Advent II, 2006 – Peace

Thomas Merton was born towards the end of WW1, the eldest son of two artists who died at an early age leaving the young Thomas orphaned. He was subsequently cared for by grandparents and ‘global’ relatives who enabled him to see many interesting parts of the world. Thomas grew up in France and England, eventually going to Cambridge where he completed his undergraduate degree. He then went on to complete a Masters Degree in literature at Columbia University in New York City. By then he lived a fairly liberal lifestyle and so shocked his friends and relatives when he converted to Catholicism and soon after became a Trappist monk; a very rigourous (“severe”) Cistercian Monastic Order.

From 1941 until his untimely death in 1968 Merton was a prolific writer in things spiritual; the monastic life flourishing in America during that time mainly due to his literary influence. He published a highly influential book entitled the Seven Story Mountain and young men throughout America began to make their way towards the monastery where he was known to be. However his identity was not as clear as each member was renamed by the Abbot upon arrival. Merton was, by then, Father Louis and somewhat anonymous, if not invisible.

Merton captured both the beauty and practicality of his vocation, and whilst this may sound strange to protestant ears, he redefined it from being cloistered or “irrelevant” to being intentionally solitary, yet fully engaged in the deepest issues of life and faith.

Increasingly, his writings embodied such social/political engagement, one of the most pressing being the cold war. I was born in 1958, thus a very small boy when the cold war was further deepening. I suspect that the northern hemisphere was a little more on edge than perhaps down here; particularly in America where Merton was writing from, where people were digging bunkers in their back yard and equipping their families with gas masks - this was the reality of a great daily fear.

So he wrote of that context and also in the context of the budding civil rights movement. And of course later the Vietnam war. He even wrote out of a growing ecological awareness; of being green before the term had even been coined. So he was a cloistered personality, certainly, yet remarkably in touch with the issues of his day and age. And what he achieved in all this was an integration of prayerfulness and social insight. I think we have images of monks or nuns being so immersed in prayer that they are of no earthly use. What I am suggesting to you is that out of his prayerfulness came a growing insight of the social issues of his day. He was an enormous intellect, read voraciously and yet remained deeply humble (open) in spirit.

Indeed, Merton’s experience of prayer led him more and more into the socio/economic and political arena. Not that he ever left the monastery, mind you, although many people tried to encourage him to leave the order and to come out and be a far more public figure. He and his Abbot resisted that continually. The other reality being that his prose and to a lesser extent, his poetry had a considerable impact of those who were already leaders within the community. And many public figures came to visit him at his hermitage at the monastery and artists particularly warmed to what he was saying. The Social activist Dorothy Day, Bob Dylan and others all came and gleaned his obvious wisdom. And if you know anything at all about the monastic tradition, this is how monks have best operated and been of great service to the world outside their walls.

In his latter years Merton wrote a great deal about peace. Given that the world in the late 50s and early 60s was only moments away from a nuclear holocaust; from the press of that dreaded red button, this should be of no surprise. And what he did consistently was to argue that peace was not just life on our terms or life according to our conditions, rather it was an inner state of generosity that allowed our enemy or enemies (or our threats to national security to bring things up to date a bit), to be truly who they are, thus teachers of life in both its breadth and complexity.

Now that’s a radical statement and you can imagine that it didn’t go down too well in the early 60s, when Russians or the Communists were the “anti-Christ’s”, and the source of all evil in the world, and here he was saying that they can potentially be our teachers!

Merton’s church, the Catholic commune, actually tried to censor him and many right wing politicians wrote him off as a communist sympathizer. After all these were the days of “better dead than red”. You’ll no doubt remember the (mindless) saying. But Merton was touching something old yet something always new; that being that inner peace comes from an inner detachment from fear, the letting go of an anxious clinging to life. For when these things are actually named and let go of there is a chance for peace in the entire world. In his own words:

To some men (sic) peace merely means the liberty to exploit other people without fear of retaliation or interference. To others, peace being the freedom to get on and do what we need to do. To others Peace means to rob others without interruption. To still others it means to leisure to devour the goods of the earth without having to interrupt their pleasures to feed those who may be hungry or even starving.

To practically everybody peace is an absence of any physical violence to cast a shadow over their devotion to fuel their animal appetites for comfort and pleasure. Many like these have asked God for what they thought was peace, and wondered why their prayer was not answered. They could not understand that their prayer actually was answered, God left them with what they desired, because their understanding of peace was only another form of war. The “cold war” is merely the normal consequence of our corrupt idea of peace based on a concept of everyone for themselves, in ethics, economics and in political life. It is absurd to think of a solid peace based on myths and illusion.

So, instead of loving what you think is peace, love other people and love God above all. Instead of hating the people you think are war makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in others.

Four or five years ago, 100,000 people (and quite a number of us from here) marched north along King William Street to implore our government not to be involved in the intended invasion of Iraq. Since that time, the lies, the arrogance and cultural ignorance have each in their own way, unraveled in our faces, leaving a worsening, bloody and cruel civil strife in Iraq. Tens of thousands and perhaps even hundreds of thousands innocent dead and wounded, thousands of coalition soldiers dead or maimed and millions upon millions of dollars spent on weaponry and military deployment.

A sheer madness in anyone’s terms, although not for the Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister, whilst claiming the ousting of a cruel and dictator - and no one is arguing against that – would still deny the wanton carnage we have helped to inflict on that society; not to mention shifting the goalposts from one end of the oval to the other as to why we went to war in the first place.

Having said as much, and I know that peace and war are vexed issues, when fear overrides love, when self protection (“we will decide who comes here”) blinds us to the needs and humanity of others, when the enemy is conceived as being purely external - the projection of our own unresolved restlessness and hate - you can be sure we will make wrong and immoral decisions, albeit these days in the name of God, our flag and our country.

I am certainly not suggesting any easy answers or simple solutions, but I hope as a community and as a society, we are actually able to name our fears, and not pretend that those fears are not anti-social in the sense that they actually give rise to prejudice and greed and all the things that we see as barriers to genuine peace.

Well, I want to read a little more of Merton before I conclude, and this comes from a book that was published fairly recently. I mentioned that he had been censored by the Catholic Church when he wrote on these issues some 45 years ago. For many people in the his church and order at the time, the role of the monk wasn’t foremost about addressing social issues, it was about helping people with their prayer life, as if their prayer wasn’t somehow related to life itself! So thankfully these essays have been published in recent times and as the people who reviewed them have said, they are incredibly relevant to our own day and age, and I think you’ll hear this in the writing:

It should be clear from the moral and mental confusion of our times that the present world crisis is something far worse than a mere political or economic conflict. It goes far deeper than ideologies. It is the crisis of humanity’s spirit. It is a complete moral upheaval of the human race that has lost its religious and cultural roots. We do not know half the causes of this upheaval. We cannot pretend to have a complete understanding of what is going on in ourselves and our society. That is why our desperate hunger for clear and definitive solutions sometimes leads us into temptation. We over simplify. We seek the cause of evil and find it here or there in a particular nation, class, race, ideology, religious system, and we discharge upon this scapegoat all the virulent force of our hatred compounded by fear and anguish striving to rid ourselves of our dread and our guilt by destroying the object we arbitrarily singled out as the embodiment of all evil. Far from curing us this is only another paroxysm, which aggravates our sickness.
The moral evil in the world is due to our alienation from the deepest truth, from the springs of spiritual life within our deeper selves to our alienation from God. Those who realise these things try desperately to enlighten their brothers and sisters. But we are in a radically different position from the first Christians, who revolutionized an essentially religious world of paganism with a radically new religion which had never been heard of.
We on the contrary live in an irreligious post Christian world in which the Christian message has been repeated over and over until it has become to seem empty of all intelligible content to those whose ears close the word of God even before it is uttered. In their minds, Christianity is no longer identified with newness and change but only with the static preservation of outworn structures.
But why is this? Is it merely that the spiritual novelty of Christianity has worn off in 20 centuries? That people have heard the gospel before and are tired of it? Or is it because for centuries the message has been belied and contradicted by the conduct of Christians themselves?
Christianity is essential the revelation of the divine mercy and the mystery of Christ and his church. Infinite mercy, infinite love are revealed to the world…to say that Christianity is the revelation of infinite love is not simply to say that Christians are (or should be) nice charitable people. It means that love is the key to life itself, and to the whole meaning of the cosmos and of history. If Christians are without love, they deprive all others access to the essential truth that gives meaning to all existence.

Admittedly, a lot of words there to digest, but I hope you can hear some of the things he is saying about our own responsibility so far as love and peace is concerned, not to mention the temptation to externalize our own problems and place them on other people, often in the name of religion! It is such a damaging thing, and it does not bring about peace, merely more discord and mistrust.

Jesus: Prince of Peace. This is what we gladly proclaim at this time of the year; the embodiment of Love, the gatherer and reconciler of all that is estranged and divided. What a great, abiding hope we have in this season. For he is the One who both embodies and symbolises this in-gathering, this re-conciliation, this understanding. It is in Him our hope for peace is founded and it is in His spirit we hope to be deepened and made more creatively humane. May it be so….