MICHAEL W. HIGGINS + JAMES FOREST ON THOMAS MERTON: ‘He found himself drawn more and more to the peace movement’

In a letter written to the Honourable Shinzo Hamai, mayor of Hiroshima, Merton makes explicit what is implied in [his poem] Original Child Bomb:

‘We are all walking backwards towards a precipice.  We know the precipice is there, but we assert that we are all the while going forward.  This is because the world in its madness is guided by military men, who are the blindest of the blind.’

Surrounded by the spectre of mass death, of obliteration, humankind prefers not to see the precipice toward which it is headed.  

Merton was resolved to help it see, and to that end he found himself drawn more and more to the peace movement.

Shortly after sending “Chant to be Used in Processions Around a Site with Furnaces” to The Catholic Worker for publication in 1961 he had his first contact with the young peace activist who would later emerge as a trusted confidant, close friend, and sympathetic biographer: James Forest.

Although Forest’s high profile and radical pacifist tactics placed him somewhat outside the more detached mode of resistance found in the monastery, he saw in Merton from the beginning a soul brother.

‘To understand Merton’s involvement in the peace issue you need to appreciate something of how Merton reacted to things in general.  

‘His usual way of responding to something or someone was first of all to fall in love.

‘The latest book was always the best book.  

‘Two days later it was a book seriously flawed or even to be approached with great caution or the most threatening work that had wonderful strengths and weaknesses.

‘This is how he responded initially to the peace movement.

‘At the beginning he was aware that the movement and its concerns was something desperately needed not only in the Roman Catholic community specifically but in the Christian community generally.

‘He could see that the work we were doing was both necessary and wonderful.

‘And the closer he got to it, the more intimate his involvement became, the more aware he became of its flaws.

‘When you examine his correspondence with peace activists, people like me, Dan Berrigan, Jim Douglass, etc., you see him becoming more and more critical and yet supportive, providing helpful insights, alerting us to the problems and dangers in the movement as well as advice or direction on matters concerning our individual spiritual needs.

‘We needed to be conscious of the fact that the direction in which our society at large was heading was destructive and that our movement was firmly situated in this very same society – we weren’t living on the moon – we were shaped by the same attitudes, the same contempt, one could find in society.

‘Merton saw very clearly our capacity to become myopic, closed in, and self-isolating.’

Merton’s role in the peace movement was more than simply providing a social critique of searing honesty.

He took on the public forces committed to the war industry, the supporters keen or tepid about nuclear arms, patriotic bishops and unthinking politicians, and Catholic moralists awash in a sea of deadly caution.

His writings became increasingly suspect, powerful figures in the ecclesiastical world opposed his peace publications, no less powerful figures in the political world pressed for his silencing, and Merton found himself, like Dan Berrigan, facing church sanctions.  

Berrigans’s superiors succumbed to pressure by the influential Cardinal Archbishop of New York, Francis Spellman, and he was sent into exile for his pains as a peace activist.

 

Heretic Blood: the Spiritual Geography of Thomas Merton, by Michael W. Higgins, pages 169 –  170, published by Stoddart, 1998.  This hardback book critiques many of Merton’s most famous poems, letters and polemical writings, and is available to borrow from the Oak Bay branch of the Greater Victoria Public Library.

CCC – LA ROSA TRANSCULTURAL PEACE PROPAGANDA 2009

Merton