Christ’s Nativity:
What shall we offer you, O Christ, who for our sake has appeared on earth as man? Every creature made by you offers you thanks. The angels offer you a hymn; the heavens a star; the Magi, gifts; the shepherds, their wonder; the earth, its cave; the wilderness, the manger; and we offer you a virgin mother.
— from a prayer for the Orthodox Christmas Vespers Service
Thich Nhat Hanh died yesterday.
So many of my teachers connect to each other, going way back. It must be a wavelength that we find and recognize in each other, and then ride it together.
"... One of the persons Nhat Hanh had long hoped to meet while in the United States was Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk whose widely read books had done so much to revitalize contemplative spirituality. Merton was by then also known for his opposition to the war and also for his deep respect for Buddhism. In late May 1966, Merton welcomed Nhat Hanh, plus John Heidbrink of the Fellowship of Reconciliation staff, to the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky for a two-day visit.
The two monks stayed up late into the night in Merton’s hermitage, sharing the chants of their respective traditions, discussing methods of prayer and meditation, comparing Christian and Buddhist aspects of monastic formation, and talking about the war.
Afterward, Merton said to his fellow Trappists, “Thich Nhat Hanh is a perfectly formed monk,” and that he regarded his guest’s arrival as an answer to a prayer. “In meeting Thich Nhat Hanh,” Merton said, “I felt I had met Vietnam.” Merton also wrote of their visit, calling Nhat Hanh his brother: “He is more my brother than many who are nearer to me in race and nationality, because he and I see things exactly the same way.”
- from "When America Met Thich Nhat Hanh", by Jim Forest, Winter 2021 edition of Tricycle magazine.
Two monks.
Thich Nhat Hanh references in louie are HERE.
From the NY Times:
“People talk about entering nirvana, but we are already there,” said the Buddhist monk, who died on Saturday. Here is a short selection of his remarks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/22/world/asia/thich-nhat-hanh-quotes.html
This body is not me. I am not limited by this body.
I am life without boundaries.
I have never been born,
And I have never died.
Plum Village Tribute to Jim Forest
Jim Forest was a true man of peace, of reconciliation, and of love. Jim gave me—and continued to give me—a lot of inspiration since we first met him at the office of the Buddhist Peace Delegation at Maison Alfort near Paris, while we were working to call for peace in Vietnam. Thanks to his deep background as a real man of Peace, Jim understood and absorbed everything our teacher Thich Nhat Hanh (“Thay”) shared with him, and he wrote many wonderful articles on Thay’s message and teachings, in particular in the Fellowship Of Reconciliation magazine. Jim always had a deeply attentive look and seemed to “drink in” everything we shared; we never felt disappointed when we read his summaries and reports for readers. With his talent in writing Jim reported so many of Thay’s teachings during that challenging time, and he shared and commented on them in a profound and sometimes very humorous way for the reader, as in the wonderful article “Only the rice loves you.”
Jim also helped publish the English translation of Thay’s theater script, “The Path of Return Continues the Journey.” Many of Jim’s earlier peace writings were printed in the Fellowship of Reconciliation magazine, and he shared with the wider American audience many deep exchanges about Sister Nhat Chi Mai (one of the first and profound students of Thay, who immolated herself for peace) as well as the story of the four social workers of the School of Youth for Social Service who were assassinated on the bank of the Saigon River. He also introduced to the community of the Fellowship Of Reconciliation Thay’s pioneering and accessible book on mindfulness practice: The Miracle of Mindfulness. In Jim’s memoirs, Eyes of Compassion: Learning from Thich Nhat Hanh, published last year by Orbis, Jim shared his profound and insightful experience of our teacher. Jim captured with clarity, compassion, and a historian’s eye for detail, many pivotal moments in Thay’s peace work during the 1960s and 70s. Jim’s love, integrity, friendship and open-hearted learning shine through in his writing and light up the way for others to follow.
 |
| Photos by Robert Ellsburg Jim Forest's funeral today in the Russian Orthodox Church of Saint Nicholas in Amsterdam. |
 |
| Jim Forest |
Jim Forest died yesterday.
It seems like I've known about Jim as long as I've known about Merton. He was always part of the story(s) that interested me. Saying no to war, resisting. Being Catholic. Prayer.
It's no accident that Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan and Thich Nhat Hanh all trusted Jim Forest to tell their stories. Jim saw through to the truth of the situations, and the truth of the person. His writing was simple. He said what was obvious.
Much of this blog revolves around Jim's contributions.
http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/search/label/Jim%20Forest
https://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/search?q=jim+forest
I met Jim once when he was giving a retreat on Dorothy Day in North Pittsburgh. Jim's deep emotional vulnerability is what surprised me about him. He wore no mask. He openly cried before the audience. When he greeted me he hugged me and hugged me for a very long time. I will never forget that.
I will never forget Jim.
Jim wrote about famous people. His own life was more humble and unknown. A beautiful man.
Rest in Peace, dear friend.
 |
| Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times |
The duty of the Christian in this crisis is to strive with all his power and intelligence,
with his faith, his hope in Christ,
and love for God and man,
to do the one task which God has imposed upon us in the world today.
That task is to work for the total abolition of war.
There can be no question that unless war is abolished
the world will remain constantly in a state of madness and desperation in which,
because of the immense destructive power of modern weapons,
the danger of catastrophe will be imminent and probable
at every moment everywhere.
Unless we set ourselves immediately to this task,
both as individuals and in our political and religious groups,
we tend by our very passivity and fatalism
to cooperate with the destructive forces that are leading inexorably to war.
It is a problem of terrifying complexity and magnitude,
for which the Church itself is not fully able to see clear and decisive solutions.
Yet she must lead the way on the road to the nonviolent settlement
of difficulties and toward the gradual abolition of war
as the way of settling international or civil disputes.
Christians must become active in every possible way, mobilizing all their resources for the fight against war.
-Thomas Merton
from Jim Forest's essay, "An Army that Sheds No Blood; Thomas Merton's Response to War"
DAN: This was very much a part of the style of Merton -- the inside/outside. And it had very rich consequences, I think. For him and for others. He used to say that he would never become a monk again, but now that he was a monk, he would be a monk. Absolutely. Yes.
JIM FOREST: A man playing hide and seek with tradition.
NHAT HANH: Anyway, being a monk or not being a monk, that is not the problem. The problem is the way you are a monk or the way you are a non-monk. I think if we greet events in that way, we can master the situation.
In China, they tell the story of a man who lost his horse. He was sad and he wept about it. But a few days later the horse returned with another horse. So the man was now very happy. His loss turns out to be lucky. But the next day his son tried the new horse and fell and broke one leg. So now it is not good luck any more, but bad luck. So he deserts the other horse and takes his son to the hospital and is content with what he has. So they say, if you greet these event with a calm mind, then you can make the most of these events for the sake of your happiness. That's not me, but the Chinese! (Laughter.)
-from a slightly edited transcript of a conversation recorded in Paris in 1973 by Jim Forest between Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan.
[What follows are excerpts from a slightly edited transcript of a conversation recorded in Paris in 1973 by Jim Forest between Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan, the one a Buddhist monk and Zen master, the other a Catholic priest well known for animosity to draft records and for failure to report for imprisonment on schedule. Published in WIN magazine in June 1973]
Dan Berrigan: ... When we were in prison I believe we had a very different sense of time, too. It was closer maybe to the truth.
Nhat Hanh: We tend to imagine that the lifetime of a person is something like using your pen in order to draw a line across a sheet of paper. A person appears on this earth and lives and dies. And we may think of the life of a person just like a line we trace across a sheet of paper. But I think that is not true. The life of a person is not confined to anything like a line you draw, because being alive you do not go in one direction - direction of the right side of a piece of paper, but you also go in other directions. So the image of that line crossing the sheet of paper is not correct. It goes in all directions. Not only four, or eight, or sixteen, but many, many. So if we can see through to that reality, our notion of time will change. That is why in meditation you can feel that you are not traveling in time but we are, we are eternity. We are not caught by death, by change. A few moments of being alive in that state of mind is a very good opportunity for self purification. Not only will it affect our being, but of course it affects our action -- our non-action.
“The Christian must have the courage to follow Christ. The Christian who is risen in Christ must dare to be like Christ: he must dare to follow conscience even in unpopular causes. He must, if necessary, be able to disagree with the majority and make decisions that he knows to be according to the Gospel and teaching of Christ, even when others do not understand why he is acting this way… (p. 189).”
My first encounter with Merton was in 1969, when I was 19 years old investigating the pacifist roots of the Christian faith. I picked up Merton’s booklet entitled “Blessed Are the Meek: The Christian Roots of Nonviolence,” published by the Catholic Peace Fellowship. The entire contents of this booklet are included in these “Essential Writings.”)
This volume is divided into three sections, in addition to the preface and a brief biography of Merton’s life: contemplation, compassion and unity. The selections are presented, more or less, in chronological order, giving the reader some insight into the development of his thinking over the years. I have a friend who says that Merton “went off the deep end” near the end of his life. But I dare say that my friend probably didn’t read what Merton wrote. This book assures me that Merton never strayed from the Christian tradition, even while trying to engage in dialogue with monks and mystics from other traditions.
Below are favorite quotes.
 |
| Mario Tapia/Barricada, via Associated Press |
In 1966, after returning from his first trip to Latin America, Dan had briefly questioned whether nonviolent approaches could provide an effective means of overcoming the military dictatorships that ruled so many countries in that continent. In the years that followed Dan became increasingly convinced that there was no alternative to nonviolent methods and attitudes for those who sought to model their actions on the example and teaching of Jesus. On this issue he entered into a public debate with his friend and fellow poet and priest, Ernesto Cardenal, who took part in Nicaragua’s Sandanista revolution and, after its victory, became Minister of Culture.
In November 1977, in an interview published in the Costa Rican journal Tiempo, Cardenal recalled how he had initially favored nonviolent methods of struggle. However, after the destruction of his community, Solentiname, by troops of the Somosa dictatorship, he had been forced to realize that, in the Nicaraguan context, “a nonviolent struggle is not practical, and that Gandhi himself would be in agreement with us.”
“Above all,” Cardenal argued, “the Gospel teaches us that the Word of God is not simply to be heard, but should be practiced.” In the Nicaraguan situation, in which so many peasants were suffering persecution and terror, imprisonment, torture and murder, “the only practical witness that could be given was to take up arms with the [revolutionary movement] Frente Sandinista.” Those who did this “did it for one reason only: for their love of the Kingdom of God, for their ardent desire to build a just society, a Kingdom of God, concrete and real, here on earth. When the hour arrived, our young men and women fought valiantly, and as Christians.” The young people, said Cardenal, “fought without hatred, in spite of everything, without hating the police, poor peasants like themselves, exploited.”
Cardenal saw the choice of violence as tragic but necessary. “We would prefer that there not be fighting in Nicaragua, but this is not the fault of the people, the oppressed, who only defend themselves. One day there will be no more fighting in Nicaragua, no more peasant police killing other peasants. Rather, there will be an abundance of schools, of child care centers, hospitals and clinics for everyone, food and adequate housing for all the people, art and diversions for everyone, and most importantly, love between them all. And it is for this that we struggle.”
Dan wrote an open letter in response, addressing Cardenal as “dear brother”:
“Let me say that the questions you raise are among the most crucial that Christians can spell out today. Indeed, in your own country, your life raises them…. They are far more than a matter of domestic importance….
“You discuss quite freely and approvingly the violence of a violated people, yourselves. You align yourself with that violence, regretfully but firmly, irrevocably. I am sobered and saddened by this. I think of the consequences of your choice, within Nicaragua and far beyond. I sense how the web of violence spins another thread, draws you in, and so many others for whom your example is primary, who do not think for themselves, judging that a priest and poet will lead them in the true way.
“I think how fatally easy it is, in a world demented and enchanted with the myth of short cuts and definitive solutions, when nonviolence appears increasingly naïve, old hat, freakish — how easy it is to cross over, to seize the gun.
“It may be true, as you say, that ‘Gandhi would agree with us.’ Or it may not be true…. It may be true that Christ would agree with you. I do not believe He would, but I am willing to concede your argument, for the sake of argument.
“You may be correct in reporting that ‘those young Christians fought without hate … and especially without hate for the guards’ they shortly killed (though this must be cold comfort to the dead). Your vision may one day be verified of a Nicaragua free of ‘campesino guards killing other campesinos…’ The utopia you ache for may one day be realized in Nicaragua: ‘an abundance of schools, child-care centers, hospitals, and clinics for everyone … and most importantly, love between everyone.’ This may all be true: the guns may bring on the kingdom. But I do not believe it.
“So the young men of Solentiname resolved to take up arms. They did it for one reason: ‘on account of their love for the kingdom of God.’ Now here we certainly speak within a tradition! In every crusade that ever marched across Christendom, murder — the most secular of undertakings, the most worldly, the one that enlists and rewards us along with the other enlistees of Caesar — this undertaking is invariably baptized in religious ideology: the kingdom of God.
“Of course we have choices, of course we must decide. When all is said, we find that the Gospel makes sense, that it strikes against our motives and actions or it does not. Can that word make sense at all today?
“‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ‘Love one another as I have loved you.’ ‘If your enemy strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other as well.’ Practically everyone in the world, citizens and believers alike, consign such words to the images on church walls or the embroideries on front parlors.
“We really are stuck. Christians are stuck with this Christ, the impossible, unteachable, unreformable loser. Revolutionaries must correct him, set him aright. That absurd form, shivering under the cross winds of power, must be made acceptable, relevant. So a gun is painted into his empty hands. Now he is human! Now he is like us.
“Correction! Correction! we cry to those ignorant Gospel scribes, Matthew and the rest. He was not like that, he was not helpless, he was not gentle, he was under no one's heel, no one pushed him around! He would have taken up a gun if one had been at hand, he would have taken up arms, ‘solely for one reason; on account of his love for the kingdom of God.’ Did he not have fantasies like ours, in hours out of the public glare, when he too itched for the quick solution, his eyes narrowed like gun sights?
“Dear brother Ernesto, when I was underground in 1970 … I had long hours to think of these things. At that time I wrote: ‘The death of a single human is too heavy a price to pay for the vindication of any principle, however sacred.’ I should add that at the time, many among the anti-war Left were playing around with bombings, in disarray and despair.
“I am grateful that I wrote those words. I find no reason eight years later to amend or deny them. Indeed, in this bloody century, religion has little to offer, little that is not contaminated or broken or in bad faith. But one thing we have: our refusal to take up bombs or guns, aimed at the flesh of brothers and sisters, whom we persist in defining as such, refusing the enmities pushed at us by war-making state or war-blessing church.
“This is a long loneliness, and a thankless one. One says ‘no’ when every ache of the heart would say ‘yes.’ We, too, long for a community on the land, heartening liturgies, our own turf, the arts, a place where sane ecology can heal us. And the big boot comes down. It destroys everything we have built. And we recoil. Perhaps in shock, perhaps in a change of heart, we begin to savor on our tongues a language that is current all around us: phrases like ‘legitimate violence,’ ‘limited retaliation,’ ‘killing for the love of the kingdom.’ And the phrases make sense — we have crossed over. We are now [like] any army…. We have disappeared into this world, into bloody, secular history. We cannot adroitly handle both gospel and gun; so we drop the gospel, an impediment in any case.
“And our weapons? They are contaminated in what they do and condemned in what they cannot do. There is blood on them, as on our hands. And like our hands, they cannot heal injustice or succor the homeless.
“How can they signal the advent of the kingdom of God? How can we, who hold them? We announce only another bloody victory for the emperor of necessity, whose name in the Bible is Death.
“Shall [Death] have dominion?
“Brother, I think of you so often. And pray with you. And hope against hope.”
In May and June 1984, seven years after his exchange with Cardenal, Dan and fellow Jesuit Dennis Leder spent a month in Central America visiting both El Salvador, governed by a U.S.-backed military junta, and Nicaragua, in its sixth year of U.S.-opposed Sandanista rule.
In Nicaragua, Dan took part in a dialogue with leaders of the revolutionary government, including Cardenal, now Minister of Culture. The exchange was, for Dan, deeply disappointing. Asking what provisions were made for conscientious objectors, he was told hat military service was obligatory for all without exception. Dan listened with “a sinking spirit.” Was not respect of conscience essential for a revolution that defined itself as “a revolution of conscience”? A question was raised about concerns Amnesty International had published regarding the treatment of minorities and dissidents, the use of “preventive detention” and forced removals from the land. While everyone present knew that the Sandanista leadership had made a number of serious mistakes, neither Cardenal nor others in the government admitted any of their policies had gone off track. Dan was saddened that Cardenal presented a wrinkle-free portrait of “the revolution as a kind of absolute platonic form, beyond question or critique — essentially a romantic view.” (A decade later, in 1994, Cardenal left the Sandanista party, protesting its authoritarianism, and joined an opposition group. Cardenal stated, “I think an authentic capitalism would be more desirable than a false revolution.”)
While in El Salvador Dan and Leder listened to testimonies of torture, murder and war, but also of peacemaking and community building. While in the capital city of San Salvador, they visited staff and faculty of the Universidad Centroamericana, including theologian and rector Ignacio Ellacuria and the five other Jesuits who, five years later, would be assassinated by government soldiers. There were also discussions with Jon Sobrino, one of the leading voices of liberation theology. “These learned Christians, theorists, weavers of the volatile biblical words and themes,” Dan noted, were “first of all listeners, and not merely to one another, to [fellow] academics … but listeners to the unlikely poor.”
“What society preaches as ‘the good life’ is in fact a systematically organized way of death, not only because it is saturated with what psychologists call an unconscious death wish, but because it actually rests on death. It is built on the death of the nonconformist, the alien, the odd ball, the enemy, the criminal. It is based on war, on imprisonment, on punitive methods which include not only mental and physical torture but, above all, the death penalty.”– Thomas Merton’s introduction to The Plague by Albert Camus
 |
| Photo by Thomas Merton |
The religion of our time,
to be authentic,
needs to be the kind that escapes practically all religious definition.
Because there had been endless definition,
endless verbalizing,
and words have become gods.
There are so many words that one cannot get to God
as long as He is thought to be on the other side of the words.
But when he is placed firmly beyond the other side of the words,
the words multiply like flies
and there is a great buzzing religion,
very profitable,
very holy,
very spurious.
One tries to escape it by acts of truth that fail.
One's whole being must be an act for which there can be found no word.
This is the primary meaning of faith.
On this basis, other dimensions of belief can be mad credible.
Otherwise not.
My whole being must be a yes
and an amen
and an exclamation
that is not heard.
Only after that is there any point in exclamations
and even after that there is no point in exclamations.
One's acts must be part of the same silent exclamation.
It is because this is dimly and unconsciously realized by everyone,
and because no one can reconcile this with the state of
division and alienation in which we find ourselves,
that they all without meaning it
gravitate toward the big exclamation
that means nothing and says nothing:
Boom.
The triumph of speech,
when all the words have worn out,
and when everybody still thinks
that there remain an infinite amount of truths
to be uttered.
If only they could realize
that nothing has to be uttered.
Utterance makes sense
only when it is spontaneous and free ....
[This] is where the silence of the woods comes in.
Not that there is something new
to be thought and discovered
in the woods,
but only that the trees
are all sufficient exclamations of silence,
and one works there,
cutting wood,
clearing ground,
cutting grass,
cooking soup,
drinking fruit juice,
sweating,
washing,
making fire,
smelling smoke,
sweeping, etc.
This is religion.
The further one gets away from this,---
the more one sinks in the mud
of words and gestures.
The flies gather.
 |
| Photo by Thomas Merton |
One might say I had decided to marry the silence of the forest.
The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife.
Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence,
but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered
by all the lovers in their beds
all over the world.
So perhaps I have an obligation
to preserve the stillness,
the silence,
the poverty,
the virginal point of pure nothingness
which is at the center of all other loves.
I attempt to cultivate this plant
without contempt
in the middle of the night
and water it with psalms and prophecies
in silence.
It becomes the most rare
of all the trees in the garden,
at once the primordial paradise tree,
the AXIS MUNDI,
the cosmic axle,
and the Cross ...
There is only one such tree.
It cannot be multiplied.
- Thomas Merton, essay, "Day of the Stranger", 1965
 |
| Photo by Thomas Merton, New Mexico 1968 |
The thing to do with nature … is to listen to it, and watch it, and look deep into its eyes in a sense, as though you were listening to and watching a friend, not just hearing the words or even just watching the gestures but trying to guess, or get a sense, or share the spirit underneath it, trying to listen (if this isn’t too fancy) to the silence under the sound and trying to get an idea (not starting with any preconceived formulation) of what kind of silence it is."
- Robert Lax, Letter by Bob Lax to Jubilee magazine staff, quoted by Jim Harford in his book Merton and Friends; New York: Continuum, 2006, p 105-6- Jim Forest, "Thomas Merton: One Foot in the Wilderness, One Foot in the World."
 |
| Photo by Thomas Merton |
Kelly Latimore Icon "You have made us together, you have made us one and many, you have placed me here in the midst as witness, as aw...
