https://merton.bellarmine.edu/s/Merton/item/59475
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Monday, August 8, 2022
Merton's letter to the Mayor of Hiroshima, August 9, 1962
https://merton.bellarmine.edu/s/Merton/item/59475
Thursday, August 26, 2021
truth & lies
| Photograph of Gal Vihara by Thomas Merton |
We are all convinced that we desire the truth above all.
Nothing strange about this. It is natural to man, an intelligent being, to desire the truth. (I still dare to speak of man as "an intelligent being"!)But actually, what we desire is not "the truth" so much as "to be in the right."
To seek the pure truth for its own sake may be natural to us, but we are not able to act always in this respect according to our nature.
What we seek is not the pure truth, but the partial truth that justifies our prejudices, our limitations, our selfishness. This is not "the truth." It is only an argument strong enough to prove us "right."
And usually our desire to be right is correlative to our conviction that somebody else (perhaps everybody else) is wrong.
Why do we want to prove them wrong?
Because 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."
No wonder we hate. No wonder we are violent. No wonder we exhaust ourselves in preparing for war!
And in doing so, of course, we offer the enemy another reason to believe that he is right, that he must arm, that he must get ready to destroy us.
Our own lie provides the foundation of truth on which he erects his own lie, and the two lies together react to produce hatred, murder, disaster.
-Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 78
[Note: This posting first appeared on this blog on June 23, 2017]
Tuesday, March 3, 2020
Dan Berrigan's letter to Ernesto Cardenal
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| Mario Tapia/Barricada, via Associated Press |
Jim Forest really does connect all the dots. Cardenal, an admired Latin American poet and priest, served in the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. He actively supported revolution (and violence). During the 1980s, the Vatican publicly demanded that he resign from his government position.
The following is from Jim Forest's biography of Dan Berrigan, "At Play in the Lion's Den". I quote it in its entirety because it is all so important:
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.”
Friday, August 9, 2019
Nagasaki - the Peace Statue
August 9, 2019
A moment of silence was observed at 11:02 AM, the exact time on August 9, 1945, when a plutonium cored atomic bomb, code named "Fat Man" dropped by a U.S. bomber exploded over the southwestern Japanese city. This bombing happened 3 days after the United States dropped the world's first deployed atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
The ceremony was held in Nagasaki's Peace Park, before the Peace Statue.
The sculpture of the seated man has his right arm pointed to the sky, representing the threat of an atomic bomb being dropped, and his left arm is extended horizontally, symbolizing peace. The statue's eyes are closed in mourning.
Other louie postings on Nagasaki & Hiroshima are here:
Nagasaki (2018)
Thursday, October 25, 2018
The News
" ... Nine tenths of the news, as printed in the papers, is pseudo-news, manufactured events. Some days ten tenths. The ritual morning trance, in which one scans columns of newsprint, creates a peculiar form of generalized pseudo-attention to a pseudo-reality. This experience is taken seriously. It is one's daily immersion in "reality". One's orientation to the rest of the world. One's way of reassuring himself that he has not fallen behind. That he is still there. That he counts!-Merton, "Events and Pseudo-Events", Faith and Violence, p. 151
"My own experience has been that of renunciation of this self-hypnosis, of this participation in the unquiet universal trance, is no sacrifice of reality at all. To "fall behind" in this sense is to get out of the big cloud of dust that everybody is kicking up, to breathe and to see a little more clearly.
"When you get a clearer picture you can understand why so many want to stand in the dust cloud, where there is comfort in confusion."
Monday, October 22, 2018
Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, Diary entry (September 29, 1942)
Friday, September 21, 2018
the moan is the birthing sound
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| The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery Alabama |
The air must have been thick with fear and prayer as the slaving ships pulled out of Gorée and other West African ports laden with human cargo. Devotees of Vodun, the river gods, [YHWH], Allah, Oludumare—to name just a few—lay together (tightly or loosely packed) in an involuntary rebirthing cocoon. It was a community of sorts, yet each person lay in their own chrysalis of human waste and anxiety. More often than not, these Africans were strangers to each other by virtue of language, culture, and tribe. Although the names of their deities differed, they shared a common belief in the seen and unseen. The journey was a rite of passage of sorts that stripped captives of their personal control over the situation and forced them to turn to the spirit realm for relief and guidance.. . . The word contemplation must press beyond the constraints of religious expectations to reach the potential for spiritual centering in the midst of danger. Centering moments accessed in safety are an expected luxury in our era. During slavery, however, crisis contemplation became a refuge, a wellspring of discernment in a suddenly disordered life space, and a geo-spiritual anvil for forging a new identity. This definition of contemplation is dynamic and situational. . . .As unlikely as it may seem, the contemplative moment can be found at the very center of such ontological crises . . . during the Middle Passage in the holds of slave ships . . . auction blocks . . . and the . . . hush arbors [where slaves worshipped in secret]. Each event is experienced by individuals stunned into multiple realities by shock, journey, and displacement. . . . In the words of Howard Thurman, “when all hope for release in the world seems unrealistic and groundless, the heart turns to a way of escape beyond the present order.” [1] For captured Africans, there was no safety except in common cause and the development of internal and spiritual fortitude. . . .The only sound that would carry Africans over the bitter waters was the moan. Moans flowed through each wracked body and drew each soul toward the center of contemplation. . . . One imagines the Spirit moaning as it hovered over the deep during the Genesis account of creation [Genesis 1:2]. Here, the moan stitches horror and survival instincts into a creation narrative. . . . On the slave ships, the moan became the language of stolen strangers, the sound of unspeakable fears, the precursor to joy yet unknown. The moan is the birthing sound, the first movement toward a creative response to oppression, the entry into the heart of contemplation through the crucible of crisis.
- Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church, second edition (Fortress Press: 2017), 45-46, 50, 52.
HT: from today's meditation from Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation
Saturday, August 11, 2018
The bombing of Nagasaki August 9, 1945: The Untold Story
photos: ruins of St Mary's Cathedral in Nagasaki and a scorched statue of St Mary that had stood inside the cathedral
The Bombing of Nagasaki August 9, 1945: The Untold Story
by Gary G. Kohls, MD., Duluth, MN
On August 9th, 1945, the second of the only two atomic bombs ever used as instruments of war was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, by an all-Christian bomb crew. The well-trained American soldiers were only “doing their job,” and they did it well.
It had been only three days since the first bomb, a uranium bomb, had decimated Hiroshima on August 6, with chaos and confusion in Tokyo, where the fascist military government and the Emperor had been searching for months for a way to an honorable end of the war which had exhausted the Japanese to virtually moribund status. (The only obstacle to surrender had been the Truman administration’s insistence on unconditional surrender, which meant that the Emperor Hirohito, whom the Japanese regarded as a deity, would be removed from his figurehead position in Japan -- an intolerable demand for the Japanese.)
The Russian army was advancing across Manchuria with the stated aim of entering the war against Japan on August 8, so there was an extra incentive to end the war quickly: the US military command did not want to divide any spoils or share power after Japan sued for peace.
The US bomber command had spared Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Kokura from the conventional bombing that had burned to the ground sixty-plus other major Japanese cities during the first half of 1945. One of the reasons for targeting relatively undamaged cities with these new weapons of mass destruction was scientific: to see what would happen to intact buildings – and their living inhabitants – when atomic weapons were exploded overhead.
Early in the morning of August 9, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress called Bock’s Car, took off from Tinian Island, with the prayers and blessings of its Lutheran and Catholic chaplains, and headed for Kokura, the primary target. (Its plutonium bomb was code-named “Fat Man,” after Winston Churchill.)
The only field test of a nuclear weapon, blasphemously named “Trinity,” had occurred just three weeks earlier, on July 16, 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The molten lavarock that resulted, still found at the site today, is called trinitite.
With instructions to drop the bomb only on visual sighting, Bock’s Car arrived at Kokura, which was clouded over. So after circling three times, looking for a break in the clouds, and using up a tremendous amount of valuable fuel in the process, it headed for its secondary target, Nagasaki.
Nagasaki is famous in the history of Japanese Christianity. Not only was it the site of the largest Christian church in the Orient, St. Mary’s Cathedral, but it also had the largest concentration of baptized Christians in all of Japan. It was the city where the legendary Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, established a mission church in 1549, a Christian community which thrived and multiplied for several generations. However, soon after Xavier’s planting of Christianity in Japan, Portuguese and Spanish commercial interests began to be accurately perceived by the Japanese rulers as exploiters, and therefore the religion of the Europeans (Christianity) and their new Japanese converts became the target of brutal persecutions.
Within 60 years of the start of Xavier’s mission church, it was a capital crime to be a Christian. The Japanese Christians who refused to recant of their beliefs suffered ostracism, torture and even crucifixions similar to the Roman persecutions in the first three centuries of Christianity. After the reign of terror was over, it appeared to all observers that Japanese Christianity had been stamped out.
However, 250 years later, in the 1850s, after the gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Perry forced open an offshore island for American trade purposes, it was discovered that there were thousands of baptized Christians in Nagasaki, living their faith in a catacomb existence, completely unknown to the government - which immediately started another purge. But because of international pressure, the persecutions were soon stopped, and Nagasaki Christianity came up from the underground. And by 1917, with no help from the government, the Japanese Christian community built the massive St. Mary’s Cathedral, in the Urakami River district of Nagasaki.
Now it turned out, in the mystery of good and evil, that St. Mary’s Cathedral was one of the landmarks that the Bock’s Car bombardier had been briefed on, and looking through his bomb site over Nagasaki that day, he identified the cathedral and ordered the drop.
At 11:02 am, Nagasaki Christianity was carbonized -- then vaporized -- in a scorching, radioactive fireball. And so the persecuted, vibrant, faithful, surviving center of Japanese Christianity became ground zero.
And what the Japanese Imperial government could not do in over 200 years of persecution, American Christians did in nine seconds. Few Nagasaki Christians survived....
* * *
photos: ruins of St Mary's Cathedral in Nagasaki and a scorched statue of St Mary that had stood inside the cathedral
Friday, August 10, 2018
living your love
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| The Guatamalan-Maya Center |
Welcome Annaise, how can I help? We’re here to serve you. Bienvenida Eulalia, what a beautiful name you have. Welcome Rosa Mayra, thank you for bringing your gentle children. Oneida! Good to see you again. I hope everything is going well. Hello Juana, does your family live near to the volcano? Are they all right? Carmen! Is your family in Cali still dancing, still doing the samba? Nohemy! A surprise to see you. Dare I ask about your family in Guerrero? I remember the murders. How are your sisters surviving? Odelina from Honduras… Is your brother surviving the violence at school? Can he study? Alma, when I hear your name I think of the beauty of your soul. Welcome Mariela, welcome again. It’s always a joy to see you. Nicolasa, every time we meet I feel like your brother with my Nicholas name. Amany from Egypt, you frightened me at first with your stern presence, but you always soften. Your children must love your softness dearly. Bienvenida Viviana. You strike me as living vitally. You capture the bright life of your name. Gudelia, good woman, good mother, marked by goodness. Delmi, Karina, Francisca, Kellyn, Mariela, your names, once so foreign to me I couldn’t imagine you, now open a world not only for me, but for my neighbors as well. I can harvest your names for them. I can harvest your truth for them. Most of you bring the heart of Maya joining the heart of the earth to the heart of the sky, teaching the urgency of love. We live in these perilous times when the government deports or threatens to deport your husbands, but you go on caring for the place of your heart, the place of your children, the place of their hearts. You have seen all around you murder and the threat of murder. You know the precariousness of life. But no matter you go on living your trust, living your love, teaching us the profound depths of your poverty.
I will not compare you with anyone. But I must say you have found a place, a heart place which others, if they would only open themselves to discover, would cherish. They would follow with all their heart. And this is what you have taught me if I could only learn: lead with my heart, lead with my heart, lead with my heart.
- from an email by Fr. Frank O'Laughlin
The Guatamalan Maya Center
Thursday, August 9, 2018
Edith Stein, August 9, 1942
Born on the 12 of October, 1891, Edith Stein was a German Jew from Wroclaw, doctor of philosophy specializing in phenomenology. A teacher of the girls' colleges in Speyer and later in Munster. She converted to Christianity in 1922 and joined the Carmelite convent in Cologne in 1933. With the attacks on the Jews intensifying in Germany, Sr. Teresa Benedicta was moved to the Carmelite convent in Echt in the Netherlands. There she studied the works of St. John of the Cross. In 1942, after the protests of the Roman Catholic Church against the persecution of Jewish citizens in the Netherlands, the German occupying powers ordered detaining Catholic clergy of Jewish origin. Edith Stein was arrested on August 2, 1942, and taken to Amersdoort and later to Westerbork. A few days later 987 Jews from Westerbork were sent to Auschwitz. This transport included Edith Stein and her older sister, Rosa Stein. After a selection on the ramp in Birkenau, both were sent to the gas chamber where they were killed, probably on August 9, 1942.
Blessed Franz Jägerstätter, enemy of the state
Blessed Franz Jägerstätter was beheaded and cremated on August 9, 1943.
Franz Jägerstätter was an Austrian conscientious objector during World War II. He was sentenced to death and executed on August 9, 1943. He was later declared a martyr and beatified by the Catholic Church. 
On June 1, 2007, Pope Benedict XVI approved a series of decrees, issued by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, that attributed martyrdom to Franz Jägerstätter, a husband and father of three who was beheaded on August 9, 1943, for refusing any collaboration with the Nazis.
On October 26, 2007, Franz Jägerstätter was beatified in an elaborate ceremony in St. Mary's Cathedral in Linz, Austria.
Jägerstätter left behind a widow and 3 small daughters. Both his priest and his bishop had urged him to give up his conscientious objection, and join the army. His sacrifice was uniformly regarded as foolish by his neighbors, and his story was known to but a handful of people for almost 2 decades.
In the early 1960’s, an American intellectual, Gordon Zahn was researching the Catholic response to Hitler and came across the story of Jägerstätter. He wrote a book: In Solitary Witness.
But for this book, we would not know the story of Franz Jägerstätter, who is now a candidate for beatification.
The book came to Merton’s attention, and he wrote an essay, “An Enemy of the State”, commenting on Jägerstätter’s life, conscientious objection, and the role of religion in military matters and war. Jägerstätter’s own bishop had judged his conscience to be “in error”, but “in good faith”, and that the priests and seminarians who died in Hitler's armies “firm in the conviction that they were following the will of God” to be following “a clear and correct conscience.”
Merton, while conceding that whose conscience was erroneous and whose was correct could ultimately only be decided by God, says that the real question raised by the Jägerstätter story is not merely that of the individual Catholic’s right to conscientious objection but the question of the Church’s own mission of protest and prophecy in the gravest spiritual crisis man has ever known.
Merton’s essay includes an impressive meditation from Franz Jägerstätter in which he intuits that his refusal to fight is not a private matter, but concerns the historical predicament of the Catholic Church in the 20th century:
“The situation in which we Christians of Germany find ourselves today is much more bewildering than that faced by the Christians of the early centuries at the time of their bloodiest persecution … We are not dealing with a small matter, but the great (apocalyptic) life and death struggle has already begun. Yet in the midst of it there are many who still go on living their lives as though nothing had changed … That we Catholics must make ourselves told of the worst and most dangerous anti-Christian power that has ever existed is something that I cannot and never will believe … Many actually believe quite simply that things have to be the way they are. If this should happen to mean that they are obliged to commit injustice, then they believe that others are responsible. … I am convinced that it is still best that I speak the truth even though it costs me my life. For you will not find it written in any of the commandments of God or of the Church that a man is obliged under pain of sin to take an oath committing him to obey whatever might be commanded him by his secular ruler. We need no rifles or pistols for our battle, but instead spiritual weapons, - and the foremost of these is prayer.”
Nagasaki
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| Urikami Cathedral, Nagasaki |
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| Found in a house near Sanno Shrine. |
A B29 bomber released a plutonium-armed atomic bomb dubbed Fat Man on the city of Nagasaki, using the Urakami Catholic Cathedral for ground zero.
The ferocious heat and blast indiscriminately slaughtered its inhabitants. 50000 died.
"Men and women of the world, never again plan war! ... From this atomic waste the people of Nagasaki confront the world and cry out: No more war! Let us follow the commandment of love and work together. ...
"The people of Nagasaki prostrate themselves before God and pray: Grant that Nagasaki may be the last atomic wilderness in the history of the world."
- Dr. Takashi Magai, Mystic of Nagasaki
Among the survivors was Takashi Nagai, a pioneer in radiology research and a convert to the Catholic Faith. Living in the rubble of the ruined city and suffering from leukemia caused by over-exposure to radiation, Nagai lived out the remainder of his remarkable life by bringing physical and spiritual healing to his war-weary people. A Song for Nagasaki
Tuesday, August 7, 2018
the uncertainty of waiting
"Ever increasing frenzy, tension, explosiveness of this country. You feel it in the monastery with people like Raymond. In the priesthood with so many upset, one way or another, and so many leaving. So many just cracking up, falling apart. People in Detroit buying guns. Groups of vigilantes being formed to shoot Negroes. Louisville is a violent place, too. Letters in U.S. Catholic about the war article -- some of the shrillest came from Louisville. This is really a mad country, and an explosion of the madness is inevitable. The only question -- can it somehow be less bad than one anticipates? Total chaos is quite possible, though I don't anticipate that. But the fears, frustrations, hatreds, irrationalities, hysterias, are all there, and all powerful enough to blow everything wide open. One feels that they want violence. It is preferable to the uncertainty of "waiting"." (March 12, 1968)
- Merton, The Other Side of the Mountain, pp. 66-67
Friday, November 24, 2017
Sufism
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| Photo by Thomas Merton |
This is a very important concept in the contemplative life, both in Sufism and in Christian tradition. To develop a heart that knows God, not just a heart that loves God, but a heart that knows God. How does one know God in the heart? By praying in the heart. The Sufis have ways of learning to pray so that you are really praying in the heart, from the heart, not just saying words, not just thinking good thoughts or making intentions or acts of the will, but from the heart. This is a very ancient Biblical concept that is carried over from Jewish thought into monasticism. It is the spirit which loves God, in Sufism. The spirit is almost the same word as the Biblical word "spirit" -- the breath of life. So man knows God with his heart, but loves God with his life. It is your living self that is an act of constant love for God and this inmost secret of man is that by which he contemplates God, it is the secret of man in God himself.
-- Thomas Merton, speaking to a group of Catholic sisters in Alaska, 2 1/2 months before his death in 1968.
Who Are Sufi Muslims and Why Do Some Extremists Hate Them?
Today, November 24, 2017, in the NY Times:
CAIRO — Militants detonated a bomb inside a crowded mosque in the Sinai Peninsula on Friday and then sprayed gunfire on panicked worshipers as they fled, killing at least 235 people and wounding at least 109 others. Officials called it the deadliest terrorist attack in Egypt’s modern history.
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| Most worshipers at the mosque were Sufi Muslims, who practice a mystical form of Islam that some extremists consider heretical. Credit European Pressphoto Agency |
Wednesday, August 16, 2017
Apocalyptic times
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| Charlottesville VA, August 2017 |
"It is not exaggeration to say that our times are Apocalyptic, in the sense that we seem to have come to a point at which all the hidden, mysterious dynamism of the "history of salvation" revealed in the Bible has flowered into final and decisive crisis.
"The term "end of the world" may or may not be one that we are capable of understanding. But at any rate we seem to be assisting in the unwrapping of the mysteriously vivid symbols of the last book of the New Testament. In their nakedness, they reveal to us our own selves as the men whose lot it is to live in the time of possible ultimate decision."
-Thomas Merton, "Nuclear War and Christian Responsibility", from "Passion for Peace", p. 39
Wednesday, August 9, 2017
Nagasaki - "The winner is war itself"
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The weapon dropped over Nagasaki, on August 9, 1945, weighed five tons and was known as the Fat Man.
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The following is extracted from Jim Forest's book, "The Root of War is Fear".
“Target Equals City,” an essay written [by Merton] in February 1962 and slated for publication in The Catholic Worker, was refused approval by his order’s censors, the first of Merton’s war-related writings to suffer that fate. In it he argued that a major ethical border had been crossed during the Second World War. On the Allies’ side, it was a war that that had begun with “a just cause if ever there was one.” There was no doubt that Hitler was the aggressor in Europe and that Japan was in Asia. But by the war’s end in 1945, not only Germany but the Allies had moved from bombing military targets to targeting whole cities. Those theologians who took Church teaching on war seriously were forced to consider the question “whether the old [just war] doctrine [still] had any meaning.”
"The obliteration bombing of cities on both sides, culminating in the total destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by one plane with one bomb for each, had completely changed the nature of war. Traditional standards no longer applied because … there was no longer any distinction made between civilian and combatant…. [In fact] the slaughter of civilians was explicitly intended as a means of 'breaking enemy morale' and thus breaking the 'will to resist.' This was pure terrorism, and the traditional doctrine of war excluded such immoral methods…. These methods were practiced by the enemy [at the war’s start, but by the time] the war ended they were bequeathed to the western nations."
Merton recalled how, early in the war, Britain had declared that it would not imitate Germany’s savage blitz-bombing tactics but instead would limit its bombing raids to military objectives. But in 1942 Britain abandoned its early restraint and began to target whole cities. “There are no lengths in violence to which we will not go,” Churchill declared. To quiet troubled consciences, the argument was put forward that city destruction, in the long run, “will save lives and end the war sooner.” In one notorious case, a thousand British and US bombers dropped so many bombs on the German city of Dresden that a firestorm was created that gutted the heart of the city. An estimated 25,000 people were killed, including many refugees and Allied prisoners of war. Far more died or were injured in the saturation bombing of Tokyo — the Tokyo Fire Department estimated 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded.
Merton noted that while one can understand how those who suffered the Blitz would accept similar combat strategies against their enemy, no one could any longer claim that the standards of the just war doctrine, requiring not only a just cause but just methods that shelter non-combatant lives, were being respected.
The development of nuclear weapons and rockets for their delivery to distant targets, many of which were cities, meant that city destruction had become an integral element of future war planning. While the policy is called deterrence, the effectiveness of deterrence depends on the demonstrated readiness to commit the gravest war crime ever contemplated.
Meanwhile the vast majority of Christians were offering no resistance. “The Christian moral sense is being repeatedly eroded,” Merton wrote. When occasional protests occur or questions arise, “soothing answers are provided by policy makers and religious spokesmen are ready to support them with new [moral] adjustments. A new cycle is prepared. Once again there is a ‘just cause’. Few stop to think that what is regarded complacently as ‘justice’ was clearly a crime twenty years ago. How long can Christian morality go on taking this kind of beating?”
Merton finished the essay with these three sentences:
"There is only one winner in war. The winner is not justice, not liberty, not Christian truth. The winner is war itself."
Monday, August 7, 2017
Shadow on the Rock
SHADOW ON THE ROCK
by Daniel Berrigan, S.J.
At Hiroshima there’s a museum
and outside that museum there’s a rock,
and on that rock there’s a shadow.
That shadow is all that remains
of the human being who stood there on August 6, 1945
when the nuclear age began.
In the most real sense of the word,
that is the choice before us.
We shall either end war and the nuclear arms race now in this generation,
or we will become Shadows On the Rock.
(Image: "Human Shadow Etched in Stone," relocated and preserved at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum)
Saturday, August 5, 2017
Feast of the Transfiguration
August 6, The Feast of the Transfiguration
The famous, haunting statement by Oppenheimer, recalling the event compels and haunts in equal measure; probably from a combination of the quote itself and Oppenheimer’s odd delivery.
In 1965, Oppenheimer was asked to repeat
the quote again for a television broadcast: “We knew the world would not
be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were
silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita;
Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and,
to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’.“
Other Louie entries on Hiroshima and the Transfiguration:
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| The Enola Gay after dropping atomic bomb, "Little Boy" on Hiroshima, Japan - August 6, 1945 |
The dropping of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, combined with the bombing of Nagasaki, is the only (officially) recorded use of a nuclear bomb against an enemy target.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist who was responsible for the research and design of an atomic bomb. He is often known as the “father of the atomic bomb."
The famous, haunting statement by Oppenheimer, recalling the event compels and haunts in equal measure; probably from a combination of the quote itself and Oppenheimer’s odd delivery.
The Bombing of Hiroshima and the Feast of the Transfiguration (August 6, 2009)
Points for meditation to be scratched on the walls of a cave.
27: At 1:37 A.M. August 6th the weather scout plane took off. It was named the Straight Flush, in reference to the mechanical action of a water closet. There was a picture of one, to make this evident.
28: At the last minute before taking off Col. Tibbetts changed the secret radio call sign from “Visitor” to “Dimples.” The bombing mission would be a kind of flying smile.
29: At 2:45 A.M. Enola Gay got off the ground with difficulty. Over Iwo Jima she met her escort, two more B-29’s, one of which was called the Great Artiste. Together they proceeded to Japan.
30: At 6:40 they climbed to 31,000 feet, the bombing altitude. The sky was clear. It was a perfect morning.
31: At 3:09 they reached Hiroshima and started the bomb run. The city was full of sun. The fliers could see the green grass in the gardens. No fighters rose up to meet them. There was no flak. No one in the city bothered to take cover.
32: The bomb exploded within 100 feet of the aiming point. The fireball was 18,000 feet across. The temperature at the center of the fireball was 100,000,000 degrees. The people who were near the center became nothing. The whole city was blown to bits and the ruins all caught fire instantly everywhere, burning briskly. 70,000 people were killed right away or died within a few hours. Those who did not die right away suffered great pain. Few of them were soldiers.
33: The men in the plane perceived that the raid had been successful, but they thought of the people in the city and they were not perfectly happy. Some felt they had done wrong. But in any case they had obeyed orders. “It was war.”
34: Over the radio went the code message that the bomb had been successful: “Visible effects greater than Trinity … Proceeding to Papacy.” Papacy was the code name for Tinian.
35: It took a little while for the rest of Japan to find out what had happened to Hiroshima. Papers were forbidden to publish any news of the new bomb. A four line item said that Hiroshima had been hit by incendiary bombs and added: “It seems that some damage was caused to the city and its vicinity.”
36: Then the military governor of the Prefecture of Hiroshima issued a proclamation full of martial spirit. To all the people without hands, without feet, with their faces falling off, with their intestines hanging out, with their whole bodies full of radiation, he declared:
“We must not rest a single day in our war effort … We must bear in mind that the annihilation of the stubborn enemy is our road to revenge.” He was a professional soldier."
"Original Child Bomb", The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, pages 300-301
Saturday, July 8, 2017
resisting error
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| Associated Press Photo, North Korea, 2017 |
"Our submission to plausible and useful lies involves us in greater and more obvious contradictions, and to hide these from ourselves we need greater and ever less plausible lies.
"The basic falsehood is the lie that we are totally dedicated to the truth, and that we can remain dedicated to truth in a manner that is at the same time honest and exclusive: that we have the 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 basic 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 the truth."
-- Thomas Merton, "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander", p. 68
Friday, June 23, 2017
Pharisaism
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| Photograph of Gal Vihara by Thomas Merton |
We are all convinced that we desire the truth above all.
Nothing strange about this. It is natural to man, an intelligent being, to desire the truth. (I still dare to speak of man as "an intelligent being"!)
But actually, what we desire is not "the truth" so much as "to be in the right."
To seek the pure truth for its own sake may be natural to us, but we are not able to act always in this respect according to our nature.
What we seek is not the pure truth, but the partial truth that justifies our prejudices, our limitations, our selfishness. This is not "the truth." It is only an argument strong enough to prove us "right."
And usually our desire to be right is correlative to our conviction that somebody else (perhaps everybody else) is wrong.
Why do we want to prove them wrong?
Because 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."
No wonder we hate. No wonder we are violent. No wonder we exhaust ourselves in preparing for war!
And in doing so, of course, we offer the enemy another reason to believe that he is right, that he must arm, that he must get ready to destroy us.
Our own lie provides the foundation of truth on which he erects his own lie, and the two lies together react to produce hatred, murder, disaster.
-Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 78
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