During Thanksgiving 2004 I had another visit with my family. The November elections seemed to further polarize views and encrust positions on the war in Iraq, the economy, the U.S. image abroad, the domestic moral agenda, Muslim emergence, oil usage, and Catholic Church politics. In short, the elections provided another opportunity to test my skills at dialogue, to see if I could refrain from polarizing, from sarcasm, from arguing, from dominating conversations, from putting up or putting down.

Conversations on all the topics listed above soon became objects of firm, intractable positions. I found my dialogue skills not up to the task of staying engaged on current topics with members of my own Funk family. I pulled into the safety of silence, yet without physically withdrawing. I found that if I offered a counter-argument or a differing side of the issue, the topic would explode in all directions with a double dose of passion and, what felt to me as, disdain for my point of view.

Looking Back and Looking Ahead
In my first article on this topic, published in the previous issue of this bulletin, I claimed that Thomas Merton, if he were still alive, would challenge the just-war theory, the notion that war is a means to peace, totalitarian approaches, crusades for truth, and viewing the enemy as the Other. He would insist that fear is the root cause of war and that we can’t harm others without harming ourselves. He would ask the question, “Is peace something you fight for?” I proposed a monastic practice of dialogue that would refrain from oppositional positions, from proposing abstractions at the expense of persons, from using ego as a weapon, and from resorting to negativity and dichotomies. Instead, a monastic practice of dialogue would

• speak in the first person,
• shift from ideologies to persons,
• shift from truth as an abstraction to personal beliefs, hopes and experiences of the sacred,
• shift from ego-centered resistance to a shared consciousness of the sacred human,
• shift from negativity to a conscious willingness to understand and honor differences.

The board of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue is committed to developing skills and a theory of dialogue that can be practiced in our families, our religious communities, and our formal practice of interreligious dialogue. We are preparing a dialogue with Muslims scheduled to be held in New Harmony, Indiana, in April 2006, with “hospitality” as our theme. We want to hone our dialogical skills and to increase our knowledge about Muslim and Christian beliefs and practices. I’ve promised to prepare a paper for the members of the board that could serve as a teaching on the process. In this present article, a sequel to my earlier one, I would like to reflect further on ways in which Merton can be an aid to any of us involved in dialogue, whether that be around the family table or at a formal dialogue with members of another religious tradition.

Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
In an interview with Brother Patrick Hart published elsewhere in this issue of our bulletin, Patrick recommended Merton’s book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander as a vintage model of his writing and his style of engaged dialogue. In this classic book, first published by Doubleday in 1966, we get not only a glimpse of Merton’s finest thinking and writing but also a voice for monastics to imitate. Merton said that the book was about a decade of “personal reflections, insights, metaphors, observations, judgments on readings and events” (Preface). He presents his “version of the world.” The genius of Merton was that he had a version of the world. That is, he could step back and look and then articulate it both for himself and for others, like us. In other words, he puts this version “out there” and thereby begins and sustains a dialogue with the world. We may not have his immense capacity to receive and interpret the world with his brilliant mind, excellent education, and universal contacts with the intellectual and artistic community of the 1960s, but we can notice what he did and how he did it and imitate his “doing” of dialogue “in the world.”

Merton’s fundamental belief was that being a monk, rather than disqualifying him from having a point of view, gave him a vantage point that offered a unique and universal perspective. As human, he was engaged in living in our actual world. He says of Conjectures, “Maybe the best way to characterize this book is to say that it consists of a series of sketches and meditations, some poetic, and literary, others historical and even theological, fitted together in a spontaneous, informal philosophic scheme in such a way that they react upon each other. The total result is a personal and monastic meditation, a testimony of Christian reflection in the mid-twentieth century, a confrontation of twentieth-century questions in the light of monastic commitment, which inevitably makes one something of a ‘bystander’ ” (Preface, pp. 5-6; this and all subsequent quotations are from the Doubleday Image Books edition, 1968).

A Voice for Praise and Worship
Merton then proceeds to move through contemporary news items, philosophical systems, poetry, theology, and all manner of things in a way that makes an op-ed page look one-dimensional. In scanning this book for the sake of my dialogue practice, I read with the intention of understanding just what the “voice” of a bystander is. What did Merton see that I want to notice for myself? At one point toward the end of Conjectures, Merton portrays a particular day on retreat:

We are on retreat. Very cold morning, about 8° above. I left for the woods before dawn, after a conference on sin. Pure dark sky, with only the crescent moon and planets shining: the moon and Venus over the barns, and Mars over in the west over the hills and the fire tower.

Sunrise is an event that calls forth solemn music in the very depths of man’s nature, as if one’s whole being had to attune itself to the cosmos and praise God for the new day, praise Him in the name of all the creatures that ever were or ever will be. I look at the rising sun and feel that now upon me falls the responsibility of seeing what all my ancestors have seen, in the Stone Age and even before it, praising God before me. Whether or not they praised Him then, for themselves, they must praise Him now in me. When the sun rises, each one of us is summoned by the living and the dead to praise God. (p. 280)

The authority that all contemplatives, lay and monastic, claim is that we come from the cloister of solitude. “You must be free, and not involved. Solitude is to be preserved, not as a luxury but as a necessity: not for ‘perfection’ so much as for simple ‘survival’ in the life God has given you” (pp. 96-97). It’s in this solitude that we name the contemplative moment from our ongoing practice of lectio divina. Our eyes become trained to “see.” Merton writes:

I pray much to have a wise heart, and perhaps the rediscovery of Lady Julian of Norwich will help me. I took her book with me on a quiet walk among the cedars. . . . she really elaborates, theologically, the content of her revelations. She first experienced, then thought, and the thoughtful deepening of experience worked it back into her life, deeper and deeper, until her whole life as a recluse at Norwich was simply a matter of getting completely saturated in the light she had received all at once, in the “shewings,” when she thought she was about to die . . . . To have a “wise heart,” it seems to me, is to live centered on this dynamism and this secret hope—this hoped-for secret. It is the key to our life, but as long as we are alive we must see that we do not have this key: it is not at our disposal. Christ has it, in us, for us. We have the key in so far as we believe in Him, and are one with Him. So this is it: the “wise heart” remains in hope and in contradiction, in sorrow and in joy, fixed on the secret and the “great deed” which alone gives Christian life its true scope and dimensions!

The wise heart lives in Christ. (pp. 211-12)

So, what would Merton do? Two words from the title of his book—“guilty” and “bystander”—function as an idiom of watching, from the outside. We monastics often use the collective, personal pronoun “we” as a way of accepting responsibility for the current condition and of expressing our joint commitment to accountability for the next generation, to taking action on behalf of those who will follow us. The “we” of Thomas Merton’s writings is saturated with compassion and hope. However, this collective “we” is only half of the monastic’s vocation in the world. Merton uses the singular “I” when he names the now of each contemplative moment. Notice the first passage above: “We are on retreat.” “I look at the rising sun.” We might share our concerns about America at war, but to miss the now that is calling for praise and worship would mean forsaking an important part of our vocation.

A Voice for Protest and Honest Talk
However, Merton also knew that monastics cannot limit their activity to praise and worship. He once said that he wanted to make his entire life a protest against the injustice and cruelty that are as evident in our world today as when he was writing forty or more years ago. We simply must ask, “Why war?” a question I have asked of some of my relatives. I believe the following lines from Merton do much to explain our ongoing Iraq War:

The basic falsehood is the lie that we are totally dedicated to truth, and that we can remain dedicated to truth in a manner that is at the same time honest and exclusive: that we have a monopoly of all truth, just as our adversary of the moment has the monopoly of all error.

We then convince ourselves that we cannot preserve our purity of vision and our inner sincerity if we enter into dialogue with the enemy, for he will corrupt us with his error. We believe, finally, that truth cannot be preserved except by the destruction of the enemy—for, since we have identified him with error, to destroy him is to destroy error. The adversary, of course, has exactly the same thoughts about us and exactly the same as our policy by which he defends the “truth.” He has identified us with dishonesty, insincerity, and untruth. He believes that, if we are destroyed, nothing will be left but truth. (p. 68)

Why do we need to prove our enemy wrong? “Because,” Merton writes, “we need them to be wrong. For if they are wrong, and we are right, then our untruth becomes truth: our selfishness becomes justice and virtue: our cruelty and lust cannot be fairly condemned. We can rest secure in the fiction we have determined to embrace as ‘truth.’ What we desire is not the truth, but rather that our lie should be proved ‘right,’ and our iniquity be vindicated as ‘just.’ This is what we have done to pervert our natural, instinctive appetite for truth” (p. 78).

Truth itself can be a trick. When we have “the truth,” this gives us permission to hate. Merton gives an example drawn from table reading at his monastery:

In the refectory a tendentious book about Communism is being read. Communism is insidious. We should hate all that is insidious, especially this ultimate diabolical insidiousness which is Communism. If we truly hate it with all the power of our being, then we can be sure we ourselves are, and will remain, righteous, free, sincere, honest, open. Today then (we are told) hatred of Communism is the test of a good Christian. The pledge of all truth is our political hate. Hate Castro. Hate Khrushchev. Hate Mao. All this in the same breath as “God’s merciful love” and the “beatings of the Sacred Heart.” There seems to be some other dimension we have not discovered. (p. 44)

Merton even cautions the monastic about positing another “truth” that trumps the previous abuse of truth. His skillful method toward love that informs and forms truth is this: “The best I can do is to look for some of the questions” (p. 49). So, I guess Merton would not appear on a talk show. Being a monk he could stand back and watch. But his genius was to watch without being hooked into the crisis. He also insisted on the importance of thought, of being a thinking person: “Nothing can take the place of thoughts. If we do not think, we cannot act freely. If we do not act freely, we are at the mercy of forces which we never understand, forces that are arbitrary, destructive, blind, fatal to us and to our world. If we do not use our minds to think with, we are heading for extinction, like the dinosaur: for the massive physical strength of the dinosaur became useless, purposeless. It led to his destruction” (p. 79).

Personal Lessons to Take from His Book
Having reviewed some of the most potent teachings in Conjectures, and nothing substitutes for the direct experience of doing it leisurely yourself, let me conclude this brief piece by reflecting on some ways in which Merton’s book might serve as a tool for me the next time I’m at the Funk family table and the political world becomes part of the menu, no matter what the feast.

First, I must continue to do my own practice so as not to participate unconsciously as a person of the lie and claim to “see” the hidden agenda of others from my own store of hubris. My own angers, competition, and propensity to retaliate and keep the cycle of violence in full swing need be rooted out with practice before coming to the dinner table and to the table of dialogue. I fear not only “the Lord” but also my own stored tendencies to “kill my enemies,” even if they are my kindred by blood or ties of friendship.


I don’t apologize for being a nun and bringing to the table views that I have picked up from here, from there, from reading, from other conversations—views that are neither better than nor richer than others, but just “other views.” Being in this world and actually living today is the only warrant to engage in the conversation. However, silence, when not used passive-aggressively, is my greatest strength before, during, and after the talk.

I would bring to the table that contemplative “eye of the heart” that has the witness of the “we” but the urgency rising from the “I.” The description of Merton’s night watch when he was Novice Master serves as an ode to all of us who see:

Looking at the dark empty room, with everyone gone, it seemed that, because all that they loved was there, “they” in a spiritual way were most truly there, though in fact they were all upstairs in the dormitory, asleep.

It was as if their love and their goodness had transformed the room and filled it with a presence curiously real, comforting, perfect: one might say, with Christ. Indeed, it seemed to me momentarily that He was as truly present here, in a certain way, as upstairs in the Chapel. The loveliness of the humanity which God has taken to Himself in love is, after all, to be seen in the humanity of our friends, our children, our brothers, the people we love and who love us. Now that God has become Incarnate, why do we go to such lengths, all the time, to “disincarnate” Him again, to unweave the garment of flesh and reduce Him once again to spirit? As if the Body of the Lord had not become “Life-giving Spirit.” . . .

In any case, I felt there was something quite final and eternal in looking at this empty room: . . . the sign of love is on these novices and they are precious forever in God’s eyes . . . . It is very good to have loved these people and been loved by them with such simplicity and sincerity. (pp. 213-14)

Most of all, what contemplatives bring to the table of dialogue is to gently raise up in the midst of dissonance the contemplative moment of the here and now. I’m here at this table, belonging to this family and coming from my particular monastery. Merton has the words to describe this attitude: “Dealing with these brothers, my attitude toward the monastery changes. I see that they have need of me, and I have need of them, and I am glad to do what I can for them. This is a source of peace that makes much more sense than aiming at something less attainable and then being dissatisfied because one has not ‘attained’ it” (p. 280). So, stay at the table.