all of us left us these two words: miloserdiye and svoboda, the works of mercy and freedom.

* * *

A paper presented at a gathering of remembrance of Fr Sergei Ovsiannikov at St Nicholaks of Myra Russian Orthodox Church in Amsterdam 17 February 2018.

* * *

About Fr Sergei

On the 6th of January, the eve of old calendar Christmas, Fr Sergei Ovsiannikov passed into eternal life. His death followed a prolonged struggle with pulmonary fibrosis made worse in his final weeks by pneumonia.

He was born in Leningrad on the 14th of August 1952. He is survived by his wife, Aliona [née Voogd], whom he married in 1986, and three children: Aleksey, Aglaya and Evdokia.

Fr Sergei was a spiritual child of Metropolitan Anthony Bloom of Sourozh, who ordained him priest in London in 1990, where he had been assigned in 1989 by the Moscow Patriarchate. In 1986 he was awarded a doctorate after defending a thesis on “Theological Schools in the Early Church”. At the invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1989-1990 he did post-doctoral research in Bible sciences and church history at Oak Hill College in London. For thirteen years, beginning in 1991, he was a translation consultant for the United Bible Society, work which brought him to many parts of the former USSR. In the period 1993-1998, he was secretary of the New Testament Slavonic Scholarly Project. Earlier in his life, from 1969 through 1974, he studied physics at the State University in Leningrad. Between university and seminary studies, for two years (1971-1973) he was a conscript in the Soviet army. In that period, he was twice arrested and jailed.

Since 1991 he had served the parish of St Nicholas of Myra in Amsterdam (www.orthodox.nl) and been its rector since 1999. During these years the steadily-expanding parish moved two times, on each occasion to a larger building. The parish has about 300 registered members, with more than 25 nationalities. Services are conducted in Church Slavonic, Russian, Dutch and English.

He was a founding member of the advisory board of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship (www.incommunion.org) and played a major role in guiding its work.

In December 2017, with the publication in St Petersburg of A Book about Freedom, Fr Sergei became an author. The book is now in its second printing. An English-language translation by Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear is underway. A Dutch translation is anticipated in the near future.

* * *

By Jim Forest

On the 6th of January, 2018, the eve of old calendar Christmas, Fr Sergei Ovsiannikov passed into eternal life. His death followed a prolonged struggle with pulmonary fibrosis made worse in his final weeks by pneumonia.

He was born in Leningrad 65 years ago, on the 14th of August 1952. He is survived by his wife, Aliona [née Voogd], whom he married in 1986, and three children: Aleksey, Aglaya and Evdokia.

Fr Sergei was a spiritual child of Metropolitan Anthony Bloom of Sourozh, who ordained him priest in London in 1990, where he had been assigned in 1989 by the Moscow Patriarchate. In 1986 he was awarded a doctorate after defending a thesis on “Theological Schools in the Early Church”. At the invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1989-1990 he did post-doctoral research in Bible sciences and church history at Oak Hill College in London. For thirteen years, beginning in 1991, he was a translation consultant for the United Bible Society, work which brought him to many parts of the former USSR. In the period 1993-1998, he was secretary of the New Testament Slavonic Scholarly Project. Earlier in his life, from 1969 through 1974, he studied physics at the State University in Leningrad. Between university and seminary studies, for two years (1971-1973) he was a conscript in the Soviet army. In that period, he was twice arrested and jailed.

Since 1991 he had served the parish of St Nicholas of Myra in Amsterdam (www.orthodox.nl) and been its rector since 1999. During these years the steadily-expanding parish moved two times, on each occasion to a larger building. The parish has about 300 registered members, with more than 25 nationalities. Services are conducted in Church Slavonic, Russian, Dutch and English.

He was a founding member of the advisory board of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship (www.incommunion.org) and played a major role in guiding its work.

In December 2017, with the publication in St Petersburg of A Book about Freedom, Fr Sergei became an author. The book is now in its second printing. An English-language translation by Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear is underway. A Dutch translation is anticipated in the near future.

“One of the biggest gifts Father Sergei had was giving attention, attention that consisted of love and admiration,” said Fr Sergei’s son, Aleksey, at the funeral January 11. “He was able to give full attention to that very moment he was living in whether he was reading, speaking or praying, giving his attention to every word and letter. Maybe even more importantly, he was able to let the silence sound in between the words.

“I’m an actor myself. Being an actor or being a priest is of course a totally different thing, but during these last few days it struck me how many similarities there are in our calling. As an audience member I notice immediately when an actor on stage is just summing up some words or making a movement because that is his assignment – just empty words and movements. But when an actor is able to re-live a monologue, to connect him or herself with a text or a movement, to exclude everything else that is going on in his head – his worries, his personal life, etcetera. Then you’re able to fully engage, to be fully alive in that very moment. When that happens, it’s a blessing. As an audience member you sense and feel it.

“Amazingly it’s something that I found in the church. When a priest is able to say a prayer not only with his mouth and tongue, but with his heart, when a priest gives a blessing not only with his hand but with the divine love within him, it touches us deeply. Father Sergei was someone who was able to do this. Connecting mind, body and soul with that specific prayer and with that very blessing, he was giving himself into that very moment.

“Father Sergei was a father for all of us, to some a father in the flesh, to others a father in spirit. I can tell you honestly that it is a strange sensation to share a father with so many people. Our phone used to ring almost all day long – people asking for help, for advice, for a last communion, or to baptize their newborn child.

“It’s just now, in these recent days, that I realized why he dedicated so much time of his life to the priesthood. Just look around you. His impact is huge.

“On the last day of his life, Father Sergei said, ‘Children, what do you want me to tell you?'” And I asked him, ‘Tell us your wish’. His answer was, ‘That you will love each other unconditionally’. I wanted you all to know this because he dedicated his life to his family and we are standing here today as that one family.”

In July 2017 my wife Nancy and I recorded a conversation with Fr Sergei, the main themes of which were fear and freedom. Here is the transcript:

Jim Forest: I recall that being in jail provided a turning point in your life…

Fr Sergei: I was jailed twice while I was in the army. The first time I was accused of doing propaganda for the American style of life. In fact it wasn’t true – I knew almost nothing about the American style of life! What could I say about it? They also accused me of disobedience, and that was true. I was disobedient to the authorities. So I was sent to prison, originally just for a few weeks. That was nice. I was with other people and we had good discussions. But when we walked to work together, we were followed by a soldier with a machine gun. Not so pleasant. It was at this time I realized that we are always being followed by such a soldier, only usually he is invisible. In normal life you don’t see him. But somewhere inside of you he is controlling what you think and what you say, controlling your behavior. You had to become your own guard, your own censor. You must abide by the system.

JF: And it’s all based on fear…

Yes. In fact the prison was to create fear. At some moment I shared this thought with someone else, another prisoner. He told one of the jail administrators what I had said and this resulted in my being put in solitary confinement. I was there three months. This was hard. You can do nothing. You can’t really sleep – the floor is wet. You cannot read – there are no books. You cannot write – no paper, no pencil. You have four walls and that’s it.

JF: No window?

Yes. Light comes in but the window is too high to look through it. So all you can do is think. It was in this situation that I realized I didn’t know how to think. I had thought that thinking is a very easy thing. I used to be a physicist so I thought about physics, laws of physics, formulas. But after a few days, perhaps a week, these topics were exhausted. Finished! Then you have to really think, but I didn’t know how. Then something happened. I began to think about freedom. What happened next is very difficult to describe. Maybe I can say there was a kind of light. I heard the words “freedom is in God.” But – a big but – I knew nothing about God! I didn’t believe in God! (laughter) This was a problem – freedom is in God but I didn’t believe in God! But it seems God believed in me. I experienced joy. Only much later did I realize that it is comparable only to one thing, the joy you experience on the night of Pascha. Easter night. Finally I came to realize that the state you enter on Pascha night is intended to be the natural state of the human being. In fact many people experience this joy at the all-night Pascha service, but we lose it again and again, some after a few hours, some after a couple of months.

So I was given this joy while in solitary confinement. This kind of joy is indescribable and unbelievable. I lost my fear. That was the most important thing. I realized if they sent me to a labor camp with a long sentence it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because I was free. Of course gradually I came to realize freedom is not just given – you have to take responsibility for it. You have to do something about it every moment of your life.

Anyway it was a beginning. I understood that I had to know about God. I had to read the Gospel – it was difficult even to find a Bible in those days. But it was the real beginning of my life.

Finding my way into the Church was much more complicated. It was the beginning of the 70s. Not many churches were open and churches were watched closely.

Nancy Forest: When you had that experience in prison, did you sense there were things they couldn’t take away from you anymore?

Certainly. They couldn’t take away my freedom. They could do what they liked to my body but I was not afraid anymore.

JF: What happened then, once you were out of solitary?

Their first plan was to send me to a labor camp, but then they realized there was no basis for convicting me of a crime. So they decided on a completely different course and instead sent me to school for officer training! Six months. Instead of being a good soldier they made me into a bad officer! School was wonderful. I spent many hours in the library and found a book by Solzhenitsyn – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – and books by other forbidden writers. Lucky for me the librarians had failed to remove such books.

JF: I have noticed in your sermons how often you use the word “svoboda” – freedom.

Yes. Sometimes people tease me for speaking so often about freedom. It’s such an important topic. It is what we lost in the Garden of Eden. It’s at the center of the story of Adam and Eve. That’s where the problem started. After eating the forbidden fruit they tried to hide from God. God said to Adam, “Where are you?” And Adam responded, “I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid.” This is the first time in the Bible we hear about fear. In place of freedom Adam and Eve got fear. Human nature was damaged. All of us are damaged. We are not born in freedom but there is the chance to find the way to freedom. We have to pass through the difficulties of life, but the chance is quite big. We have somehow to be born in freedom. Christ is awaiting our freedom. Christ wants only free people. Of course he accepts many other people too, but he wants free people.

NF: As Christians we can say that without Christ there is no true freedom, yet there is the paradox that Christ only accepts free people. What comes first?

First comes the icon. Each person is an icon of God. In Genesis we read, “Let us create man according to our image.” The Greek word for image is icon. This was a favorite topic of Metropolitan Anthony [Bloom]. Everyone has this icon but the icon is damaged. Life is given to man in order to repair – restore – the icon. With the help of Christ to return to freedom.

JF: Peacemaking is the removal of the smoke-darkened varnish that masks the icon…

This is why Christ is so often described as a physician. Perhaps the most important thing he does is heal the heart and open our eyes. One consequence is that we become capable of seeing beauty. One of the favorite sayings used by Metropolitan Anthony was “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” What does that mean? It doesn’t mean that beauty is something we can manipulate. Yes, you must open your eyes, but not only your eyes. You must enlarge your heart. Otherwise we see beauty only partially or not at all. If the heart is too narrow, the beauty that we see will seem ugly. What you see depends on you – on you and your spiritual condition.

[A Russian translation of this interview is posted at: http:/

/www.pravmir.ru/protoierey-sergiy-ovsyannikov-ya-perestal-boyatsya-eto-byilo-samyim-vazhnyim/ ]

* * *A lecture given by Fr Sergei “Peace and Conflict in Scripture and History” is posted at:

http://incommunion.org/2006/03/24/peace-and-conflict-in-scripture-and-history/

Here is an album of photos of Fr Sergei:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/albums/72157662450293767

To download high-resolution photos from Flickr:

– When viewing an album, double click on any image to see enlarged
– click on the downward-pointing arrow below the photo and to the right
– choose resolution (“original” is the highest)
– save to your computer

* * *

[an extract from “Ladder of the Beatitudes” by Jim Forest]

One of the people of modern times whose heart was radiantly pure was the Russian pianist, Maria Yudina. I have come to know her indirectly through the memoirs of her friend and one-time classmate, the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, and also through Tatiana Voogd, a founder of our parish who knew Yudina personally and has slept under her piano — “the most sheltered place in her apartment,” she tells me. (This photo was taken by Tatiana Voogd.)

It was Maria Yudina’s fate to live through the Russian revolution and its aftermath, seeing many of her dearest friends and colleagues disappear into the Gulag. A fearless Christian, she wore a cross visibly even while teaching or performing in public — an affirmation of belief at a time when any display of religious faith could cost one’s work, one’s freedom, even one’s life. She lived an ascetic life, wearing no makeup, spending little on herself, and dressing simply. “I had the impression that Yudina wore the same black dress during her entire long life, it was so worn and soiled,” said Shostakovich.

For her, music was a way of proclaiming her faith in a period when presses were more carefully policed than pianos. “Yudina saw music in a mystical light. For instance, she saw Bach’s Goldberg Variations as a series of illustrations to the Holy Bible,” said Shostakovich. “She always played as though she were giving a sermon.”

She would not only perform piano works but pause during concerts to read poetry, such writers as Boris Pasternak, unable to publish at the time.

She was notorious among friends for her inability to keep anything of value for herself. “She came to see me once,” Shostakovich recalled, “and said that she was living in a miserable little room where she could neither work nor rest. So I signed a petition, I went to see various bureaucrats, I asked a lot of people to help, I took up a lot of people’s time. With great difficulty we got an apartment for Yudina. You would think that everything was fine and that life could go on. A short time later she came to me again and asked for help in obtaining an apartment for herself. ‘What? But we got an apartment for you. What do you need another one for?’ ‘I gave the apartment away to a poor old woman.’”

Shostakovich heard from a friend that he had made a loan to Yudina of five rubles. “I broke a window in my room, it’s drafty and so cold, I can’t live like that,” she had told them. “Naturally, they gave her the money — it was winter. A while later they visited her, and it was as cold in her room as it was outside and the broken window was stuffed with a rag. ‘How can this be, Maria Veniaminovna? We gave you money to fix the window.’ And she replied, ‘I gave it for the needs of the church .

Shostakovich, who regarded religion as superstition, didn’t approve. “The church may have various needs,” he protested, “but the clergy doesn’t sit around in the cold, after all, with broken windows. Self-denial should have a rational limit.” He accused her of behaving like a yurodivye, the Russian word for a holy fool, a form of sanctity in the eyes of the Church.

Her public profession of faith was not without cost. Despite her genius as a musician, from time to time she was banned from concert halls and not once in her life was she allowed to travel outside Russia.

“Her religious position was under constant artillery and even cavalry attack [at the music school in Leningrad],” Shostakovich remembered. “Serebriakov, the director then, had a habit of making so-called ‘raids of the light brigade’. . . . He realized that Yudina was a first-class pianist, but he wasn’t willing to risk his own position. One of the charges of the light brigade was made specifically against her. The cavalry rushed into Yudina’s class and demanded of Yudina: ‘Do you believe in God?’ She replied in the affirmative. ‘Was she promoting religious propaganda among her students?’ She replied that the Consti­tution didn’t forbid it. A few days later a transcript of the conversation made by ‘an unknown person’ appeared in a Leningrad paper, which also printed a caricature — Yudina in nun’s robes surrounded by kneeling students. And the caption was something about preachers appearing at the Conservatoire. The cavalry trod heavily, even though it was the light brigade. Naturally, Yudina was dismissed after that.”

From time to time she all but signed her own death warrant. Perhaps the most remarkable story in Shostakovich’s memoir concerns one such incident:

“In his final years, Stalin seemed more and more like a madman, and I think his superstition grew. The ‘Leader and Teacher’ sat locked up in one of his many dachas, amusing himself in bizarre ways. They say he cut out pictures and photos from old magazines and newspapers, glued them onto paper, and hung them on the walls. . . . [He] didn’t let anyone in to see him for days at a time. He listened to the radio a lot. Once Stalin called the Radio Committee, where the administration was, and asked if they had a record of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23, which had been heard on the radio the day before. ‘Played by Yudina,’ he added. They told Stalin that of course they had it. Actually, there was no record, the concert had been live. But they were afraid to say no to Stalin, no one ever knew what the consequences might be. A human life meant nothing to him. All you could do was agree, submit, be a yes-man, a yes-man to a madman.

“Yudina later told me that they had to send the conductor home, he was so scared he couldn’t think. They called another conductor, who trembled and got everything mixed up, confusing the orchestra. Only a third conductor was in any shape to finish the recording.

“I think this is a unique event in the history of recording — I mean, changing conductors three times in one night. Anyway, the record was ready by morning. They made one single copy in record time and sent it to Stalin. Now that was a record. A record in yes-ing.

“Soon after, Yudina received an envelope with twenty thousand rubles. She was told it came on the express orders of Stalin. Then she wrote him a letter. I know about this letter from her, and I know that the story seems improbable. Yudina had many quirks, but I can say this — she never lied. I’m certain that her story is true. Yudina wrote something like this in her letter: ‘I thank you, Joseph Vissarionovich, for your aid. I will pray for you day and night and ask the Lord to forgive your great sins before the people and the country. The Lord is merciful and He’ll forgive you. I gave the money to the church that I attend.’

“And Yudina sent this suicidal letter to Stalin. He read it and didn’t say a word. They expected at least a twitch of the eyebrow. Naturally, the order to arrest Yudina was prepared and the slightest grimace would have been enough to wipe away the last traces of her. But Stalin was silent and set the letter aside in silence. The anticipated movement of the eyebrows didn’t come.

“Nothing happened to Yudina. They say that her recording of the Mozart was on the record player when the ‘Leader and Teacher’ was found dead in his dacha. It was the last thing he had listened to.”

Shostakovich found Yudina’s open display of belief foolish, yet one senses within his complaints both envy and awe. In a time of heart-stopping fear, here was someone as fearless as Saint George before the dragon, someone who preferred giving away her few rubles to repairing her own broken window, who ‘published’ with her own voice the poems of banned writers, who dared to tell Stalin that he was not beyond God’s mercy and forgiveness. She had a large and pure heart. No wonder her grave in Moscow has been a place of pilgrimage ever since she died.

* * *

By Jim Forest

Pilgrimage is the quest for what the Celts have described as “thin places.” Thin places have a way of slowing us down, even stopping us in our tracks.

A thin place is a place where ordinary matter seems charged with God’s presence. It may be a spot well known for a celebrated encounter with God, a place remembered for a key event in the life of Jesus, or a place linked with a great saint; it may be twelve time zones away or as close at hand or right where you’re standing. What marks any thin place is the time-stopping awareness of God’s presence. It doesn’t matter whether a particular thin place is known only to you or featured in hundreds of guidebooks. For you, that spot will be endowed ever after with a special significance.

Thin places, even when built of stone, seem to possess a kind of translucence. While awareness of the Divine Presence — in reality, everywhere — s forced upon no one, go to a thin place and an awareness of the holy often touches even the most skeptical and faith-resistant person. The walls of ancient churches seem to have been sponge-like in absorbing the prayers and tears of all who have come there. All that makes life opaque has slowly been worn away by so many pilgrims bringing their suffering, their longing, their prayers, their grief, their gratitude, their joy.

The most famous thin places are powerful magnets attracting pilgrims by the thousands or even millions. They come by foot and bike, car and bus, plane and train; they come alone and they come in crowds.

An encyclopedia of many volumes could be written describing all the world’s thin places. But for the moment let’s consider only three.

One of the most venerable of thin places is Mount Sinai and its surroundings. Moses got there on foot. Most pilgrims these days arrive by bus.

About 1300 years before Christ’s birth, Moses murdered an Egyptian who was abusing a Hebrew. Desperately in need of a hiding place, he fled to the southern Sinai, a desert region of narrow valleys and precipitous cliffs. There, beside a well years later, he met his wife Zipporah. While guarding his father-in-law’s flock near the same well, he experienced the miracle of the burning bush. Before his eyes a desert bush exploded with flame, yet wasn’t consumed. From within the burning bush, God called, “Moses, Moses!” Moses replied, “Here am I.” The voice spoke again: “Do not come near; put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” Finally the voice identified itself: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” The text in Exodus adds: “And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.” On that day Moses found the next step in his vocation: to return to Egypt and free his fellow Jews from slavery.

While the bush Moses stood before no longer burns, it lived a long life. Its progeny has survived to the present day. In the year 330, the Byzantine empress, St. Helena, requested the monks living in the area to build a chapel next to the site of the bush. Later in the same century, the Spanish nun Egeria was among pilgrims who came here. “There are many cells of holy men,” she wrote, “and a church on the spot where the bush stands, and this bush is still alive today and gives forth shoots.” The bush, quite large, still thrives within an enclosure adjacent to a chapel directly behind the basilica’s main sanctuary.

In the sixth century substantial donations from the Emperor Justinian made possible construction of a basilica and the fortress wall that still encloses the monastery. Even with this formidable barrier, however, the monks could do little in self-defense under siege. One of the wonders of the Christian era is that this vulnerable desert community has survived. Its principal defense is not its granite walls, but a document signed by the prophet Muhammad personally guaranteeing the safety of the monastery and its inhabitants. It is one of the principal treasures of the monastery library. For centuries, Muslim Bedouin neighbors who venerate both Moses and Mary and regard Jesus as a prophet have assisted the monks. As an act of gratitude and hospitality to its guardians, St. Catherine’s is the world’s only monastery to have a mosque within its walls.

The monastery opens its gate to visitors only three hours a day between 9:00 a.m. and noon. Praying at the place of the burning bush may be the pilgrims’ first priority, but they find much more to do both within the walls of St. Catherine’s and in the surrounding wilderness.

First of all, there is the iconography. The monks care for some of the world’s oldest and finest icons. Two hundred of them hang in a special gallery. Among the earliest is an image of the face of Christ that has a photographic immediacy. A sixth-century icon of St. Peter is so lifelike that, if smaller, could be used in a passport. That these icons have survived is thanks to the irony of the monastery’s being situated in the Muslim world and thus beyond the edicts of the iconoclastic Byzantine emperors of the eighth and ninth centuries.

Among the monastery’s less ancient icons is one from the thirteenth century of Moses taking off his sandals before the burning bush.

Outside the walls, Mount Sinai towers over the monastery. As it rises, it divides into three peaks, the most famous being Jebel Musa, the Peak of Moses. Mount Sinai seems not just to have risen but to have erupted out of the earth. It’s as barren a place as exists anywhere or earth.

Moses climbed the mountain on two occasions to speak with God. Regarding the second ascent, Exodus records: “Then Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days; and on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud. Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel. And Moses entered the cloud, and went up on the mountain. And Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights.”

During those forty days Moses received the two tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed.

In the first millennium, monks living on and near Mount Sinai created a 3750-step granite stairway that makes the ascent for today’s pilgrims much easier than it was for Moses. Pilgrims normally start the climb in the middle of the night so they can witness the sunrise from the summit. The small church on the top, on the spot where Moses talked with God and received the Ten Commandments, is about 1,600 years old.

Few places on earth are less favorable to a human presence than Mount Sinai and the surrounding area, yet countless thousands of monks have made this desert region, including the mountain heights, their home for more than seventeen centuries. At the same time, they have received and cared for a never-ending river of pilgrims.

No matter how brief the visit, no pilgrim can leave St. Catherine’s without being impressed with the astonishing tenacity of monastic life in such a dry, rugged, sun-battered setting. One need only read any of the collections of desert-father stories to meet some of the astonishing people who have made the Egyptian desert their home.

The best known monk of St. Catherine’s Monastery was St. John Climacus (or St. John of the Ladder), abbot of the monastery for many years until his death in the year 606, when he was in his eighties. He is the author of one of the classics of ascetic life, The Ladder of Divine Ascent. This is the only book that has its own icon, an image that with great economy summarizes the text: A thirty-rung ladder links the desert to the welcoming hands of Christ in heaven, but many are falling from it. The book is a kind of guidebook outlining the route to salvation for monks to follow. A ladder of thirty virtues begins with the renunciation of worldly life and ascends, rung by rung, through obedience, penitence, detachment, and humility to enter into love of God and neighbor and freedom from all that impedes that love. The book’s moral isn’t how easy it is to fall, but rather how important it is to get up and start climbing again after each fall. This is what generation after generation of monks at St. Catherine’s has been struggling to do.

While St. Catherine’s is among the most honored and impressive places of Christian pilgrimage anywhere on earth, the oldest and most important pilgrimage center for Christians is Jerusalem. Despite all its sorrows, Jerusalem remains a city crowded with thin places, chief of which is the Church of the Resurrection, as it is called by Orthodox Christians; or the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, as it is known to Christians of other traditions.

As is often the case with much-visited thin places, pilgrims often find themselves unready once they arrive, no matter how much preparation they have been made. Standing at the door of the Church of the Resurrection, many pilgrims are in a state of exhaustion and irritation rather than astonishment and exaltation. They have endured the wear and tear of simply arriving only to meet the obstacle of slow-moving lines once inside the church. Many pilgrims find themselves struggling to lay aside all their frayed nerves as they attempt to focus their thoughts on what happened there two millennia ago. After all this hard work, the pilgrim may not be in a receptive state. On top of that, there may be the disappointment of what time has done to such a place. Nothing inside the Church of the Resurrection looks anything like it did twenty centuries ago.

For most pilgrims stepping into that dimly lit, time-worn church, the first stop is the chapel on Golgotha, where Jesus gave up his life on the cross.

The Golgotha chapel, reached by ascending a narrow stone staircase just inside the main entrance, is dominated by a life-sized icon of Christ on the cross in front of which is a marble altar standing on four thin pillars. Dozens of candles burn constantly while numerous ornate silver lamps, large and small, hang from the ceiling. Glass panels on either side of the altar reveal the rough stone surface on which the cross was erected outside the city walls that stood nearby in the days of Roman occupation. (Following the city’s destruction in 70 AD, Jerusalem was rebuilt within new walls, at which time the western wall was moved further west, enclosing Golgotha.)

Cluttered as it is with pre-Reformation religious imagery, this chapel can be a disconcerting place for Protestant visitors. They may also be disconcerted to witness the physical veneration exhibited by pilgrims belonging to the older churches. Yet once inside the chapel, the most undemonstrative visitor tends to be moved by the climate of quiet, heartfelt devotion shown by pilgrims from the more ancient churches. Even a tourist with a head full of religious doubts may feel obliged to speak in a whisper. Visitors who regard the resurrection as nothing more than a pious legend may be moved by the realization that here, on this very spot, a man who had harmed no one — a man of mercy and healing — was stripped, nailed to a cross, and left to die while soldiers threw dice to determine who would take possession of his blood-stained robe. Nearly all visitors kneel in front of the altar, then reach through an opening in the marble floor to touch the rock of Golgotha.

Another significant resonance for this place is the tradition that Adam and Eve were buried at Golgotha, the very place where Christ was later crucified. In any icon of the Byzantine tradition, Adam’s skull appears in a tiny black cave just under the foot of the cross.

Leaving the Golgotha chapel, most pilgrims stop at the place where, according to Christian memory, Christ’s body was laid out before burial. The stone tablet set into the floor, placed there many centuries ago and now as smooth as silk, has received not only millions of kisses but also a river of tears and a nearly constant flow of perfume, the latter poured mainly by women pilgrims. Each day brings many hundreds of mourners who pause at this small area just inside the church’s main entrance. The pilgrims among them know the significance of this rectangle of stone on which no one steps, while tourists are mainly puzzled and perhaps embarrassed by the intense emotion they see displayed by the people kneeling there.

The next stop for pilgrim and tourist alike is the tomb in which Christ rose from the dead. It’s about thirty meters west of the Golgotha chapel and directly beneath the church’s main dome.

When Jesus was crucified, this was the Garden of Golgotha, full of olive trees and flowering plants. Many people were buried here. What was once a small and ordinary burial place — a simple niche chiseled out of a stone embankment, one among many — has become an elaborately carved, chapel-like structure. The surrounding embankment and the adjacent tombs have been completely cut away since the fourth century.

To accommodate pilgrims, Christ’s tomb has been made larger than it was. The structure encasing the tomb — called the Aedicula — now has within it both an outer and inner room, the latter with the narrow shelf, now covered with a thin sheet of marble, on which Christ’s body was laid.

Worn nerves and aching feet notwithstanding, pilgrims always find it a blessing to enter this constricted enclosure. At the very least, the Gospel accounts of the mystery of Christ’ triumph over death become more real. It probably crosses even the atheist visitor’s mind that what occurred here may not be merely an ancient fable. Something happened in this small space that every subsequent generation has had to consider — a mysterious event that has shifted culture and history and even altered the way we look at each other. The place of the resurrection continuously attracts people from near and far, touches both intellect and heart, providing a summons to live the rest of one’s life the freedom that comes from no longer dreading death.

The Church of the Resurrection is more than an enclosure for two sacred places. The pilgrim who has time will discover many unexpected surprises by wandering alone through this maze-like church.

One of my most memorable experiences inside this ancient church occurred during Easter in 1985. How fortunate I was! It’s all but impossible to get inside the Church of the Resurrection on Pascha. One must have an invitation. Providentially, George Hintlian, a leader of Jerusalem’s Armenian Christian community, had given me one. It was a precious gift. Each of the several Christian communities in Jerusalem is allotted only so many. Once the guests are inside the church, the doors are locked and bolted. The area immediately around the tomb is densely crowded.

At a certain moment the Patriarch of Jerusalem, having entered the tomb and been locked inside, lights the “holy fire.” Flame bursts out of the tomb’s small windows. The sealed doors are opened, and the Patriarch comes out bearing two candles which are then used to light the candles everyone holds. Few people hold only one; more often each holds ten or twelve. Each candle will later become a gift to a friend or relative who couldn’t be present. Meanwhile, guests utter cries of joy not unlike those one might hear in a crowded sports stadium at the moment a winning point is scored in a crucial game. As at a sports match, some exultant young men ride on the shoulders of friends. It’s an amazing sight. The space around the tomb quickly becomes hot from the proximity of so many people. So many living flames — so many people packed so tightly! Those who suffer from claustrophobia may find it slightly terrifying.

During the hours when we were locked inside the church, I twice retreated from the crowd to empty areas away from the tomb.

First I went back to Golgotha. How strange it is to be at a place normally crowded with pilgrims and to be the only one there. It is a rare blessing to be entirely alone at the exact spot where Christ gave himself for the life of the world.

On my second walk away from the tumult surrounding the tomb, I went as far as the east end of the Church. Walking down the stairway to St. Helena’s Chapel and from there to another deeper level, I entered the Chapel of the Discovery of the Cross.

While all visitors to the church visit the place of the crucifixion and the tomb in which Christ’s body was laid, far fewer visit this remote corner. Many visitors don’t have time. People often travel long and far to reach Jerusalem and then face a tight schedule once they arrive. As a result, they see relatively little of this huge, somewhat chaotic, ancient building with its many passageways, staircases, chapels and places of veneration. In fact, many Protestant tour groups, suspicious of relics and uncomfortable with devotion to saints, intentionally avoid this subterranean chapel. “The true cross? Found here?” one may hear a visitor say. “Hogwash! All these so-called relics! It was a hoax — just some old wood in the ground passed off as the real thing by swindlers.”

The pilgrim descends via a stone staircase. Step by step the air gets cooler and damper. One goes slowly, perhaps pausing to notice the carefully carved graffiti on the walls left by the pilgrims of earlier eras. Finally the pilgrim reaches an exceptionally quiet, womb-like area beneath the huge church.

There is something remarkable about the special quietness of this deep, damp chapel. Even when there is a steady stream of people coming and going, it seems to absorb and muffle every sound. The unhurried visitor can feel a numinous quality here that may be harder to experience in places where people are waiting in slow-moving lines. In a subterranean enclosure entirely abandoned at Easter, I found myself more aware of the risen Christ than when I stood outside his tomb. An ancient garbage pit has become the thinnest of thin places.

I was also aware of being in the footsteps of St. Helena, whose pilgrim journey in the year 326 inspired the discovery of the cross. Twenty years later, St. Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, declared, “[The Cross] has been distributed fragment by fragment from this spot and already has nearly filled all the world.”

Another thin place, goal of many pilgrims despite its size and remoteness, is the tiny island of Iona in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. This comma of land just off the southwest tip of Mull has been a place of pilgrimage for nearly fifteen hundred years.

In the course of walking Iona’s paths, you will find yourself standing on some of the oldest exposed rock on earth. The more imposing volcanic heights of neighboring Mull belong to a land just barely out of the baby carriage in comparison — a mere 70 million years old. Iona is vastly older: two-and-a-half billion years.

An Irish saint, Columba, put Iona on the map. In penance for his role in a bloody clan war, Columba, along with twelve companions, sailed away from his homeland in self-exile, arriving on Iona on Pentecost Sunday in the year 563. Walking across the island from what has since been known as Columba’s Bay, his group found an ideal spot to build a monastic settlement on the northeast edge of the island.

Iona is the probable birthplace of the greatest masterpiece of Celtic art, the illuminated Gospel text known as the Book of Kells. The book takes its name from a monastery in Ireland where it was later taken for safekeeping. It is now displayed in the library of Trinity College, Dublin.

The wattle-and-wood dwellings the monks lived in fifteen centuries ago are long gone, destroyed by Viking raids between 795 and 806. During those years, 67 of the monks were martyred. At last the survivors packed up and returned to Ireland. All that remains from the early days of monastic life on Iona are several standing crosses, the tiny chapel of St. Oran, the adjacent graveyard in which many kings and queens of ancient Ireland and Scotland are buried, Macbeth among them, and the faint traces of foundations.

What today’s pilgrims find are the solid stone buildings Benedictine monks erected in the 13th century, when monastic life found a fresh footing on Iona: the plain square tower of St. Mary’s Cathedral and the rectangular masses of the several adjoining buildings are all of enduring gray stone with deep-cut windows under steep slated roofs.

The monks of Columba’s day lived a demanding life spent close to the elements. Columba’s monastic rule, later adopted by many similar communities, required that the monks own nothing but bare necessities, inhabit a place with but one door, center their conversations on God and the New Testament, refuse idle words and the spreading of rumor and evil reports, and follow every rule that governs devotion. They were to prepare themselves daily for suffering and death, to offer forgiveness from the heart to everyone, to put almsgiving before all other duties, and to eat nothing unless hungry; they were not to sleep unless tired; they were to pray constantly for anyone who had been a trouble, and to pray until tears came. They were to labor to the point of tears as well; or, if tears “are not free, until thy perspiration come often.”

Columban monastic life was far from sedentary. The monks of Iona traveled into the wilds of Scotland and, later on, much further as missionaries of the Gospel. They also served as a pacifying influence in a Europe of small kingdoms and constant war. Irish monasticism had a profound impact on the development both of Christianity and culture across Europe, even reaching to France, Italy and western Russia. Missionaries sent from Iona founded schools and communities, winning in the process such a reputation for holiness that, even in the sixth century, pilgrims were drawn to the remote isle from as far away as Rome. Tiny Iona became known as “the Jerusalem of the North.”

Much of the thirty-two years of life left to Columba once he arrived on Iona were spent preaching the Christian faith to the unchurched inhabitants of the highlands of northern Scotland. His preaching was confirmed by many miracles. He provided for the nurturing of his converts by building many churches and monasteries. He governed numerous communities in Ireland and Scotland that recognized him as spiritual father and founder. When not away on missionary travels, Columba resided on Iona.

Witnesses record that Columba never spent a waking hour without study, prayer or useful work. A lover of books from his early years, he was often engaged in the work of transcription. Reportedly he copied more than 300 books with his own hand. Two of these, The Book of Durrow, and the psalter called The Cathach, survive to the present day.

One of the most revealing of the many stories that come down to us about Columba’s life concerns a sword. It was the custom of people who visited him not only to seek a blessing for themselves, but also for some item of personal property. One day, without due reflection, Columba blessed a sword that was put before him, only to realize afterward that it might well be used in battle. He then gave the sword a second, more careful blessing, praying that the blade would remain sharp only so long as it was used for cutting bread and cheese but would acquire a dull edge if ever used to harm any living thing.

The medieval abbey seems as timeless as the island’s seagulls. So solid and undamaged does the monastery appear that it is startling to see old engravings showing the ruined state it fell into after the Scottish Parliament outlawed monastic life in 1561. The Act of Suppression came just two years before the thousand-year anniversary of the first monks landing on Iona. It was only in the last century that restoration at last occurred, thanks mainly to the efforts of a Presbyterian minister, George MacLeod, pastor of a working class parish in Glasgow. Inspired by MacLeod, pilgrims came to Iona not simply to admire the ruins and try to imagine what had once happened there, but to take part in the hard physical labor of restoration. The restored abbey in turn has greatly enlarged the number of pilgrims coming to Iona.

No doubt St. Columba rejoices to see Iona’s revival as a place of Christian life and a center of pilgrimage, one of the world’s thin places. He had a gift for seeing the future and knew one day there would be nothing left of his foundation, but he saw beyond that desolate time to its restoration. He left this prophecy:

Iona of my heart,
Iona of my love,
Instead of monk’s voices,
Shall be lowing of cattle,
But ere the world comes to an end
Iona shall be as it was.

* * *

Note: This is a chapter from Jim Forest’s book, “The Road to Emmaus: Pilgrimage as a Way of Life” (Orbis). Endnotes removed.

The discussion of weapon damage as a method of war resistance that has been ignited by Tom Cornell’s article on nonviolence in the current Catholic Worker [December 2017] has got me thinking.

One of my problems with property destruction is secrecy. If you tell the people making or guarding the weapons that you’re coming, they won’t let you in. It’s that simple. The only way around it is to take pains not to be expected. You are obliged to be secretive. There are events in life where secrecy is necessary, even contexts in which life-saving actions are difficult or even impossible unless there is secrecy. For example here in Holland, my home since 1977, one had to be highly secretive about the people you were hiding during the period of German occupation. Think of Anne Frank.

My guess is that even in circumstances where the only way to save life and struggle against evil powers is to live and operate in secrecy, everyone pays a price. What I noticed in the resistance groups I was a part during the Vietnam War was how much suspicion there was within the groups preparing major acts of civil disobedience. Inevitably there were worries about FBI infiltrators. Time and again the question was, “Is so-and-so to be trusted?” Various people were suspected of working for the FBI and were forced out of the groups they were a part of. For those wrongly suspected it could be deeply embittering. Eventually, in courtrooms, it became absolutely clear who the actual informers were. I don’t recall the people suspected of spying ever having been the right people. Ironically, sometimes it was people who had been trusted the most who turned out to be helping the FBI. (Think of Boyd Douglas, mailman for Phil Berrigan and Liz McAlister, in the Harrisburg case.)

So we are talking about forms of action in which secrecy is a given and about the suspicions that secrecy, of its nature, tends to generate, and the possibility that considerable interpersonal damage may be the consequence of misdirected suspicion. Apart from other factors, this ought to make us very cautious about getting involved in actions in which secrecy is essential.

Another issue that must be considered: Things very rarely go as planned. In the case of the Milwaukee Fourteen action, in which I was a participant, I am still troubled by the cleaning woman — an elderly refugee — who discovered us emptying files inside the draft boards, was deeply upset, and tried to call the police. When two members of the group restrained her, she became hysterical. What if we had caused her to have a heart attack? What if she had died? While I don’t regret our action, what we did could have gone very badly off tracks and generated headlines that centered on a dead cleaning lady.

Another problem that has long bothered me was the way in which people were at times manipulated — “guilt-tripped” — into taking part in high-risk actions. This is not only a problem of actions aimed at property destruction but just about any acts civil disobedience likely to result in long sentences. Any group involved in trying to get other people to take part is going to have to struggle with the temptation to become manipulative. The kind of civil disobedience in which I was deeply involved came to involve a lot of guilt-tripping. At that time we had people who tended to talk about actions in which there was a likelihood of long prison sentences as being “Serious.” As in: “Are you ready to take part in a Serious action?” One felt the capital “S” in the way such questions were asked. Anything that didn’t involve the risk of long-term imprisonment was dismissed as less than serious if not inconsequential

While we are all called to be peacemakers, we are each in the permanently awkward position of having to work out what that means in my particular case — who I am and what God calls me to do with my unique mixture of gifts and tendencies and limitations. This involves ongoing struggle with not only demands that governments may make but also our peers and heroes, and that last part is often even more difficult. The most important thing I can possibly do is what God leads me to, which may seem quite minor to others, even to those whom I most admire. But if I do otherwise, however useless or irrelevant or unimportant or meager it seems, I am leaving my conscience behind.

The shaping of one’s conscience is about as hard a piece of work as I can think of. It’s the search for one’s real identity, finding out who we really are. It’s finding out what it would be like to fully recover in ourselves hat it means to be made in the image and likeness of God.

A question raised by all this is, of course, what do we make of Jesus throwing the money changers out of the Temple? Is this the prototype for Christian resistance to militarism?

It’s a lightning-like event in Christ’s life: turning over the tables of commerce in a place of worship and using a whip to drive away the money changers. If the story does nothing else, it should at least shave away the sugar-coating that often gets put on Jesus. The Lamb of God breathed fire.

Yet it’s striking to notice that Jesus didn’t enter the armories of the Roman occupiers or their collaborators. He didn’t even disarm his own disciples. At the time Jesus was arrested, Peter had a sword. Jesus’ last miracle before the crucifixion was to heal the injury Peter caused. Only afterward did he tell his followers that whoever takes up the sword will die by the sword. (I suppose Peter intended to strike a deadly blow in Jesus’ defense, but all he did was chop off an ear; it seems Peter wasn’t very skilled in handling weapons. In the gospels we hear no more of Peter’s using a weapon. He seems to have thrown away his sword that night and never got another.)

The point is that Jesus didn’t force Peter or anyone to be disarmed.

Most of the civil disobedient actions I was closest to — all during the Vietnam War — involved the destruction of draft records. After that war finally ended in 1975, the Plowshares movement gradually emerged with its focus on damaging weapons. Some of these actions have helped raise awareness of important questions, but I wonder if the damage caused makes it any more likely that the people who make the weapons or want them are brought closer to disarmament? I can imagine that if I had a gun and someone damaged it or stole it from me, I would be inclined to get another and maybe even two. I think I might become more suspicious, more fear-driven, more dependent on police and armies.

I understand that for those now in prison for Plowshare actions raising such questions probably makes for hard reading. I recall writing to Dorothy Day from prison, taking issue with her criticisms of draft record burning. I didn’t change her mind, but her response made clear that she had a deep sympathy for what motivated me. She pointed out that we were performing one of the major works of mercy: visiting the prisoner.

In Christ’s peace,

Jim Forest

28 December 2017

* * *

by Jim Forest

A friend who thinks of the Catholic Church as the oldest form of Protestantism recently asked, “Why should an Orthodox Christian be interested in Dan Berrigan?” He was slightly scandalized that I, a member of the Orthodox Church since 1988, had written a biography of this often-jailed Jesuit priest, At Play in the Lions’ Den.

The core of my answer is that every Christian, no matter what church or communion or sect he belongs to, should interest us to the extent that he or she has lived a Christ-shaped, Christ-revealing life. While no community of Christians has been more attentive to preserving the theology and liturgy of the first millennium as the Orthodox Church, we don’t have a monopoly on sanctity. Christ did not say it was by our excellent theology that his followers would be known, but by their fruits. All sanctity deserves our interest—our divisions should not blind us to holiness on the other side of our ecclesiastical borders. As I recall, it was Metropolitan Platon of Kiev who, in the 19th century, remarked: “The walls we build on earth do not reach to heaven.”

“And just what is it,” my friend asked, “that was so Christ-revealing about Berrigan’s life?”

When he died last year, age 94, obituaries focused on the anti-war aspects of Berrigan’s life: he was eighteen months in prison for burning draft records in a protest against conscription of the young into the Vietnam War; then there was a later event in which he was one of eight people who hammered on the nose cone of a nuclear-armed missile. No one has kept count of his numerous brief stays in jail for other acts of war protest. He was handcuffed more than a hundred times.

He wrote in 1968 of his most famous act of war resistance as one of the Catonsville Nine:

Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise. For we are sick at heart. Our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children and for thinking of that other Child of whom the poet Luke speaks. The infant was taken up in the arms of an old man whose tongue grew resonant and vatic at the touch of that beauty.

He spoke with the voice of a poet. These remarkable sentences were reprinted in the longer obituaries. But much was left out.

Berrigan committed acts of civil disobedience not only protesting the mass killing of war but the mass killing of the unborn caused by abortion. Addressing those engaged in peace advocacy, he asked hard questions:

Is our morality in any sense superior to that of those ancient peoples who commonly exposed the newborn to death, as unwelcome aspirants to the sweet air of life? Can we help everyone walk into the full spectrum and rainbow of life, from womb to old age, so that no one is expendable? Especially in the religious pacifist community, we who believe no political idolatry can excuse the taking of life, can we help remind and symbolize the splendid range of nonviolence, from before birth to the aged? What is a human vocation anyway? Was not our first political act just getting born?

Dan noted how words, phrases, and slogans have been enlisted to dehumanize the human being in the womb. “It’s an unborn child only if it’s wanted—if unwanted it’s demoted to embryo or fetus.”

Also given little attention were the thousands of hours he had spent with the sick, especially those dying of cancer and AIDS. For years he was a part-time orderly at St. Rose’s Home, a Dominican hospice in Manhattan. The gentle care the nuns provided was done gratis. “In payment for such care, such friendship, no money crossed the palm,” he wrote. “No guest paid, no one could pay. It was a rule of the order, strictly adhered to. It struck me: here we had a stunning instance of the ethical cemented into natural law. The rule was all but metaphysical: no money.”

Dan Berrigan was an early responder to the AIDS crisis. For twelve years beginning in 1984 he walked the wards of St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York talking with AIDS patients and getting to know them, available to all but keeping an eye out especially for those who had no family or friends coming to visit. He also visited patients not yet hospitalized. Via a parent or sister or nun or friend, a spouse or former spouse, names and addresses of the afflicted had a way of making their way to Dan. One visit tended to lead to another until death intervened. A typical first sentence: “I heard from so-and-so that you were ill and thought I would drop by and see how it’s going.” He described himself as “a listener of last resort.”

For most of his adult life he was a teacher of theology and Scripture, though rarely staying at a particular school for more than a year, as he had a tendency to annoy the administration by noticing how badly paid were those doing menial jobs and to side with them in their appeals for better pay and working conditions. He also called for the demilitarization of schools where he was teaching. Many American Jesuit universities have tight connections with the Pentagon.

One of the constants in his life was poetry. In 1957, when he was 35, his first book, Time without Number, won the Lamont Poetry Award. He was a prolific author, averaging a book each year of his adult life.

His often-staged play, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, was partly inspired by the Greek classic, Antigone, the first drama centering on conscientious objection and civil disobedience. It was also produced as a film by Gregory Peck.

Dan was both an actor and advisor in the movie The Mission, which won the 1986 Cannes Film Festival Best Film Award and was nominated for seven Oscars, including best picture. His book on the making of The Mission has been described by Martin Sheen as “one of the best books on filmmaking” he had ever read.

Perhaps his most notable quality was his immense compassion, which shaped his life one way or another on a daily basis, even late in life when it was a great challenge just getting out of bed. I recall him once using the phrase “outraged love.” Many people are driven by rage, which rarely does them or anyone much good, and often makes things worse. But outraged love is mainly about love. Dan loved his flawed church, his flawed Jesuit community, even his flawed homeland—but there is much in all three zones that is outrageous, and Dan was never able to be silent or passive about our betrayals. This could have made him a ranter, but the artist side of Dan always found ways to channel his outrage into one or another form of creativity, whether via poetry or a wide variety of acts of witness.

He was also a profoundly pastoral person, the sort of person who visits the sick in the middle of the night and holds the hands of the dying. He was one of the most consistent voices of his generation for the protection of human life, a commitment excluding no one, from a child in the womb to a condemned murderer on death row.

He was supportive of me when I was received into the Orthodox Church at a parish of the Moscow Patriarchate in Amsterdam. Not every Catholic priest I was close to at the time viewed this as a positive event. Dan teased me: “This kind of thing can happen when you love your enemies.” He was referring to my frequent trips to Soviet Russia in the 1980s and the two books that came out of those journeys.

I first met Dan in 1961 and worked closely with him for more than half a century. From time to time he heard my confession. The confession with him that I remember best happened in New York late in 1965. I was twenty-four, Dan forty-three. It was nearly midnight. Dan and I, pushed along by a cold, damp wind, were walking back toward his Jesuit residence on East 78th Street after a meeting with college students at a West Side hotel.

By the mid-1960s, confession was becoming an unfashionable sacrament. The Age of Aquarius was dawning. The argument ran: “God knows, why tell a priest?” Also, events in one’s private life that had once been seen as morally catastrophic were now seen in a less critical light. There were multiplying assurances that self-accusations were as immobilizing to our potential selves as bricks tied to helium-filled balloons. For many social activists, sin’s main surviving validity was chiefly in the public sphere: complicity in war crimes, greedy use of the planet’s resources—social sins, sins we commit en masse. But I was unable to shake off a painful awareness that I was also guilty of sins of the old-fashioned variety: my failures as a husband and parent.

Dan listened. Confession can be like giving birth. Births are always hard, my words were coming hard, but Dan was a patient and cheerful midwife. I finished. We walked along in the special silence of Manhattan on a wet night, not a word from either one of us until Dan announced, “Hey, Jimmy, look at this!” We stopped. I discovered that we were in a wealthy zone of the Upper East Side and that Dan was gazing into the window of a store that sold every sort of sleep gear: silk and velvet eye masks, pillows with radios inside, pillows that provide the sounds of rain and water, down-filled pajamas, Swiss-made ear plugs, cashmere slippers, fur-trimmed blankets, silk and satin sheets. Dan was delighted. He pointed from item to item. “Look at that, Jimmy! Mink ear muffs!” I had never been invited to window-shop in a confessional before. Dan said, “This is how the other half sleeps!”

It dawned on me that the sleep store window tour was Dan’s comment on the unexamined life, his way of laughing at the moral sleepwalk I had been owning up to. And it was a celebration. “Look, Jimmy!” Which is to say, “Jimmy, this is where you were but now you’re awake again.”

Walking away from the shop, Dan said to me words I had often heard in the tight enclosure of a confessional: “With the authority I have received from the Church, in the name of Jesus Christ, I absolve you from all your sins.”

Whether there will ever be icons of Dan Berrigan remains to be seen, but his life was certainly a day-to-day response to the Gospel.

“If you want to follow Jesus,” Dan would say, “you had better look good on wood.”

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Editors’ Note: The author’s At Play in the Lions’ Den: A Biography and Memoir of Daniel Berrigan was released last month and is available on Amazon. Jim Forest is the international secretary of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship and the author or editor of many books. His earlier books include Praying With Icons, Ladder of the Beatitudes, The Road to Emmaus: Pilgrimage as a Way of Life, and Confession: Doorway to Forgiveness. His The Root of War is Fear: Thomas Merton’s Advice to Peacemakers won the International Thomas Merton Society‘s Louie Award. He serves as a reader at St. Nicholas of Myra Russian Orthodox Church in Amsterdam.

12 December 2017 / for the blog Orthodoxy in Dialogue

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By Jim Forest

Among saints remembered for their peaceful relations with dangerous animals not least is Gerasimos, shown in icons healing a lion. The story behind the image comes down to us from John Moschos, a monk of Saint Theodosius Monastery near Bethlehem and author of The Spiritual Meadow, a book written in the course of journeys he made in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. It’s a collection of stories of monastic saints, mainly desert dwellers, and also an early example of travel writing. Recently it inspired William Dalrymple to write From the Holy Mountain, in which the author sets out from Mount Athos to visit places — in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Egypt — that Moschos described.

In the fifth century Gerasimos was abbot of a community of seventy monks who lived in the desert east of Jericho, a mile from the River Jordan. They slept on reed mats, had cells without doors, and — apart from common prayer — normally observed silence. Their diet consisted chiefly of water, dates and bread. Gerasimos, in ongoing repentance for having been influenced by the teachings of a heretic in his youth, is said to have eaten even less than the norm.

One day while walking along the Jordan, Gerasimos came upon a lion roaring in agony because of a large splinter imbedded in one paw. Overcome with compassion for the suffering beast, Gerasimos removed the splinter, drained and cleaned the wound, then bound it up, expecting the lion would return to its cave. Instead the creature meekly followed him back to the monastery and became the abbot’s devoted pet. The whole community was amazed at the lion’s apparent conversion to a peaceful life — he lived now on bread and vegetables — and its devotion to the abbot.

It was given a special task: guarding the community’s donkey, which was pastured along the Jordan. But one day it happened, while the lion napped, that the donkey strayed and was stolen by a passing trader. After searching without success, the lion returned to the monastery, its head hanging low. The brothers concluded the lion had been overcome by an appetite for meat. As punishment, it was given the donkey’s job: to carry water each day from the river to the monastery in a saddle pack with four earthen jars.

Months later, it happened that the trader was coming along the Jordan with the stolen donkey and three camels. The lion recognized the donkey and roared so loudly that the trader ran away. Taking its rope in his jaws, the lion led the donkey back to the monastery with the camels following behind. The monks realized, to their shame, that they had misjudged the lion. The same day Gerasimos gave the lion a name: Jordanes.

For five more years, until the abbot’s death, Jordanes was part of the monastic community. When the elder fell asleep in the Lord and was buried, Jordanes lay down on the grave, roaring its grief and beating its head against the ground. Finally Jordanes rolled over and died on the last resting place of Gerasimos.

The narrative touches the reader intimately, inspiring the hope that the wild beast that still roars within us may yet be converted — while the story’s second half suggests that, when falsely accused of having returned to an unconverted life, vindication will finally happen.

The icon of Saint Gerasimos focuses on an event of physical contact between monk and lion — an Eden-like moment. By the river of Christ’s baptism, an ancient harmony we associate with Adam and Eve before the Fall is renewed. Enmity is over between man and creation, at least in the small island of peace that Christ has brought into being through a merciful action. The icon is an image of peace – man and beast no longer threatening each other’s life.

But is the story of Gerasimos and Jordanes true?

Certainly the abbot Gerasimos is real. Many texts refer to him. Soon after his death he was recognized as a saint. The monastery he founded lasted for centuries, a center of spiritual life and a place of pilgrimage. He was one of the great elders of the Desert. But what about Jordanes? Might the lion be a graphic metaphor for the saint’s ability to convert lion-like people who came to him?

Unlikely stories about saints are not rare. Some are so remarkable — for example Saint Nicholas bringing back to life three murdered children who had been hacked to pieces which were being boiled in a stew pot — that the resurrection of Christ seems a minor miracle in contrast. Yet even the most far­fetched legend usually has a basis in the character of the saint: Nicholas was resourceful in his efforts to protect the lives of the defenseless. On one occasion he prevented the execution of three young men who had been condemned to death. In icons that include biographical scenes, we find him in his bishop’s robes grasping an executioner’s blade that was about the fall on one prisoner’s neck. It’s a story that has the ring of truth. The miracle here is the saint’s courage. Christ’s mercy shines through Nicholas’ act of intervention.

Various icons bring together saints and beasts.

In icons of Saint George’s combat with the dragon, the legend has it that George only wounded the dragon, subduing it. The princess whose life was saved at last leads the dragon away like a pet, using her girdle as a leash. Afterward the local people accepted baptism and cared for the pacified dragon until it died. It’s a deeply Christian story even though Saint George never saw a dragon. The legend arose centuries after his death. The actual miracle in George’s life was his courage in publically confessing his Christian belief during the persecution of Diocletian. The dragon symbolizes the fear he overcame while the princess he saved and the people in the town who were baptized represent all those brought to salvation by the young martyr’s act of witness.

If the dragons saints have battled with were in reality invisible demons, the wolf we sometimes see in images of Saint Francis of Assisi was probably real. We know from the oldest collection of stories about his life that he was asked by the people of Gubbio to help them with a wolf which had been killing livestock. Francis set out to meet the wolf, blessed it with the sign of the cross, communicated with it by gesture, finally leading the wolf into the town itself where Francis obliged the people of Gubbio to feed and care for their former enemy. It’s a remarkable but not impossible story. In the last century, during restoration work, the bones of the wolf were discovered within Gubbio’s ancient church.

A similar image has come down to us from the life of Saint Seraphim of Sarov. In some icons he is shown feeding a bear at the door of his log cabin. Living deep in the Russian forest at the beginning of the eighteenth century, visitors occasionally found Seraphim sharing his ration of bread with bears and wolves. “How is it,” he was asked, “that you have enough bread in your bag for all of them?” “There is always enough,” Seraphim answered. He said of a bear which often visited him, “I understand fasting, but he does not.”

Neither Francis’ wolf nor Seraphim’s bear were storytellers’ inventions. It’s not unlikely that Jordanes was as real as Gerasimos. We can easily imagine a man so deeply converted that fear is burned away. Gerasimos was such a man. In fact it has not been rare for saints to show such an example of living in peace with wild creatures, including those that normally make us afraid. The scholar and translator Helen Waddell once assembled a whole collection of such stories: Saints and Beasts. (Appropriately, our copy is scarred with tooth marks in it left by a hyperactive puppy who was once part of our household.)

Apart from the probable reality of Jordanes, he happens to belong to a species long invested with symbolic meaning. In the Bible, the lion is mainly a symbol of soul-threatening passions and occasionally an emblem of the devil. David said he had been delivered “from the paw of the lion.” (1 Sam 17:37) The author of Proverbs says a wicked ruler abuses the poor “like a roaring lion and a raging bear.” (Prov 28:15) Peter warns Christians: “Be sober and watchful, for you adversary the devil roams about like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour.” (1 Pet 5:8) Here the lion is seen as representing that part of the unredeemed self ruled by instinct, appetite and pride — thus the phrase “a pride of lions.”

In medieval Europe, lions were known only through stories, carvings and manuscript illuminations. A thirteenth century Bestiary now at the Bodleian Library in Oxford starts its catalogue of astonishing creatures with the lion. It is called a beast, says the monastic author, because “where instinct leads them, there they go.” The text adds that the lion “is proud by nature; he will not live with other kinds of beasts in the wild, but like a king disdains the company of the masses.” Yet the author also finds in the lion promising traits: lions would rather kill men than women and only attack children “if they are exceptionally hungry.”

However merciful an unhungry lion might be, no one approaches even the most well-fed lion without caution. From the classical world to our own era, the lion has chiefly been regarded as danger incarnate — wild nature “red in tooth and claw.” And yet at times the symbol is transfigured. The lion becomes an image of beauty, grace and courage. In The Narnia Chronicles, C.S. Lewis chose a lion to represent Christ. The huge stone lions on guard outside the main entrance of the New York Public Library always struck me as guardians of wisdom.

There is still one more wrinkle to the ancient story of Gerasimos and Jordanes. Saint Jerome, the great scholar responsible for the Latin rendering of the Bible, long honored in the west as patron saint of translators, lived for years in a cave near the place of Christ’s Nativity in Bethlehem only a two day’s walk from Gerasimos’ monastery. The name of Gerasimos is not very different from Geronimus — Latin for Jerome. Pilgrims from the west connected the story told of Gerasimos with Jerome. Given the fact that Jerome sometimes wrote letters with a lionish bite, perhaps it’s appropriate that Gerasimos’ lion, and sometimes the donkey as well, eventually wandered into images of Jerome. It’s rare to find a painting of Jerome in which Jordanes isn’t present.

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Jim Forest is international secretary of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship. His books include Praying With Icons, from which this text is adapted, and The Ladder of the Beatitudes. The icon, by Emelia Clerkx, is based on a 15th century icon in the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

Jim Forest
Kanisstraat 5
1811 GJ Alkmaar
The Netherlands
e-mail: [email protected]
web site: www.jimandnancyforest.com

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