THOMAS MERTON AND HENRI NOUWEN: WESTERN EXPLORERS OF THE CHRISTIAN EAST by Jim Forest

mosaic at the church of Sts Cosmas & Damian in Rome

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

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

Both were restless, searching men.

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

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

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

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

There are still other Merton-Nouwen similarities:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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