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Thomas Merton’s Peace Forty years ago, on December 10, 1968, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton accidentally died while attending a Monk’s conference in Bangkok, Thailand. His death brought to a close a seismic year that saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, the welling up of anti-war, civil rights and women’s movements, the escalation of the Vietnam War, the Tet offensive, the Catonsville Nine action, conflagration in the inner cities, and the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Thomas Merton’s remains were flown back to the U.S. on an Air Force military plane, along with the bodies of American soldiers killed in Vietnam. He is buried in the Gethsemane Abbey cemetery in rural Kentucky, where he spent the last twenty seven years of his life. A simple white cast iron cross bearing his adopted monk’s name, Fr. Louis Merton marks his grave amid scores of other identical crosses neatly lined in rows—a Monk’s Arlington. Merton was born in France to a father from New Zealand and an American mother, both artists, orphaned young, educated at Cambridge and Columbia Universities. He taught at St. Bonaventure University; his college student and teaching days were filled with friends, jazz, drinking and partying. But, over these years, a slow and relentless conversion was stalking him, which would lead to Catholicism, the Trappists, and the priesthood. The journey is wonderfully told in a true spiritual classic, his autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain, published in 1948. It became a best seller, influencing many people, especially the men recently returned from the war, who, having experienced the horrors of WW II, were searching for meaning and purpose. As a result many would enter Trappist Abbeys. On December 7, 1941, the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, plunging the U.S. into war, Thomas Merton boarded a train in New York that took him to Gethsemane, to a life devoted to silence, solitude, prayer, study, manual labor and the cycle of the liturgical hours chanted daily. Above the Abbey gateway that he entered were two Latin words “Pax Intrantibus,” peace to all who enter, a peace denied to the outside world, involved in a total war that would cost the lives of 50 million soldiers and civilians. His only brother, John Paul, would be one of those casualties as a crewmember of a British bomber that crashed into the English Channel, his final resting place. It didn’t take long for Merton’s superiors to recognize his great intellect and writing talent and encouraged him in this pursuit. Over the years, he would go on to write on a great array of subjects, poetry, essays, book reviews, magazine articles and letters compiled in five large volumes, and journals encompassing seven more volumes. It seems that he never balled up a piece of paper he had written on and threw it into a waste paper basket. Thomas Merton pondered on what should be the role of a Trappist monk in the 20th century, post Vatican II, confronting the reality of a Cold War with nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert that could annihilate the world in a few hours. He thought that he lived in both an Apocalyptic and post Christian era that demanded action on his part. In an earlier visit to the Abbey, as a retreatant, he was profoundly moved to write in his secular journal that he thought Gethsemane was the center of America, holding the country together and keeping the universe from cracking to pieces, falling apart. In a letter Merton wrote in November 1958 to Pope John XXIII, he expressed the idea that his abbey could be more than a place of prayer and penance, but also have a contemplative grasp of political, intellectual, artistic, and social movements. He wanted to establish a monastic foundation of monks who would host special groups of writers, intellectuals, poets, artists, etc. for retreats and discussions, exchanges of letters and publications. This proposed opening up of the Order to the outside world gained acceptance slowly and begrudgingly by his superiors. This forum allowed him to engage with others in his passionate pursuit of warning the world of the madness and moral bankruptcy of the Cold War, nuclear weapons, deterrence, and later the Vietnam War. He wrote a flurry of articles on these issues published in the Catholic Worker newspaper, Commonweal, Jubilee, and Blackfriars. The first two articles, “The Root of War is Fear” and “Nuclear War and Christian Responsibility” were published in the Catholic Worker and Commonweal between October 1961 and October 1962, a year’s period of time that saw a confrontation at the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile crisis. Merton corresponded with a host of prominent people in many fields of endeavor addressing these issues. One hundred eleven of these letters were published titled, Cold War Letters. As these writings reached a more general audience, Merton was increasingly criticized as un-American, and a Communist sympathizer. Soon after, the Abbot General of the Trappists forbade him to write on war and nuclear weapons. His role as monk was to pray for peace. His superiors refused to publish a book he wrote at this time, Peace in the Post Christian Era. It dealt with, as he termed it, a prophetic critique of war and witness to peace. The book winds its way through a history of just war theory with references to Celsus, Origen, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Edward Teller, John Courtney Murray, etc. It concludes that just war theory in regard to both non-nuclear and nuclear war was not morally sustainable. Hundreds of copies of the manuscript were mimeographed, Samizdat fashion (Russian for self publish), and passed around like Russian writers under censorship by the Soviet government. (What an irony!) Copies made it to Vatican Council II in progress in Rome at this time. It is believed to have influenced Council Document Schema 13, dealing with the Catholic Church in the Modem World, including the issue of war. It is also believed that Pope John XXIII drew from it to help shape his historic encyclical “Pacem In Terris.” The book was finally published in 2004 by Orbis Books. Thomas Merton increasingly turned his attention to what he believed was the overwhelming atrocity that was the Vietnam War. He met with peace people like John H. Yoder, A.J. Muste, Phillip and Daniel Berrigan, Abraham Heschel and Thich Nhat Hanh. He joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation and became an early sponsor of the Catholic Peace Fellowship (CPF) at its inception in 1964. He thought of his role with the CPF as pastoral, morally and spiritually, not politically. He counseled Fr. Daniel Berrigan after he wrote him that his brother Phillip had proposed a need for the Catholic Peace Movement to move in the direction of violence against idolatrous things such as selective service draft files. Thomas Merton expressed his reservations that these acts could escalate to harming people and property, but somewhat reluctantly concurred, that if these actions could be done in a restrained manner, they would be a powerful symbolic gesture. Actions in Baltimore, Catonsville and Milwaukee would shortly take place. In February 1966, he sent a letter of encouragement to Jim Forrest, after Forrest wrote to him of his despair that CPF was not achieving meaningful results. In part, he wrote that CPF was not going to stop the war in Vietnam or cause many Catholics to think differently about war and peace. But it would begin the laborious job of changing the national mind and open up the national conscience, contributing something to a clarification of Christian trust in society. In 1958, Thomas Merton had an Epiphany in downtown Louisville at 4th & Walnut Streets. He relates that he was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that he loved all the people walking about him, that they were his and he was theirs, that they could not be alien even though they were total strangers. It was a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race—God gloried in becoming a member of the human race. All were walking around shining like the sun. If only we could see each other as we really were. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty and no more greed. The gate of heaven was everywhere. Thomas Merton envisioned a world informed by a regard for the dignity of the human person. It is a humanistic vision, Christian in nature, residing in the Incarnation. It is rooted in the biblical notion of man and woman as the object of divine mercy and of special concern to God—no one is left out. No One! In a world where terrorism has replaced communism, Islamic fascism has replaced the atheistic soviet empire and desert wars have replaced a jungle war, Thomas Merton’s peace witness is as relevant today as when he was alive. Rest in Peace, Father Louis! John Wanenchak |