by Ken Sehested
My favorite definition of God is Thomas Merton’s:
God is “mercy within mercy within mercy.” —Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB
A special issue of “Signs of the Times” devoted to Thomas Merton (31 January 1915 – 10 December 1968) quotes was already in the works, to mark the centennial of his birth. But when Pope Francis, in his historic address to a joint session of Congress, lifted his name for special recognition (along with three other Americans), it seemed timely to move up the schedule.
Brother Louis, as he was called in his Trappist community at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, is likely the most influential American Catholic of the twentieth century. His bibliography exceeds 60 books, hundreds of poems and articles, some translated into at least 15 languages.
He is most widely known for one of his first books, The Seven Storey Mountain, which has sold over one million copies. Acclaimed for his work on prayer and contemplation, he also wrote passionately on civil rights, militarism, and nonviolence.
In rereading some of his work, I marvel, especially, at the way he identified the frailty of white liberal response to our ongoing racial trauma. (“Religion and Race in the United States,” a chapter in Thomas Merton: Selected Essays, is thankfully available online. See The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University for a biographical sketch and a complete bibliography of Merton’s published writings.)
Pope Francis’ choice to publicly name Merton along with Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and Abraham Lincoln is stunning in a number of ways. Two were assassinated, one of them a Baptist pastor, the other who presided over the first contentious step in unraveling our nation’s brutal racial history. No surprise two others were Roman Catholics, but neither were ecclesial leaders. In fact, both gave fits to church hierarchies when they were alive.
In a 25 September 2015 “Democracy Now!” interview, Robert Ellsberg, editor of Orbis Press, the imprint of the Maryknoll order, expressed his own surprise.
“[Pope Francis’ mention of Thomas Merton in his speech to a joint session of Congress] was the surprise for me. Just 10 years ago, the American Catholic bishops decided to remove his name from a list of exemplary Catholics to be included in a catechism for young adults, because they felt uncomfortable with him. He was a prophet. He was a man on the margins, who didn't fit into any kind of prefab Catholic Churchy kind of idea of holiness, although he was a Trappist monk and a priest through most of his life. . .
“His own Trappist order censored him and wouldn't allow him to publish on those topics for some years. And he became, in some ways, a kind of a renegade, a kind of troublesome figure. He said, ‘I want my whole life to be a protest against war and political tyranny. No to everything that destroys life. Yes to everything that affirms it. . . .’
“I'm sure there were a lot of people in the House [of Representatives, where the joint session met] who were scratching their heads at the mention of this Trappist monk. . . . It was interesting the way [Francis] used Merton as a figure of dialogue, of somebody who overcomes polarization.” (The interview and transcript are available at “Pope Francis Compares Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day to Lincoln and MLK”)
At least some in the US Catholic Church leadership are still leery of Merton’s influence. As Rose Berger wrote in a 25 September 2015 Washington Post article, just recently “the Northern California chapter of the International Thomas Merton Society attempted to host a talk by a Merton scholar and well-respected theologian on the topic of Merton’s interreligious dialogue. But the bishop asked the local Catholic Church to host it off-site.” (“What Pope Francis can teach the US Catholic Church about Thomas Merton”)
The great paradox of Merton’s life lay in the tension between his being, on the one hand, a cloistered monk, with a vigorous commitment to silence, and on the other hand a prolific writer. Initially, after making his final vows, he swore off his writing habit in favor of his Cistercian vow of silence. That resolve didn’t last, and in fact his superiors encouraged him to see his writing on prayer and contemplation as part of his monastic duties.
Merton’s attention to the life of prayer eventually did what genuine prayer always does—coaxing attention to God’s intention for a bruised and battered world. “Prayer does not blind us to the world,” he wrote, “but it transforms our vision of the world, and makes us see everyone and everything in the light of God.”
His superiors were not happy about his critical social commentary. Merton resorted to mimeographed circulation of his writing among friends. In a 1963 letter to French philosopher Jacques Maritain, Merton complained:
“I am putting into the mail a copy of my 'unpublishable' book on 'Peace in the Post Christian Era.' Unpublishable because forbidden by our upright and upstanding Abbot General who does not want to leave Christian civilization without the bomb to crown its history of honor. He says that my defense of peace 'fausserait le message de la vie contemplative' [would falsify the message of the contemplative life]. The fact that a monk should be concerned about this issue is thought—by 'good monks'—to be scandalous. A hateful distraction, withdrawing one's mind from Baby Jesus in the Crib. Strange to say, no one seems concerned at the fact that the crib is directly under the bomb.”
Of course, it was his burgeoning dialogue with Buddhism that caused (and still causes) the most consternation from his orthodox handlers. That East-ward pilgrimage was cut short, in his 53rd year, after his first address to an interfaith conference on comparative monastic traditions held in Bangkok, Thailand. A final paradox: He died, electrocuted by faulty wiring on a fan in his room, twenty-seven years to the day of his arrival at the Gethsemani monastery.
The Pope was right to name Br. Louis—and Dorothy and Martin and Abraham—as especially bright lights in the cloud of witnesses, for this land and at this hour. We need to follow that lead.
# # #
•See the special "Merton Quotes" edition of "Signs of the Times," 1 October 2015, No. 40.
•An extended collection of Merton quotes ("More Merton quotes") is also available on this site.
©Ken Sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org
turned the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s approval of sulfoxaflor, a pesticide linked to the mass die-off of honeybees that pollinate a third of the world’s food supply.”
¶ Invocation. “Prayer is more than something I do. The longer I practice prayer, the more I think it is something that is always happening, like a radio wave that carries music through the air whether I tune in to it or not.” —Barbara Brown Taylor
¶ Little Rock Nine anniversary. After weeks of resistance from Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, nine black students successfully enter Little Rock's Central High School on 25 September 1957 with protection from the National Guard and the 101st Airborne Division authorized by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
¶ Does your liturgy ever allow time for 
women with their arms stretched out to me over that line. But I can’t seem to get there no how. I can’t seem to get over that line.” —Viola Davis, first black woman to win the best actress in a drama category, in her award acceptance speech, quoting Harriet Tubman, the 19th century abolitionist who rescued dozens of slaves, then struggled for women’s voting rights after the Civil War. In her acceptance speech, Davis went on to say that “The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity.”
ul, after buying the rights to a 62-year-old drug used for treating life-threatening parasitic infections and increasing the price overnight from $13.50 to $750. Several years ago, prior to being bought by different pharmaceutical companies several times, the drug cost $1.00 per tablet. —
¶ Last week’s prayer&politiks post featured “Days of awe and Meccan pilgrimage: Reflections on the confluence of Jewish and Islamic holy days.” Here’s another reflection—“
who got married in the province which is near the Syrian border last week, invited some of those refugees who have fled the country since the civil war which began four years ago. "We thought that on such a happy day, we would share the wedding party with our Syrian brothers and sisters.” —Raziye Akkoc, “
¶ Intercession. “
“The Knotted Gun” sculpture (right), in front of the United Nations building in New York. The artist, Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, created the sculpture as a response to the killing of his friend John Lennon. It was donated to the UN in 1988 by the government of Luxembourg.
¶ Can’t make this sh*t up. A company in Florida is selling a “Christian” AR-15 assault rifle with a Crusader’s cross etched on one side and Psalm 144:1 on the other: "Blessed be the Lord my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle." Named “The Crusader,” the gun also features a three setting trigger control labeled Peace, War, and God Wills It. —Henry Pierson Curtis, “
¶ “Problem is, gun owners’ interests are represented . . . by the National Rifle Association, an extremist gang. . . . So long as the NRA has such an outsized voice in this debate, so long as politicians, unencumbered by conscience or vertebrae, tremble to its call, and so long as many of us are silent and supine in the face of that obscenity, Hodges is right.” —Leonard Pitts, “
¶ “Last week a police officer in London shot and killed a man. It was the first fatal shooting by British police since 2011. Police officers in the US have killed 776 people thus far this year.” —Lauren McCauley, “
¶ Preach it. “
history." —Nicholas Kristof, Thursday 27 August 2015, New York Times
quantity of arms, ammunition and camp equipage.” —for more information, see Navy Vet Terp, “
Second, every year on Yom Kippur afternoon the book of Jonah is read in synagogues around the world. Jonah’s is the tale of God’s unremitting mercy, a mercy so severe that it scandalizes the prophet himself, who is still stuck with the customary human assumption that you get what you earn, you reap only what you sow, your sum always equals your parts.
Sunday” confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., shocked the nation, died 26 August at a hospital in Montgomery, Ala. She was 104. This past March she again crossed the Pettus Bridge, in a wheelchair and holding hands with President Obama, on the 50th anniversary of that historic event. —See Andrea Germanos, “
¶ Along with many of you I’ve been haunted of late by a single photograph, of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, from Syria, lying in the surf of a Turkish beach, lifeless, having drowned along with his brother and mother while attempting to reach Greece on a rickety boat that capsized. His body looks serene, very much like those of my own babies and grandbabies when fast asleep. Only Aylan is drenched, face down in the surf, a wave lapping at his head, breathless.
said the number of people forcibly displaced at the end of 2014 had risen to a staggering 59.5 million compared to 51.2 million a year earlier and 37.5 million a decade ago.
¶ Some additional notes about the current refugee crisis:
¶ Call to confession. “
•Sweden was the first EU country to take in Syrian refugees, back in 2012, and ranks highest in the number admitted as a proportion of population.
¶ Serious yogurt. Hamdi Ulukaya, founder of Chobani, the popular Greek-style Yogurt, has pledged 
¶ “For years, the European Union kept refugees out of sight and out of mind by paying Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi's government to intercept and turn back migrants that were heading for Europe. Gadhafi was something like Europe's bouncer, helping to bar refugees and other migrants from across Africa. His methods were terrible: Libya imprisoned migrants in camps where rape and torture were widespread. But Europe was happy to have someone else worrying about the problem. When Libya's uprising and Western airstrikes ousted Gadhafi in 2011, Libya collapsed into chaos.” —Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, “
minister so frequently references . . . is crystal clear about the absolute priority of our obligation to refugees. For the moral imagination of the Hebrew scriptures was determined by a battered refugee people, fleeing political oppression in north Africa, and seeking a new life for themselves safe from violence and poverty.” —Giles Fraser, "
¶ For the savvy investor, conflict can be profitable. “Let’s paint a picture of the world right now,” Epstein says. “You’ve got the Europeans worried about what the Russians are doing in their backyard; we’ve got our hands full right now in Iraq; you’ve got the Israelis with their hands full in their region; and then you have the Chinese and Japanese in the South China Sea. As an investor [in the defense industry], with this much regional conflict in the world . . . that can’t be bad.” —Bank of America analyst Ronald Epstein in Tory Newmyer, “