A HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL

http://monasteriodelaencarnacion.org/bienvenidos-14-04.html

Today the Virgin gives birth to him who is above all being,

and the earth offers a cave to him whom no one can approach.

There has been found the undug well

From which David once longed to drink.

For this, let us hasten to this place where there has been born

A little Child, God before the ages…

-Romanos the Melodist, trans. Ephrem Lash

Pope Francis: Christmas Festivities “a Charade” while World at War

 During a homily that followed the massacre in Paris, Pope Francis said the “whole world is at war”.

His most recent homily was darker still, declaring traditional Christmas festivities a charade during this time of global turmoil:

The pontiff put this holiday season in perspective during mass at the Basilica di Santa Maria last week. His speech comes after a rash of notable violent incidents, including the now infamous terrorist attacks in Paris, as “we are close to Christmas. There will be lights, there will be parties, bright trees, even Nativity scenes – all decked out – while the world continues to wage war.

“It’s all a charade. The world has not understood the way of peace. The whole world is at war,” Pope Francis said. “A war can be justified, so to speak, with many, many reasons, but when all the world as it is today, at war, piecemeal though that war may be—a little here, a little there—there is no justification.”

The Pope expanded his blame from weapons dealers to weapons makers for the continuing strife:

“You can not serve two masters: either God or riches.’ War is the right choice for him, who would serve wealth: ‘Let us build weapons, so that the economy will right itself somewhat, and let us go forward in pursuit of our interests. There is an ugly word the Lord spoke: ‘Cursed!’ Because He said: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers!.’ The men who work war, who make war, are cursed, they are criminals. A war can be justified – so to speak – with many, many reasons, but when all the world as it is today, at war – piecemeal though that war may be – a little here, a little there, and everywhere – there is no justification – and God weeps. Jesus weeps.”

Pope Francis is clearly feeling the stress of being a prime target of ISIS terror operatives, and so the bleak attitude is understandable. Especially in light of the fact that an attack during one of the holiest seasons for Christians is especially tempting for radical Islamic terror organizers.

In fact, British security experts indicate holiday shoppers are likely to be the next target:

A terror expert has warned the festive period makes the iconic landmarks in the UK a “soft target”, with tourists, shoppers and revellers a likely target.

MI5 has warned Britain is facing the highest threat of a terror attack than it has ever experienced, with seven terror attacks foiled in Britain in the last six months alone and nine disrupted overseas in this year alone.

Despite ISIS-video threats against New York City’s famed landmarks, residents are planning to continue with their usual festivities:

Several holiday-themed events opened this week with increased police presence. The annual Union Square Holiday Market opened Thursday, and Urbanspace, the organization that runs the market, said it expects to have just as busy a holiday season as ever.

“We’re going on as usual this year, but obviously we’re cognizant of what’s going on in the world,” said Rachel Van Dolsen, a spokeswoman for Urbanspace. “The holiday market has been in New York for over 20 years, it has integrated itself into the city’s culture, it’s become an institution.”

The Pope is now in Kenya as part of his African tour, which will include masses in that country and Uganda. Despite the butchering of Christians at the hands of radical Islamic terrorists, including 147 university students in Nairobi in April this year, the Holy Father is still traveling through the streets in a simple Honda with windows open.

Should a jihadi sniper decide to take aim, it will not be a gun maker or ammunition dealer that would be responsible for the ensuing tragedy. The free market does not control the choices people make to embrace evil or ignore real world risks to themselves.

Sunday is the start of Advent, and the season will be celebrated with candle lighting and prayers in Catholic homes around the world…including mine. I will be enjoying these festivities all the more, because the continued chaos makes me more deeply appreciate the many blessings I have (including a being Legal Insurrection author).

I will also be saying prayers for Pope Francis, that he remains safe and learns to embrace the fact that an economic system is not our enemy.

That last prayer may require a miracle to fulfill.

Posted by Leslie Eastman   Friday, November 27, 2015 at 8:00pm
Now he is targeting weapons makers for global strife

St. Nicholas, Santa Claus, and the Nativity: An Interview with Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev)

Archimandrite Anthony (Kapustin) demonstrated that the ancient hagiographers had allowed the interweaving of two lives: Nicholas of Myra and Nichols of Sion. It all began when, in the middle of the tenth century, someone decided to “supplement” the official life of Nicholas of Myra in Lycia written by the Greek monk Michael the Archimandrite. These two Nicholases merged into one venerated image in popular representation and later in ecclesiastical memory.

In December 2010 an interview with Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) conducted by Ivan Semenov on the subject of St. Nicholas was broadcast on the program “Church and World” on the “Russia 24” station. We offer below a translation of the transcript of the program.

Metropolitan Hilarion: On December 19 the memory of one of the most venerated saints, St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, Archbishop of Myra in Lycia, is celebrated.

Ivan Semenov: Vladyka, St. Nicholas is often referred to outside of Russia as a Russian saint. Russian Orthodox people consider him a special patron saint of Russia and pray especially to him. Nonetheless, St. Nicholas not only was never in Russia, but Russia as such did not exist in his time. How so?

Metropolitan Hilarion: St. Nicholas was the bishop of the city of Myra in Lycia (today this city is called Demre and is located in Turkey) and lived in the fourth century. Surprisingly little historical information has been preserved about him. But it is striking that this saint has been so venerated by the Church over the course of the centuries that in Russia, for example, he became the most venerated saint. There were more churches dedicated to St. Nicholas than anywhere else. It would happen that in a city with, say, forty churches, twenty of them would be dedicated to St. Nicholas. This is due to the special veneration of St. Nicholas in Russia and in ancient Rus’. This veneration came about for no other reason than that St. Nicholas played some sort of very significant role in the lives and spiritual experiences of hundreds, thousands, and millions of people. That is, people prayed to him and received an answer to these prayers. People addressed him for help, and miracles were performed. It is known, for instance, that St. Nicholas helped many people in distress at sea. He is traditionally seen as the patron saint of sailors. He generally helps people who are travelling. This is the experience not only of people in ancient times, but of modern people as well. Go into any Orthodox parish and ask people who have come to the service: how has St. Nicholas helped you and why is he so dear to you? And nearly everyone will likely relate some story from his or her life connected with the help and heavenly intercession of St. Nicholas. There are many such stories.

Ivan Semenov: Vladyka, our viewers might be surprised that, as you have mentioned, little historical evidence exists. In the West doubt has even arisen about the historicity of the figure of St. Nicholas. At the same time, contemporary historians have found confirmation of his existence, and even of his life, and we have a short report on this.

Narrator: The following fact was established already a century and a half ago. Archimandrite Anthony (Kapustin) demonstrated that the ancient hagiographers had allowed the interweaving of two lives: Nicholas of Myra and Nichols of Sion. It all began when, in the middle of the tenth century, someone decided to “supplement” the official life of Nicholas of Myra in Lycia written by the Greek monk Michael the Archimandrite. These two Nicholases merged into one venerated image in popular representation and later in ecclesiastical memory.

Andrei Vinogradov, researcher at the Institute of World History at the Russian Academy of Science: “For a long time it was unclear how these two texts had been combined. So far I have not succeeded in finding a text in the State Historical Museum in which these pieces have been directly inserted into the material of Michael the Archimandrite. Then each copied this enriched text in his own way.”

Narrator: St. Nicholas the Bishop of Pinara and Archimandrite of Sion lived in the sixth century. Theophan and Nonna, mentioned in the lives of Nicholas the God-pleaser, were the names of the former’s parents. It was namely Nicholas of Sion who made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. To researches, such as the Europeans Gustav Anrich, Nancy Shevchenko, and Gerardo Choffari, these are indisputable facts. Nonetheless, episodes from the life of Nicholas of Sion are still published in the lives of Nicholas the God-pleaser. These can be seen in icons of the saint: the baby standing in the baptismal font, the miracle of the cypresses, and the healing of Nonna. As for succession through the ranks of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, Nicholas of Sion was a reader, deacon, and priest, whereas Nicholas of Myra in Lycia became a bishop immediately.

Andrei Vinogradov: “He lived in his hometown of Patara as a layman and distributed money to the poor. Then by command of God he went to the city of Myra, where at that very moment he was chosen as bishop. He was the first person to enter the church. One of the bishops had had a vision that the first to enter the church was to become bishop.”

Narrator: The high forehead, eagle nose, round gray beard, and height of five and a half feet – the appearance of St. Nicholas on icons is close to his actual appearance established by anthropologists. The older the icon the more reliable it is. The anthropologists who studied the saint’s relics found confirmation of facts from his life: the person whose remains are preserved in Italy ate only vegetarian food and lived for many years in the cold and damp – Nicholas the God-pleaser spent eight years in prison. The relics preserved in Bari were studied in the 1950s. In 1987 anthropologists opened the tomb in Venice and discovered that precisely the relics lacking in Apulia are preserved there.

Andrei Vinogradov: “The people from Bari stole the relics at night. They were not able to take the smallest bones. It was these that the Venetians later took. In this way, more than four-fifths of the body has been preserved and are located in Bari and Venice.”

Narrator: Another fifth of the authentic relics are scattered throughout the world. There are too many outside of Italy for all of them to be authentic. In the future DNA analysis may help stop the spread of false relics around the world. But the next goal of scholars of St. Nicholas is to discover exactly where the saint was buried in Myra in Lycia.

Andrei Vinogradov: “There are three major versions. The Russian Church erected a monument where it considered it necessary. There are alternative versions: some people base themselves on the remnants of coffins located in the church; this is the most venerated place in the church. It may be that archeological excavations will clarify this issue.”

Narrator: But whatever discoveries scholars make, new facts from the life of the Wonderworker can only supplement his earthly image. The main thing is that faith in his miraculous intercession has continued for seventeen consecutive centuries.

Ivan Semenov: Vladyka, the Catholic Church has begun to doubt the historicity of the saint because of the opinion that two separate historical figures were conflated in his life. How does the Russian Orthodox Church view such research? Generally speaking, can such historical research influence the hagiographical literature and the Church’s attitude to its saints?

Metropolitan Hilarion: I would say this in response: every saint lives, as it were, three lives. The first was the real life that he led on earth in a given historical period of time. Sometimes we know a great deal about this life, and sometimes we know very little. Another life of the saint is his hagiography. It is good if people who knew him, who could relate the real details of his life in this hagiography, wrote this.

Very often a life is written many centuries later and then, in fact, the life is written like an icon. That is, the life is not a verbal portrait, but rather a verbal icon of the saint. Very often the life might consist of certain stories that are common for several saints that migrate from one life to another. Therefore one should not treat these lives as entirely reliable historical sources. In just the same way we do not look at an icon as a human portrait. An icon is a certain verbal, symbolic image.

The third life of a saint is his life as experienced by those people who address him in prayer over the course of centuries. This is a very real life of the saint that we can feel through our experience. Therefore, when we are told that a saint such as St. Nicholas never existed, but we know that precisely this person, precisely this saint, has helped us many times in life – then the conversation about whether he might not have existed is for us entirely baseless. The Church’s experience is no less important than any historical or archeological evidence.

Ivan Semenov: Yes, certainly anyone who has at least some spiritual experience will value this as more important than anything else.

Metropolitan Hilarion: You know, during the Soviet era we were taught that Jesus Christ never actually existed. Meanwhile, thousands and millions of people come to Christ not as some kind of ghost or phantom, but encounter the real live person of Christ; they commune with Him in prayer; they, if you will, know Him personally. They know Him by personal experience, they meet with Him, and they commune with Him. Their communion with Christ may be the very essence of their lives. One may say the same thing about the saints. Historical evidence may be more or less reliable. There are also lives of saints written by their disciples. Then this life is, in fact, a biography.

Ivan Semenov: A biography.

Metropolitan Hilarion: A biography. But it also happens, as I said earlier, that lives are written many centuries later according to certain templates or canons, just as icons are painted. And in this case, of course, one should not expect factual reliability.

Ivan Semenov: Vladyka, to return to the figure of St. Nicholas, I’d say that there could be a fourth life, if you named three. There is also the image of Santa Claus, which is not an icon but rather a sort of picture of him. This image has been extremely commercialized in the West. Vladyka, how do you view Santa Claus? Is this a blasphemous caricature, or does something remain from faith, prayer, and the image of St. Nicholas?

Metropolitan Hilarion: Very much has been commercialized in modern Western society. Very much of that which should have a pronounced Christian meaning is essentially devoid of it – for instance, the feast of Nativity. Today not everyone in the West knows that the Nativity refers to the Nativity of Christ. The Nativity is associated with vacations, breaks, skiing, family holidays, and with the opportunity to invite relatives over or to go to visit them.

Ivan Semenov: Unfortunately, in the majority of Western languages there is no meaning relating to a birth in the word “Nativity.” The word “Christmas” does not include the idea of someone being born.

Metropolitan Hilarion: But all the same it points to Christ. Nonetheless, often this Western, commercialized, secularized Nativity is entirely devoid of any Christian component. The same thing happened with St. Nicholas. After all, this is one of those saints that is loved not only by adults, but also especially by children. So the tradition developed that St. Nicholas gives children presents on New Year’s Day. Gradually this Christian component, this understanding that St. Nicholas was a Christian bishop and ascetic, disappeared and one was left with the figure of this Santa Claus, who is no different from our own Uncle Frost.

Ivan Semenov: In this regard, our viewers ask: “Should we have children believe that in Russia there is no such thing as Santa Claus, that instead we have Uncle Frost? What do you think?”

Metropolitan Hilarion: Well, it seems to me that there should always be some element of fairy tales in childhood. If children grow up only on such programs as Time or even Church and World, then they will be deprived of an essential component of a truly human upbringing. Fairy tales are an essential part of childhood. Therefore the element of fantasy should always be preserved, and with age people will understand perfectly well which characters are real and which are fantasy.

Ivan Semenov: Some Orthodox people (as a rule, new converts) fear that we will confuse children by having them believe in Uncle Frost, who isn’t real, while believing in that which the Church believes, which is real.

Metropolitan Hilarion: You know, even adults can become confused. It’s well known that there existed in ancient Rus’, and exist now, two feasts: the “winter Nicholas” and the “summer Nicholas.” The “winter Nicholas” is celebrated on December 19, and the “summer Nicholas” is celebrated in May. So when St. Nicholas is depicted wearing a miter, people say: this is the “winter Nicholas” and when he is not wearing one he is the “summer Nicholas.” But these are folk ideas. So why should we be concerned if children have certain ideas that will pass with time?

Ivan Semenov: Our viewer Pauline asks the following question about St. Nicholas: “In what cases should one pray to this saint? When can he be of more help to others?”

Metropolitan Hilarion: I think that one can pray to St. Nicholas in all cases. I, at any rate, have often turned to him in various situations and received help. I can cite a simple example. My priestly ministry began in very poor areas of Lithuania, where I had four parishes that were not connected by any means of public transportation. Of course, then I had neither my own car nor even my own horse and cart in order to travel. In order to make it from one parish to another to perform the Liturgy, I had to travel seventy kilometers [43.5 miles] either by foot or by hitchhiking. It would happen that I’d be walking and walking – and one car would go by, then a second, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, with no one stopping. Then I would begin to pray to St. Nicholas, and some car would be sure to stop. Of course, one could say that this was all a coincidence. But this happened so often, and in so many different situations, that I could never claim to anyone that this was all just a coincidence. But there have been other cases when St. Nicholas really saved people from danger, or even from death.

Ivan Semenov: Vladyka, there is another miracle about which a film was recently made in Russia. This concerns the so-called “Zoe’s standing,” when a girl blasphemously invited an icon of St. Nicholas to dancer with her, and then stood frozen with this icon for many days. Can this also be considered a miracle of St. Nicholas?

Metropolitan Hilarion: I would say that the miracles of St. Nicholas are normally very kind and luminous. St. Nicholas, as a rule, saves people from harm and death, and helps them in everyday affairs. Here, of course, was something entirely different. It seems that the Lord, or perhaps St. Nicholas himself, wanted to instruct and remind people that, despite their atheistic upbringing, one should treat holy things respectfully and without blasphemy. This, apparently, should apply not only to believers, but to non-believers as well. We know that such miracles took place, but they of course were suppressed and not recorded. But now certain of these miracles are coming to light.

Dear brothers and sisters, our program dedicated to St. Nicholas is coming to an end. In conclusion, I would like to remind you of the words of St. Paul from the Epistle to the Hebrews: Let us consider one another to provoke unto love and good deeds [10:24]. I wish you all the best. May the Lord keep you all!

MIDNIGHT MASS

SOLEMNITY OF THE NATIVITY OF THE LORD

HOMILY OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI

Dear Brothers and Sisters!

Again and again the beauty of this Gospel touches our hearts: a beauty that is the splendour of truth. Again and again it astonishes us that God makes himself a child so that we may love him, so that we may dare to love him, and as a child trustingly lets himself be taken into our arms. It is as if God were saying: I know that my glory frightens you, and that you are trying to assert yourself in the face of my grandeur. So now I am coming to you as a child, so that you can accept me and love me.

I am also repeatedly struck by the Gospel writer’s almost casual remark that there was no room for them at the inn. Inevitably the question arises, what would happen if Mary and Joseph were to knock at my door. Would there be room for them? And then it occurs to us that Saint John takes up this seemingly chance comment about the lack of room at the inn, which drove the Holy Family into the stable; he explores it more deeply and arrives at the heart of the matter when he writes: “he came to his own home, and his own people received him not” (Jn 1:11). The great moral question of our attitude towards the homeless, towards refugees and migrants, takes on a deeper dimension: do we really have room for God when he seeks to enter under our roof? Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself? We begin to do so when we have no time for God. The faster we can move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have. And God? The question of God never seems urgent. Our time is already completely full. But matters go deeper still. Does God actually have a place in our thinking? Our process of thinking is structured in such a way that he simply ought not to exist. Even if he seems to knock at the door of our thinking, he has to be explained away. If thinking is to be taken seriously, it must be structured in such a way that the “God hypothesis” becomes superfluous. There is no room for him. Not even in our feelings and desires is there any room for him. We want ourselves. We want what we can seize hold of, we want happiness that is within our reach, we want our plans and purposes to succeed. We are so “full” of ourselves that there is no room left for God. And that means there is no room for others either, for children, for the poor, for the stranger. By reflecting on that one simple saying about the lack of room at the inn, we have come to see how much we need to listen to Saint Paul’s exhortation: “Be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom 12:2). Paul speaks of renewal, the opening up of our intellect (nous), of the whole way we view the world and ourselves. The conversion that we need must truly reach into the depths of our relationship with reality. Let us ask the Lord that we may become vigilant for his presence, that we may hear how softly yet insistently he knocks at the door of our being and willing. Let us ask that we may make room for him within ourselves, that we may recognize him also in those through whom he speaks to us: children, the suffering, the abandoned, those who are excluded and the poor of this world.

There is another verse from the Christmas story on which I should like to reflect with you – the angels’ hymn of praise, which they sing out following the announcement of the new-born Saviour: “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased.” God is glorious. God is pure light, the radiance of truth and love. He is good. He is true goodness, goodness par excellence. The angels surrounding him begin by simply proclaiming the joy of seeing God’s glory. Their song radiates the joy that fills them. In their words, it is as if we were hearing the sounds of heaven. There is no question of attempting to understand the meaning of it all, but simply the overflowing happiness of seeing the pure splendour of God’s truth and love. We want to let this joy reach out and touch us: truth exists, pure goodness exists, pure light exists. God is good, and he is the supreme power above all powers. All this should simply make us joyful tonight, together with the angels and the shepherds.

Linked to God’s glory on high is peace on earth among men. Where God is not glorified, where he is forgotten or even denied, there is no peace either. Nowadays, though, widespread currents of thought assert the exact opposite: they say that religions, especially monotheism, are the cause of the violence and the wars in the world. If there is to be peace, humanity must first be liberated from them. Monotheism, belief in one God, is said to be arrogance, a cause of intolerance, because by its nature, with its claim to possess the sole truth, it seeks to impose itself on everyone. Now it is true that in the course of history, monotheism has served as a pretext for intolerance and violence. It is true that religion can become corrupted and hence opposed to its deepest essence, when people think they have to take God’s cause into their own hands, making God into their private property. We must be on the lookout for these distortions of the sacred. While there is no denying a certain misuse of religion in history, yet it is not true that denial of God would lead to peace. If God’s light is extinguished, man’s divine dignity is also extinguished. Then the human creature would cease to be God’s image, to which we must pay honour in every person, in the weak, in the stranger, in the poor. Then we would no longer all be brothers and sisters, children of the one Father, who belong to one another on account of that one Father. The kind of arrogant violence that then arises, the way man then despises and tramples upon man: we saw this in all its cruelty in the last century. Only if God’s light shines over man and within him, only if every single person is desired, known and loved by God is his dignity inviolable, however wretched his situation may be. On this Holy Night, God himself became man; as Isaiah prophesied, the child born here is “Emmanuel”, God with us (Is 7:14). And down the centuries, while there has been misuse of religion, it is also true that forces of reconciliation and goodness have constantly sprung up from faith in the God who became man. Into the darkness of sin and violence, this faith has shone a bright ray of peace and goodness, which continues to shine.

So Christ is our peace, and he proclaimed peace to those far away and to those near at hand (cf. Eph 2:14, 17). How could we now do other than pray to him: Yes, Lord, proclaim peace today to us too, whether we are far away or near at hand. Grant also to us today that swords may be turned into ploughshares (Is 2:4), that instead of weapons for warfare, practical aid may be given to the suffering. Enlighten those who think they have to practise violence in your name, so that they may see the senselessness of violence and learn to recognize your true face. Help us to become people “with whom you are pleased” – people according to your image and thus people of peace.

Once the angels departed, the shepherds said to one another: Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened for us (cf. Lk 2:15). The shepherds went with haste to Bethlehem, the Evangelist tells us (cf. 2:16). A holy curiosity impelled them to see this child in a manger, who the angel had said was the Saviour, Christ the Lord. The great joy of which the angel spoke had touched their hearts and given them wings.

Let us go over to Bethlehem, says the Church’s liturgy to us today. Trans-eamus is what the Latin Bible says: let us go “across”, daring to step beyond, to make the “transition” by which we step outside our habits of thought and habits of life, across the purely material world into the real one, across to the God who in his turn has come across to us. Let us ask the Lord to grant that we may overcome our limits, our world, to help us to encounter him, especially at the moment when he places himself into our hands and into our heart in the Holy Eucharist.

Let us go over to Bethlehem: as we say these words to one another, along with the shepherds, we should not only think of the great “crossing over” to the living God, but also of the actual town of Bethlehem and all those places where the Lord lived, ministered and suffered. Let us pray at this time for the people who live and suffer there today. Let us pray that there may be peace in that land. Let us pray that Israelis and Palestinians may be able to live their lives in the peace of the one God and in freedom. Let us also pray for the countries of the region, for Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and their neighbours: that there may be peace there, that Christians in those lands where our faith was born may be able to continue living there, that Christians and Muslims may build up their countries side by side in God’s peace.

The shepherds made haste. Holy curiosity and holy joy impelled them. In our case, it is probably not very often that we make haste for the things of God. God does not feature among the things that require haste. The things of God can wait, we think and we say. And yet he is the most important thing, ultimately the one truly important thing. Why should we not also be moved by curiosity to see more closely and to know what God has said to us? At this hour, let us ask him to touch our hearts with the holy curiosity and the holy joy of the shepherds, and thus let us go over joyfully to Bethlehem, to the Lord who today once more comes to meet us. Amen.




© Copyright 2012 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana

FATHER ABBOT OF BELMONT: 

HOMILY AT MIDNIGHT MASS

Christmas Eve 2015

“Do not be afraid. Behold, I bring you news of great joy, a joy to be shared by the whole people.” We have come tonight to hear that message once again and to be filled with great joy. The birth of Jesus, the Messiah, takes all our fears away, gives us hope and reason to rejoice. Even so, for many, this Christmas it must be difficult to rejoice let alone have hope.

            Our thoughts and prayers are with the many families in this country whose homes and livelihoods been devastated once more by heavy rain and severe flooding. For the past three years, our attention has been drawn to the hundreds of thousands of Syrian children living in refugee camps in Jordan and Turkey and the millions of refugees, displaced by war, searching for a new life and somewhere to live, many of them children. Why do innocent children always have to suffer the outrages of war and why do men make children suffer?

            There can be no excuse for the suffering inflicted on the weak and vulnerable by the great and powerful, or by those who are made powerful by the possession of guns and bombs. We know that there are no easy solutions to conflict, terrorism and war, but the suffering of children is a crime that cries to heaven for vengeance. What joy or hope can there be for those who are hungry and homeless, for the innocent who know nothing but violence and pain? The birth of the Son of God in a stable at Bethlehem and laid to sleep in swaddling bands in a manger, where cattle eat, is a sign of God’s solidarity with the poor and those who suffer, above all a sign of his love for children and for all who are young and innocent. What also saddens us today is the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and the disappearance of Christianity from its very cradle.

Jesus wasn’t born in a palace or a temple; the Messiah didn’t come into this world in a rich home or a luxury hotel. No, his companions were animals: the ox and the ass, sheep, mice and fleas. His mother Mary was a young village girl, a peasant, and the man people presumed to be his father, Joseph, a carpenter from Nazareth. They were surprised and confused at the strange events surrounding his conception and birth and now here he was, cradled in a manger, the baby whom they were to call Jesus, meaning Saviour.

            No sooner was he born than angels appeared to shepherds, watching over their flocks by night, to tell them of his birth. “Today, in the city of David a Saviour has been born to you: he is Christ the Lord.” With the angels there appears a great throng of the heavenly host, praising God and singing, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to men who enjoy his favour.” That new-born babe is God, God who created everything, yet he comes to share our weakness and fragility, our suffering and pain. He is the Messiah, the Saviour, but God’s way of saving is not ours. It is not through pride that he saves us but through humility, bringing life through death and redemption through suffering. This child in the manger is born to die and, through his death, he will reconcile the whole of creation with God. In Christ, all suffering is redemptive, all pain has purpose and meaning, and even little children can share in God’s work of salvation, because God now shares fully in their suffering and pain.

            May the joy of Christmas be yours and may the child lying in the manger help us to understand and value the suffering and death of innocent children in the world today. Now Christ’s birth doesn’t mean that their suffering is fine, that it doesn’t matter and we needn’t do anything about it. Quite the opposite: it is wrong, it is unjust, it should not happen, it must be stopped, but as long as that suffering and pain last, we know that Christ is still being born today and in still lying there, crying in the manger. Where children suffer, Jesus is there with them.


            On behalf of Fr Prior and the Monastic Community, I wish you and all your loved ones a happy Christmas. “Do not be afraid. Behold, I bring you news of great joy, a joy to be shared by the whole people.”

PLEASE WATCH THE VIDEOS OF BISHOP ROBERT BARRON: THEY PUT POPE FRANCIS' REMARKS IN CONTEXT.

PLEASE WATCH THIS SPACE!! MORE WILL BE ADDED AS THE CHRISTMAS FEAST APPROACHES.

  

THOMAS MERTON AND DOROTHY DAY by Jim Forest

Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day (Oakham lecture)
my source: Jim & Nancy Forest

(Lecture given at the annual conference of Thomas Merton Society of Great Britain and Ireland meeting at Oakham, England in April 2012)

By Jim Forest

What initially put Merton on the world map was the publication in 1948 of his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. It was an account of growing up on both sides of the Atlantic (part of his adolescence right here at Oakham), what drew him to become a Catholic as a young adult, and finally what led him, in 1941, to become a Trappist monk at a monastery in rural Kentucky, Our Lady of Gethsemani. He was only 33 years old when the book appeared. To his publisher’s amazement, it became an instant best-seller. For many people, it was truly a life-changing book. I have lost count of how many copies of the book have been printed in English and other languages in the past 64 years, but we’re talking about millions.

Merton was and remains a controversial figure. Though he was a member of a monastic order well known for silence and for its distance from worldly affairs, Merton was outspoken on various topics that many regard as very worldly affairs. Merton disagreed. He was a critic of a Christianity in which religious identity is submerged in national or racial identity and life tidily divided between religious and ordinary existence.

Merton got into hot water for his writings on war and peace as well his participation in both inter-Christian and inter-religious dialogue. In the sixties, there was a Berlin Wall running between Catholics and Protestants. To the alarm of a good many people on both sides of the divide, Merton climbed over that palisade. Even worse, he regarded friendly conversation with people of other religious traditions — Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam — as a useful and necessary, not to say Christian, activity. Some people were scandalized — some still are — that a Trappist monk would engage in dialog with the Dalai Lama. Both among critics and as well as admirers admirers, the idea got around that, if only Merton had lived a slightly longer life, he would have waved goodbye to the Catholic Church and become a Buddhist. In fact Merton’s religious practice centered on Liturgy, the eucharist, the rosary, the Jesus Prayer, and daily offices of monastic prayer.

How did Dorothy Day and Merton intersect? And who is Dorothy Day?

What put Dorothy on the map was her effort to weave together radical convictions about the social order with the Christian faith. This endeavor occurred after she became a Catholic when she was thirty years old. Less than six years after that event, in 1933, she founded and began editing a newspaper which she christened The Catholic Worker. From that eight-page journal, the Catholic Worker movement quickly emerged, a movement known for its many houses of hospitality for people who are generally unappreciated and unwelcome.

If books by Merton have sold millions of copies, Catholic Worker communities have served millions of meals. But the Catholic Worker is also well known for its acts of protest against war and social injustice. Many people associated with the Catholic Worker have served periods in jail for acts of civil disobedience or for refusing to take part in war. Dorothy herself was jailed at least eight times. The first time was for taking part in a Suffragist demonstration in front of the White House in 1917 when she had just turned twenty. Her last arrest and confinement was with striking farm workers in California in 1973 when she was seventy-five. If Thomas Merton was at times controversial, Dorothy Day was controversial pretty much full-time.

For those who think of saints as, generally speaking, law-abiding folk, it may strike them as remarkable that the Catholic Church is currently considering a proposal from the Archdiocese of New York that Dorothy Day be officially recognized as a saint. More than ten years have passed since the late Cardinal John O’Connor launched the process. It has now reached the point of Dorothy being given the title “Servant of God Dorothy Day” by the Vatican. After that comes “Blessed Dorothy” and finally “Saint Dorothy.” It would not astonish me if there are people here today who will one day be present for her canonization.

I first met Dorothy in December 1960. I was in the U.S. Navy at the time, stationed in Washington, D.C. After reading copies of The Catholic Worker that I had found in my parish library, and then reading Dorothy’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness, I decided to visit the community she had founded. Arriving in Manhattan for that first visit, I made my way to Saint Joseph’s House, the Catholic Worker’s house of hospitality on the Lower East Side. It’s now an area that has become fashionable, repackaged as the East Village. In those days it was the Bowery, an area for the desperately poor — many of them penniless alcoholics — people so down-and-out that some of them were sleeping, even in winter, on the sidewalks or in tenement hallways.

A few days into that first encounter with the Catholic Worker, I visited the community’s rural outpost on Staten Island, the Peter Maurin Farm. Crossing the New York Harbor by ferry, I made my way to an old farmhouse on a rural road near the island’s southern tip. In its large, faded dining room, I found half-a-dozen people, Dorothy among them, gathered around a pot of tea at one end of the dining room table. I gave Dorothy a bag of letters addressed to her that had been received in Manhattan. Within minutes, she was reading the letters aloud.

The only letter I still recall from that day’s reading was one from Thomas Merton. I was amazed. Having read The Seven Storey Mountain, I knew Trappist monks wrote very few letters and that generally these were limited to family members. But here was Merton writing not only to a non-relative but to someone who was as much in the world as he was out of it.

On reflection, I should have been less surprised. I had read both their autobiographies and they revealed a great deal of common ground. Both had lived fairly bohemian lives before becoming Catholics. Like Dorothy, Merton had wrestled with the issue of war, deciding that, if Christ had given an example of a nonviolent life, he would attempt to do the same. Both had thought long and hard about the sin of racism. Both were writers. Both were unburdened by any attraction to economic achievement. Merton, like any monk, had taken a vow of poverty — there were things he had use of but nothing he actually owned — while Dorothy was committed to what she called “voluntary poverty.” Though in different circumstances, they both lived very disciplined religious lives — Merton’s day beginning with Mass before dawn and ending not long after sunset with Compline, Dorothy’s including daily Mass, daily rosary, daily periods of prayer and intercession, and weekly confession. Both had a marked interest in “eastern” — or Orthodox — Christianity. Both had a degree of pastoral care for others. Though their vocations were different, it wasn’t only Merton who was a contemplative.

They never actually met. Theirs was a friendship of letters. In their exchanges the topics included peacemaking, observations about social change, problems in the Catholic Church, obedience and disobedience, the Cold War, community life, marriage, their hopes and frustrations, their current reading, the meaning of love, and a wide range of issues for which advice was sought.

The date their correspondence got underway isn’t certain. The oldest surviving letter in their exchange, dated December 26, 1956, is from Dorothy to Merton. She has received a card or letter from him the news that he had offered Christmas Mass for her and the Catholic Worker. Dorothy wanted him to know that this “made me very happy indeed.” She goes on to say, “We have had a very beautiful Christmas here, and quite a sober and serious one too. There have been occasions in the past when the entire kitchen force got drunk, which made life complicated, but you must have been holding them up this year, and please continue to do so.”

The next letter that escaped the vicissitudes of time is also from Dorothy. Dated the 4th of June, 1959, it’s a reply to a letter from Merton. In it she apologizes for not having answered more quickly and also recalls with gratitude the copies of The Seven Storey Mountain Merton had sent to her way back in 1948. She went on to ask Merton’s prayers for a member of the Catholic Worker staff, Charles Butterworth, who was about to be sentenced for harboring a military deserter at the Catholic Worker and then, by warning him that FBI agents had arrived with an arrest warrant, playing a part in the young man’s escape. “We have done this before,” Dorothy explained, “giving [deserters] the time to make up their own minds; one returned to the army and the other took his sentence.” She mentioned to Merton another member of staff, Bob Steed, formerly a novice at Gethsemani, whom she worried might be arrested for having torn up his draft registration card. In her letter Dorothy didn’t say a word of explanation or justification for such actions — miles off the beaten track for American Catholics. Clearly, in Merton’s case, she felt this wasn’t needed.

In the same letter Dorothy thanked Merton for gifts he had sent to the Catholic Worker. I wasn’t there when that particular box arrived from Gethsemani, but two years later, when I became part of the Catholic Worker staff after being discharged from the military as a conscientious objector, such boxes were not rare. The contents varied — sometimes cast-off clothing monks had worn before taking vows, often his most recent book, and also monk-made cheese and even a fruitcake flavored with Kentucky bourbon. (For many years the monks have helped support themselves by making and selling very tempting food products. Merton didn’t quite approve of the business aspect of Trappist life, but he had no qualms about giving the results away.) I recall the gift card inside one such box was signed, in Merton’s easily recognizable handwriting, “from Uncle Louie and the Boys.” “Uncle Louie” was Merton — the name “Louis” was given him when he became a Trappist monk. Dorothy always addressed him in her letters to him as “Father Louis.” The “boys” would have been his novices — Merton was Master of Novices at the time.

It’s remarkable that, in his overfull life, he occasionally found the time and motivation to fill a box to be sent off to the Catholic Worker. This says as much about his bond with Dorothy as any of his letters. He felt a deep sense of connection with what the Catholic Worker was doing — its hospitality work, its newspaper, its protest activities. His gifts communicated to all of us working at the Catholic Worker a deep sense of his of solidarity.

This sense of connection with houses of hospitality went back Merton’s days volunteering at Friendship House in Harlem, a house of hospitality whose existence was in large measure inspired by the Catholic Worker. It had been founded by a close friend of Dorothy’s, Catherine de Hueck Doherty, or “the Baroness” as she was often called due to her family’s aristocratic Russian roots. In reading The Seven Storey Mountain, one sees the important role the Baroness had played in Merton’s life. “She had a strong voice, strong convictions, and strong things to say,” Merton wrote, “and she said them in the simplest, most unvarnished, bluntest possible kind of talk, and with such uncompromising directness that it stunned.” One could say the same about Dorothy Day. Few choices Merton ever made were so difficult as deciding between a Catholic Worker-like vocation at Friendship House and becoming a monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani. “The way [the Baroness] said some things,” Merton wrote in his journal in August 1941, “left you ready to do some kind of action … renounce the world, live in total poverty, but also doing very definite things: ministering to the poor in a certain definite way.”

In one of his letters to Dorothy, Merton remarked that the reason he volunteered at Friendship House rather than at the Catholic Worker house in lower Manhattan was because, “I was at Columbia, F[riendship] H[ouse] was just down the hill and so on. [The] C[atholic] W[orker] stands for so much that has always been meaningful to me: I associate it with similar trends of thought, like that of the English Dominicans and Eric Gill, who also were very important to me. And [Jacques] Maritain…. [The] Catholic Worker is part of my life, Dorothy. I am sure the world is full of people who would say the same…. If there were no Catholic Worker and such forms of witness, I would never have joined the Catholic Church.” [TM to DD, December 29, 1965, italics added]

In the first surviving letter from Merton to Dorothy, dated July 9, 1959, he starts out by letting her know that another gift box is on its way — some “sweet-smelling” toothpaste. He then goes on to tell her that he is “deeply touched” by her witness for peace, which had several times resulted in her arrest and imprisonment. He continues: “You are right going along the lines of satyagraha [Gandhi’s term for nonviolent action]. I see no other way, though of course the angles of the problem are not all clear. I am certainly with you in taking some kind of stand and acting accordingly. Nowadays it is no longer a question of who is right but who is at least not criminal, if any of us can say that anymore.”

In the same letter Merton confided to Dorothy his attraction to a vocation of greater solitude and deeper poverty, though he realizes that “the hopes of gaining such permission, humanly speaking, are very low.” Deep questions about where, as a monk, he ought to be was not a topic that Merton touched on with many of his correspondents. It’s clear that he saw in Dorothy someone capable of helping him discern God’s will.

There is not time in a single lecture to look letter by letter at the complex exchange between them between 1956 and 1968, but I would like to read some extracts and briefly comment on several of the major themes.

One of these themes was perseverance. “My constant prayer,” Dorothy confided to Merton just before Christmas in 1959, “is for final perseverance — to go on as I am trusting always the Lord Himself will take me by the hair of the head like [the prophet] Habakkuk and set me where he wants me.”

Anyone who has ever been part of any intentional community will recall how stressful it can be even when there are no dark clouds, but when it is a community that opens its doors day and night to people in urgent need, people who would not often be on anyone’s guest list, and when it is a community with very strong-willed, sometimes ideologically-driven volunteers, it can at times be like life in a hurricane.

In one letter to Merton, Dorothy speaks in detail about the bitterness animating some of the criticisms directed at her by co-workers. She senses the motivation of some of those who come to help at the Catholic Worker is less love than a “spirit of rebellion.” [DD to TM, October 10, 1960] Many who knew her and were aware of the emotional and physical strains of Catholic Worker life were astonished that Dorothy persevered from the founding of the Catholic Worker in 1933 until her death in 1980 — forty-seven years as part of a community of hospitality.

In his response, Merton noted that “more and more one sees that [perseverance] is the great thing,” but he also points out that perseverance is much more than “hanging on to some course which we have set our minds to, and refusing to let go.” It can sometimes mean “not hanging on but letting go. That of course is terrible. But as you say so rightly, it is a question of [God] hanging on to us, by the hair of the head, that is from on top and beyond, where we cannot see or reach.”

This was a matter of acute importance to Merton personally, a monk with itchy feet who repeatedly was attracted to greener monastic pastures. Dorothy was all for Merton staying put. In a later letter, Dorothy remarks, “I have a few friends who are always worrying about your leaving the monastery but from the letters of yours that I read I am sure you will hold fast. I myself pray for final perseverance most fervently having seen one holy old priest suddenly elope with a parishioner. I feel that anything can happen to anybody at any time.” [DD to TM, March 17, 1963]

Both Merton and Dorothy remain remarkable models, not just for persevering — barnacles can do that — but for continually putting down deeper roots while rediscovering a sense of its being God’s will not to uproot themselves.

In one letter Merton reflects on the levels of poverty that he sees the Catholic Worker responding to. “O Dorothy,” he writes, “I think of you, and the beat people, the ones with nothing, and the poor in virtue, the very poor, the ones no one can respect. I am not worthy to say I love all of you. Intercede for me, a stuffed shirt in a place of stuffed shirts…” [TM to DD, February 4, 1960]

Merton goes further with this topic in his next letter to Dorothy. “I was in Louisville at the Little Sisters of the Poor yesterday, and realized that it is in these beautiful, beat, wrecked, almost helpless old people that Christ lives and works most. And in the hurt people who are bitter and say they have lost their faith. We (society at large) have lost our sense of values and our vision. We despise everything that Christ loves, everything marked by His compassion. We love fatness health bursting smiles the radiance of satisfied bodies all properly fed and rested and sated and washed and perfumed and sexually relieved. Everything else is a scandal and a horror to us.” [TM to DD, August 17, 1960]

I can easily imagine Merton in the act of writing letters like this, some of them with an “on the road” abandon. At Merton’s invitation, I made my first visit to the abbey early in 1962, hitchhiking from the Catholic Worker in Manhattan to Gethsemani. Sitting one day in the small office Merton had next to the classroom where he gave lectures to the novices, I watched while he banged out a response to a letter I had brought him from a friend at the Catholic Worker. I have rarely if ever seen paper fly through a typewriter at such speed. When you read Merton’s letters, you have to keep in mind that he was used to making the best use possible of relatively small islands in time. If you wanted deep silence at Gethsemani, a place to avoid was the area of the monastery where Merton might be working on his gray office typewriter (now on display at the Merton Center in Louisville).

In the Merton-Day correspondence, a theme that was occasionally mentioned, more in passing than at length, was their mutual debt to Russian literature and Orthodox Christianity. They shared a high regard for Pasternak and Dostoevsky, with Dorothy mentioning that the novels of Dostoevsky are “spiritual reading for me.” [DD to TM, June 4, 1960] Merton responded by mentioning that Staretz Zosima, a saintly monk in The Brothers Karamazov, “always makes me weep.” [TM to DD, August 17, 1960] So significant was Dostoevsky’s influence on Dorothy’s basic vision of Christianity that I sometimes wonder whether Dostoevsky ought not to be listed among the co-founders of the Catholic Worker.

The fact that they both were writers may have been what drew Merton to confess to Dorothy his skepticism about the value of his own writing. “There has been some good and much bad.” He fears that his books too easily “become part of a general system of delusion,” a system that ultimately feels it is practically a religious duty to have and, if necessary, to use nuclear weapons. In the sentences that follow, Merton says that he finds himself “more and more drifting toward the derided and probably quite absurdist and defeatist position of a sort of Christian anarchist. This of course would be foolish, if I followed it to the end… But perhaps the most foolish would be to renounce all consideration of any alternative to the status quo, the giant machine.” [TM to DD, July 23, 1961]

This letter is, so far as I am aware, one of only two places in his vast body of writings in which Merton refers to anarchism. With Dorothy, it was a connecting word — for her, it meant someone like herself whose obedience was not to rulers, states, or any secular or ideological system, but to Christ. The other place is in an essay on the Desert Fathers, the fourth-century ascetics who created the monastic vocation, living in places that people generally avoided. Here Merton sees the Desert Fathers as being “in a certain sense ‘anarchists’ … They were men who did not believe in letting themselves be passively guided and ruled by a decadent state, and who believed that there was a way of getting along without slavish dependence on accepted, conventional values.” [introduction to The Wisdom of the Desert]

If Merton sometimes expressed to Dorothy his frustrations about his writing, wondering what good his words did, Dorothy was a source of deep gratitude for all that he published or privately circulated. In one letter she mentioned the spontaneous comment of a struggling young woman staying at the Catholic Worker who had borrowed The Thomas Merton Reader, an anthology that Dorothy kept on her desk, and said in Dorothy’s hearing, “Thank God for Thomas Merton.” In a 1965 letter to Merton, Dorothy said much the same: “You will never know the people you have reached, the good you have done. You certainly have used the graces and the talents God has given you.” [DD to TM, June 24, 1965]

They weren’t always in agreement. In one letter Dorothy takes note of how often Merton uses the word “beat” in his letters. For him it was a very positive word, suggesting his sense of connection with “the beat generation,” as it was called — people who had moved toward the edge of society, felt alienated from the mainstream, people who didn’t want to have “careers,” and regarded the pursuit of money as a dead-end street. They were, Merton said, people “challenging the culture of death.” Probably he was aware that Allen Ginsberg, leading bard of the beats, had done a reading his poem “Kaddish” at the Catholic Worker. In the sixties, Merton had some correspondence with the beat novelist, Jack Kerouac. Kerouac had coined the phrase “beat generation.” Catholic that he was, for Kerouac the word “beat” was probably clipped out of the word “beatific,” as in “beatific vision,” a very Catholic phrase.

But for Dorothy “beat” was not a connecting word. She felt Merton was seeing the beats through too rosy a lens. In one letter she described how unbeat several long-term members of the Catholic Worker staff were. There had only been a few people Dorothy regarded as beat-types at the Catholic Worker, she continued, and her blood pressure shot up when she thought of them. She described them as “a fly-by-night crew who despised and ignored the poor around us and scandalized them by their dress and morals. I am afraid I am uncharitable about the intellectual who shoulders his way in to eat before the men on the line who have done the hard work of the world, and who moves in on the few men in one of the apartments and tries to edge them out with their beer parties and women. They can sleep on park benches as far as I am concerned. Unfortunately we are left with the women who are pregnant for whom I beg your prayers. … As far as I am concerned, I must look on these things as a woman, and therefore much concerned with the flesh and with what goes to sustain it. Sin is sin [but] the sentimental make a mystique of it…” For all their common ground, Dorothy could be testy even with Merton. [DD to TM, June 4, 1962]

The danger of nuclear war and the vast destruction of cities and life was a major concern for Merton as it was for Dorothy. Much of his writing on war and peace was published in The Catholic Worker, starting in October 1961 with his essay, “The Root of War is Fear,” an expanded version of a chapter for New Seeds of Contemplation. This was not a case of worrying where no worrying was needed. A third world war fought with nuclear weapons seemed not just a possibility but a probability. Open-air nuclear weapon tests by the United States and the Soviet Union were frequent. Planning for nuclear war was built into military practice. In 1961, while I was working with a Navy unit at the U.S. Weather Bureau just outside Washington, one of our regular exercises was to plot fallout patterns over a three-day period if a nuclear explosion were to occur over the nation’s capital that day.

For Merton is was clear that Catholics would be no more hesitant that other Americans to play their part in initiating a nuclear war with the Soviet Union and regard themselves as doing God’s work. It was a grim topic — Christians crediting God with willing a storm of killing that would make every other war in history look like a water-pistol fight. There is a letter in which Dorothy consoles Merton with the reminder that Dame Julian of Norwich, the medieval mystic, had written that “the worst has already happened and been repaired. Nothing worse can ever befall us.” [DD to TM, August 15, 1961]

Not all Trappists were pleased with Merton writing on such topics and doing so in the pages of The Catholic Worker. Everything Merton wrote had to pass his order’s censors, some of whom thought the war issue was inappropriate. There is a document in the archive of the Merton Center in Louisville that may give you a sense of those times. Here we have an unnamed American Trappist monk writing to the order’s Abbot General in Rome, Dom Gabriel Sortais, warning him of the scandal being caused by Merton’s anti-war writings. Let me read a few extracts:

“There is one further matter, Reverend Father, which I hesitate to speak of but which I feel I should. We have, in the United States, a … paper called ‘The Catholic Worker.’ This is a very radical paper, which some Americans believe is a tool of the Communists. Fr. Louis (under the name Thomas Merton) has been writing for it frequently…. The name ‘Thomas Merton’ is almost synonymous in America with ‘Trappist.’ Thus quite a number of people believe that he is expressing the Trappist outlook…”

Later in the letter, the writer reports that a military intelligence officer had visited his monastery and had spoken with him “concerning Father Louis.” He concludes his letter by acknowledging that many have benefitted from Merton’s “spiritual works,” but “it is difficult to understand how he can express himself so strongly on questions as to whether the United States should test nuclear weapons and also the wisdom of building fallout shelters. It is hard to see how — as an enclosed religious — he has access to enough facts to pass a prudent judgment on such matters.” It is unlikely that this was the only such letter sent to the Abbot General.

During my first visit with Merton early in 1962, I recall a bizarre incident that occurred when Merton and I were walking down a corridor that connected the guest house kitchen to the basement of the main monastery building. Standing next to a garbage container was an older monk, Father Raymond Flanagan, the probable author of the letter to the Abbott General. Father Raymond who was not so much reading as glaring at the latest issue of The Catholic Worker, which included an article of Merton on 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, turned his back and strode away without a word, leaving a trail of smoke. Merton’s response was laughter. He told me that Father Raymond had never had a high opinion of his writings and often denounced him at the community’s chapter meetings. “In the early days Father Raymond said I was too detached from the world,” Merton said, “and now he thinks I’m not detached enough.” The tension between Merton and Father Raymond never abated. In March 1968, just nine months before Merton’s death, Merton recorded in his journal a furious verbal assault on himself by Father Raymond, who was enraged with Merton’s opposition to the war in Vietnam. [The Other Side of the Mountain, entry of March 7, 1968, p 62]

Dorothy was one of the people to whom Merton could complain about the increasing problems he was having with censorship. The issue wasn’t that he was being charged with writing anything at odds with Catholic doctrine, but the feeling, in Merton’s words, that “a Trappist should not know about these things, or should not write about them.” He found the situation exhausting and demoralizing. “Obedience,” he wrote Dorothy, “is a most essential thing in any Christian and above all in a monk, but I sometimes wonder if, being in a situation where obedience would completely silence a person on some important moral issue … a crucial issue like nuclear war … if it were not God’s will … to change my situation.”

In the spring of 1962, Merton received an order from Dom Gabriel Sortais not to publish any more writings on war and peace. As a consequence, a book Merton has just finished writing, Peace in the Post-Christian Era, was published more than four decades after it was written. Merton found the gagging order not only outrageous but at odds with the prophetic dimension of the monastic vocation.

If you ever want to read a letter hot enough to heat a castle in January, I recommend one he sent me at the end of April in 1962. Here’s a very brief extract:

“[The Abbot General’s decision] reflects an astounding incomprehension of the seriousness of the present crisis in its religious aspect. It reflects an insensitivity to Christian and Ecclesiastical values, and to the real sense of the monastic vocation. The reason given is that this is not the right kind of work for a monk and that it ‘falsifies the monastic message.’ Imagine that: the thought that a monk might be deeply enough concerned with the issue of nuclear war to voice a protest against the arms race, is supposed to bring the monastic life into disrepute. Man, I would think that it might just possibly salvage a last shred of repute for an institution that many consider to be dead on its feet… That is really the most absurd aspect of the whole situation, that these people insist on digging their own grave and erecting over it the most monumental kind of tombstone.” [TM to Jim Forest, April 29, 1962, full text in The Hidden Ground of Love]

Yet Merton obeyed. Explaining his decision to do so in the same letter, he stresses that “blowing off steam” is not what’s important. The real question is what response was most likely to bring about a change of heart among those — monks and others — who were threatened by Merton’s thoughts regarding war. “Disobedience or a public denunciation,” he said, would be seen by his fellow monks “as an excuse for dismissing a minority viewpoint and be regarded by those outside [the church] as fresh proof that the church had no love for private conscience.” Very soberly, he asked the crucial question: “Whose mind would be changed?” In his particular case, Merton concluded, public protest and disobedience “would backfire and be fruitless. It would be taken as a witness against the peace movement and would confirm these people in all the depth of their prejudices and their self complacency.”

In fact Merton wasn’t quite silenced. He continued to write for The Catholic Worker but under such transparent pseudonyms as Benedict Monk. On one occasion he signed himself Marco J. Frisbee. He remained a member of the advisory board of the Catholic Peace Fellowship, often giving its staff extremely helpful guidance. His abbot, Dom James Fox, decided that what the Abbot General had banned was publication of mass market editions of Merton’s peace writings. With his abbot’s collaboration, Merton was able to bring out several mimeographed editions of Peace in the Post-Christian Era and another called Cold War Letters plus a succession of essays. Via Dorothy Day, the staff of the Catholic Peace Fellowship, plus a number of other friends, these were widely distributed, including to various people in the White House as well as to bishops and theologians taking part in the Second Vatican Council. Ironically, in the end Merton’s peace writings were given a much more attentive reading by many more people than would have been the case with a commercial edition. It has often been observed that nothing makes a reader so interested in a book as its being banned.

Being a lay-edited and lay-published journal, Dorothy didn’t have to work within the censorship labyrinth that Merton did, but her views about obedience were the same as Merton’s. Again and again, in similar circumstances, Dorothy quoted from the Gospel: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” [John 12:24]

Not all enemies are across national borders. Sometimes your enemies are people who, in principle, are your friends and neighbors, even your brothers and sisters in religious life. Christ taught his followers to love their enemies and in his own life demonstrated such love. Christians in the early Church gave a similar witness, even at the cost of their lives. But in Christianity today, too often what is most striking is zealous hatred of enemies, in fact not only enemies but anyone who is seen as too different or too inconvenient. For Dorothy and Merton, the refusal to hate anyone was basic Christianity. It’s not surprising to find one of Merton’s finest meditations on enmity is in one of his longer letters to Dorothy. Listen to this:

“Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who we are. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action. To shut out the person and to refuse to consider him as a person, as another self, we resort to the ‘impersonal law’ and to abstract ‘nature.’ That is to say we block off the reality of the other, we cut the intercommunication of our nature and his nature, and we consider only our own nature with its rights, its claims, it demands. And we justify the evil we do to our brother because he is no longer a brother, he is merely an adversary, an accused. To restore communication, to see our oneness of nature with him, and to respect his personal rights and his integrity, his worthiness of love, we have to see ourselves as similarly accused along with him … and needing, with him, the ineffable gift of grace and mercy to be saved. Then, instead of pushing him down, trying to climb out by using his head as a stepping-stone for ourselves, we help ourselves to rise by helping him to rise. For when we extend our hand to the enemy who is sinking in the abyss, God reaches out to both of us, for it is He first of all who extends our hand to the enemy. It is He who ‘saves himself’ in the enemy, who makes use of us to recover the lost groat which is His image in our enemy.” [TM to DD, December 20, 1961]

Here one sees in high relief what was at the root of Christian life for both Dorothy and Merton and shaped their friendship. We know God and we know each other only by love. What is most unique about Christianity is its special emphasis on the vocation to love — a love whose only real test is the love of opponents and even the love of enemies. This is not sentimental love, and certainly not romantic love, but love in the sense of recognizing our family ties with each and every human being and doing whatever is in our power to protect each life, hoping that in the process both we and those whom we regard as enemies may experience a conversion of heart. No one has ever been threatened or bludgeoned or terrified or bribed into conversion. Such a deep change of heart is something only love can obtain. Without love, we become inhabitants of hell long before we die. With love, we already have a foretaste of heaven. One of Dorothy’s most often-repeated quotations summarizes this basic truth. It is a sentence that comes from one of her favorite saints, Catherine of Siena. “All the way to heaven is heaven,” she said, “because Jesus said, ‘I am the way.’”

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Jim Forest is the author of quite a number of books, including All is Grace: a Biography of Dorothy Day and Living With Wisdom: A Biography of Thomas Merton.

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