from Bulletin 73, October 2004

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At a family gathering recently there was intense talk about the current Iraq War and coming elections. Like most families, mine is sharply divided. The range of opinion is not unusual. It’s also normal to have many points of view and to hear vastly different sides in a debate. What was striking this time was the level of intensity, the sustained informed narrative brought to the table, and the despair at finding common ground. This is my fifteenth year of being involved with monastic interreligious dialogue and my eleventh year of having it as my full-time assignment. Isn’t there some skillfulness we can bring to a family gathering from our experience? Or do we dialogue “out there” but remain mute in our home monastic communities and family reunions?

At one point, I dropped out of the conversation and became an observer, asking myself some questions: I wonder what Thomas Merton would have said about our contemporary dilemma? Would terrorism justify laying aside a nonviolent strategy? Would Thomas Merton have grown up and out of the 1960s mentality that was so optimistic? We, who were already adults in the 60s, actually thought that war would become obsolete. Forty years later there seems to be no prospect for finding solutions other than military ones. More disturbing is the fact that the reliance on nonviolence as an alternative seems to fuel more opposition and actually causes aggression instead of promoting peace.

After the 9/11 attacks the MID Board in its 2001 annual meeting at my monastery in Beech Grove, Indiana, could not come up with a unified action. One member was an Air Force chaplain and was ready to do his duty; he saw the situation as an opportunity to serve. One advisor was decidedly in favor of war as a response; he said that World War II brought peace to the United States and Europe. One nun raised the issue that if we could not speak in a unified voice, we needed to do intrareligious dialogue among ourselves. In short, we were divided, even paralyzed, and simply moved on to the next item in the agenda. At lunch Brother David Steindl-Rast shook his head in disbelief. He said, “If the MID board can’t be unified against war as a solution, we are in for a long, dark period of turbulence.” On October 15, 2002, during our annual meeting in Kalamazoo, we again discussed our position as a board. As a response to the U.S. pre-emptive strike, invasion, and occupation of Iraq, the MID Board voted on a resolution: That each monastic dialogue board member dedicate his/her contemplative practice each day for peace through dialogue rather than war. This resolution was prompted by the desire to use our contemplative practice as a skillful means to reduce violence. It also was a heartfelt willingness to start with ourselves rather than make a statement to the whole world, someplace “out there.” There was sincere shared belief that our early morning silence after Vigils was louder than all the peace marches in the streets of every capital city in the world.

I’ve done a short study on Thomas Merton and found clear teachings that we can still lean on today. The MID Board holds dear that its founding vision for dialogue rests on Merton’s amazing record of actual face-to-face conversations. He was a master at dialogue and a teacher of peace as its content. It’s time once again to do dialogue with peace as the common ground. If Thomas Merton were actually sitting on our board these years he’d surely have thick negotiations. What would he say to us? Can we accompany our silence and contemplative practice with teachings from the monastic tradition about peace? Here are some themes from Merton on peace, drawn largely from my study of Anthony Padovano’s book A Retreat with Thomas Merton: Becoming Who We Are (Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1995), pp. 73-79):

• Merton did not accept St. Augustine’s just war theory, which taught that it is possible to kill others morally if one intends objectives other than the killing and if war is the last resort. Merton said that the divorce between intention and behavior creates a moral schizophrenia in which one’s motives are separated from one’s actions, in this case, killing a human being. It was Augustine’s way of thinking that permitted the Crusades and the Inquisition.
• Merton espoused Gandhi’s nonviolence, which seeks to liberate the adversary from the mentality that makes violence and oppression appealing. Since there is no separation between the oppressor and the oppressed, there is no enemy.
• Merton raised up the imperative of nonviolence in the early Church tradition. Clement of Alexandria observed that a disciple of Christ is a soldier of peace in an army that sheds no blood. St. Justin concluded that a Christian does not take another’s life but dies for Christ. Tertullian, with his striking way of writing, insisted that Jesus disarmed every Christian soldier when he told Peter to put away his sword.
• Nonviolence imposes the need to root out our fascination for total solutions to problems and totalitarian approaches to life. We become violent because we believe we alone have the answers and the truth. We conclude that any alternative to our position must make matters worse and be false. There is arrogance in this.
• Christians become belligerent, Merton affirmed, because they see the truth as smaller than they are, as something less significant than the Church. No, Merton thundered. The truth is larger than we are. It endures even when we do not defend it. We are not the possessors of truth but its servants. The truth is more than we are, more than the Church is. The Church is a minister to the truth, a witness to it, not its master.
• If we believe that the truth is invincible, then we do not attack others to preserve it. Those who genuinely serve the truth are gentle with it and humble. The truth need only be spoken and its force can be felt. When we defend the so-called truth by violence, we are not serving the truth but ourselves. We turn to violence because we are aware at some level of consciousness that the truth is not in us and we are, therefore, insecure with what we propose as the truth.
• Those we define as our enemies are often not our enemies but simply those we cannot control, those who take options in life we did not, those who see an aspect of the truth to which we are blind. This is not to assume that there are no wicked people in the world; it is merely state that there are far fewer than we suspect. Many of those we declare wicked are not wicked, but different.
• Fear is the root cause of war. With bigger and bigger weapons we will continue to dominate and be dominated.
  Nonviolence requires spiritual maturity. This is why prayer is an important element in the achievement of nonviolence. The reason why nonviolence fails to work on many occasions is because others sense correctly that beneath the surface of the nonviolence there is a hidden belligerence, a desire to control or, at the very least, an assumption of moral superiority and self-righteousness.
• Nonviolence is a humble approach to life, seeking to purify the self from the vanity that gets in the way of our happiness and the greed that makes us violent with one another.
• Two assumptions by those who advocate violence: that I am separate from the other, and that I can hurt the other without injuring myself. Violence seems advantageous: if I don’t guard my interests, another will take them. Scarcity thus dictates a felt need to protect American interests.

There are many other teachings that Merton put into the orbit of world conversations, but if we’d pick up on just these few, there is something new that we’d observe now more than thirty-five years after his death. We’ve actually done dialogue. We need new skills. Times have changed. I think Thomas Merton would move us to the kind of initiative that we took in a proposal submitted to the Luce Foundation, in which we articulate what we take to be a bold, new direction. The gist of the proposal is as follows: