Violence and Sanity

John 18:1 - 19:42

Lopping trees was a daily task my father did to feed his sheep. He didn’t use grain but used the resources of the box, mountain oak or kurrajong to sustain his stock through hard times, or to simply augment their diet. Nature provided all he needed to care for his stock.

 

He would swing the axe into the tree climb up, take the axe and repeat the process until he was where he wanted to be. When he was in the right place, where the best branches were he would begin to cut sufficient only to feed the sheep below.

 

One day he approached a large box tree, two fulsome cuddles round. Strong and powerful in appearance and full of good branches. He swung the axe sideways into the trunk and the tree gave forth a menacing sigh and cam crashing down at his feet. With one blow of the axe, what appeared to be strong and able to live forever, crashed in a heap on the ground.

 

A closer inspection showed it was rotten at the core just waiting for the right incentive to give up the ghost.  Fortunately his faithful dog and horse were not underneath it when it cam down.

 

Good Friday is the day the human project of violence, power and oppression came crashing down. In a few short hours, from dawn till mid afternoon, what had looked invincible fell to the power of obedience and compassion in the life and death of Christ. Death, a synonym for a life violently opposed to a relationship with God, lost it’s battle when Jesus was prepared to live his life to the full, even unto an unjust and cruel death on the cross.

 

Jesus did not avoid the consequences of compassion for all of creation, the consequences for calling out injustice and the machinery of death, be that in the shape of the military economy in power in Jerusalem, or the politically greedy who were manipulating the system for their own wealth and power or the religious leaders who were benefiting from the conflict in the system.

 

Jesus subsumed the violence into his own experience and shared the experience of all those who had been crucified before him for daring to challenge Rome or simply been caught for the crime of survival. Jesus took into himself the violence that was present in those watching and calling for his death.  He understood human beings as having the capacity for great violence and heard it, felt and died from it.

 

For the more, the most challenging part of this story is the crowd, ordinary citizens of the city, mums and dads, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, adults and children, all calling for Jesus to be crucified.  They were loving to their families, caring for their neighbours, observant of religious rules and rituals. They were active community members and would have been seen, in other places, as good people.

 

Yet here they are, calling for the physical destruction of a fellow Jew, a man who had done so much good and had spoken up for them. They wished him a violent death.

 

It is not sufficient to say it was mob think, peer pressure or the manipulation of the crowd by those in power. These were  sane, thinking people, people able to manage their own decisions and emotions, how come they gave it up so easily to resort to violence? These were sane people.

 

Perhaps this is the scary bit. We understand ourselves to be sane and deny our propensity for violence. In fact we deny even the possibility that we too can resort to violence so powerful it crucifies others. Our decisions, words, actions, ideologies are well thought out and sane. There is no way how we think or act is capable of the same violence as the Romans, the crowd, the Nazis or ISIS. Yet..

 

Thomas Merton explored the case of Adolf Eichmann, the leader of the Gestapo who led millions to their death. Merton writes:

 

One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing.

If all the Nazis had been psychotics, as some of their leaders probably were, their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense easier to understand. It is much worse to consider this calm, "well-balanced," unperturbed official conscientiously going about his desk work, his administrative job which happened to be the supervision of mass murder. He was thoughtful, orderly, unimaginative. He had a profound respect for system, for law and order. He was obedient, loyal, a faithful officer of a great state. He served his government very well.

 

You may say this was an extreme case. Is it? The recent declaration of imprisonment for those who protest the use of their land for CSG and coal mining by the NSW Government, the treatment of children in detention, the increased spending on weapons of destruction for our military, the destruction of the environment for coal power and more, speaks to our willingness to use violence as and when it is necessary.

 

The increase of bullying, domestic violence, street violence, gun violence, road rage speaks to the  level of violence sitting just below the surface in many of us. AN hour in front of the tv at news time will have us locking every window and door and arming ourselves to protect what is ours! The language of politics, brought into sharp focus by the US elections, but not restricted to that country reminds us the capacity other wise sane people seem to have for violence.

 

 

Merton goes on:

The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous……….

The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless. A man can be "sane" in the limited sense that he is not impeded by disordered emotions from acting in a cool, orderly tier, according to the needs and dictates of the social situation in which he finds himself. He can be perfectly "adjusted." God knows, perhaps such people can be perfectly adjusted even in hell itself.

 

The challenge for you and I this Easter is to face the violence within ourselves, to open Pandoras box and take a good long look what is lurking within. It is a dangerous thing to do for we may be forced to realise that the violence in the world also has its home in us, our language, our expectations, our ideologies, our demands.

 

Good Friday is the result of sane people taking sane decisions and enticing good people to follow them. The outcome? The horrific death of the only truly good man. Are we the sane people participating in similar decisions and actions which condemn innocent people to a lifetime in detention centres, to be caught in inhumane living conditions and to be brutalised for our supposed safety?

 

Our does Jesus death save us? It saves us from the illusion of innocence and, if we are willing, wrests the power of violence from us so that we truly can live a non-violent life of obedience and compassion, just as Jesus did. Amen 

Peace Is Our Responsibility

Luke 3:1-6

 

In 1962 Thomas Merton wrote the following an an essay in the Commonweal journal entitled ‘Nuclear War and the Christian":

 “We are no longer living in a Christian world……..Today a non-Christian world still retains a few vestiges of Christian morality, a few formulas and clichés, which serve on appropriate occasions to adorn indignant editorials and speeches. But otherwise we witness deliberate campaigns to eliminate all education in Christian truth and morality. The Christian ethic of love tends to be discredited as phony and sentimental. It is therefore a serious error to imagine that because the West was once largely Christian, the cause of the Western nations is now to be identified, without further qualification, with the cause of God. The incentive to wipe out Bolshevism may well be one of the apocalyptic temptations of twentieth-century Christendom. It may indeed be the most effective way of destroying Christendom, even though man may survive. For who imagines that the Asians and Africans will respect Christianity and  embrace it after it has apparently triggered  mass-murder  and destruction of cosmic proportions?  It is pure madness to think that Christianity can defend itself with nuclear weapons. The mere fact that we now seem to accept nuclear war as reasonable is a universal scandal.”

 

Last week, at the Church of England Synod in England, the church accepted that armed intervention is inevitable in the Middle East refugee crisis. The Guardian reports:

“The Church of England has effectively backed military intervention by the UK government in Syria by unanimously passing a motion which implied support for the use of armed force in establishing safe routes for refugees, with the personal endorsement of the archbishop of Canterbury.

Armed action was “almost inevitable” in response to the crisis in Syria, Welby said. The forces that were driving people to become refugees needed to be confronted, he added.

The motion, proposed by the bishop of Durham, Paul Butler, called on the government “to work with international partners in Europe and elsewhere to help establish safe and legal routes to places of safety, including this country, for refugees who are vulnerable and at severe risk”.

Welby told the church assembly that it needed to recognise the implications of the clause. “Let us support the motion, but do so utterly realistically about its implications,” he said.

The motion – passed by 333 votes, with none opposed and three abstentions”

 

And now Britain is at war with ISIS.

In todays Gospel Luke introduces John the Baptist and his call for repentance and Baptism. This Old Testament style prophet, a ‘replica’ of Isaiah’, recognises the crisis his world was facing and calls for radical action to be taken. What was that radical action? Personal accountability for the state of relationships in the world.

 

Luke makes it clear just how dysfunctional the world was by taking care to meticulously detail the time (In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius,), the key players who were recognised for the manipulation and brutality of each other and those under them (when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene,) and the complicity of the Jewish hierarchy ( ²during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas).

He then places John as a prophet, an outsider, who is not in cohorts with the world, but is aware of God and the role God wants each of us to play in bringing peace to the world, as the spokesman for the new world order - (the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. )

Peace in the world is not a world without unrest, but a world in which unrest first finds its answer in our unwillingness to maintain or feed the violence, thus ensuring it continues. If we continue to feed it, the crooked ways of humanity, even the crooked ways within ourselves, will continue to wind there way into the hills and high places of violence, war and hatred.

Peace in the world is not the sole task of God. John continues the voice of the prophets, institutes a radical pattern of repentance and baptism, putting the responsibility on all humans (flesh) in the world and points to The Way (Jesus) this will be achieved.

Peace is not the sole responsibility of Jesus, his birth, life, death and resurrection. Peace is what we do with that. Unfortunately while the church continues to be embroiled in scandals or in visible and damaging conflict and in-fighting at the local level, we do not contribute to peace, but to unrest.

Peace is found in actions bringing down those in high places, unwinding the corruption and power of those committed to violence in all its forms. These actions are to be peace bringing and non-violent. No where does Jesus advocate a violence response, that would simply have ensured violence continued.

Peace requires we seek and find ways to personally untangle ourselves from the patterns and structures which are committed to maintaining unrest in the world – political parties, big business, the weapons industry and more. Perhaps finding out how businesses operate, where they source their products, how  they make their money, where is you retirement money invested and more. We then can make decisions on who we support through our purchases for example.

The announcement this week that the founder of Facebook and his wife are giving 99% of his fortune to charity over his lifetime has been applauded. Yet it comes with strings attached and carrying much baggage as Devon Maloney of The Guardian website points out:

 

Simply by creating and overseeing the world’s largest social network and one of the most influential corporations on Earth – by gathering and selling untold amounts of data under the protection of inscrutable legal jargon, by implementing shaky harassment and reporting policies that permit certain kinds of abuse, by employing 68% men and fewer than 50 black people in a company of more than 10,000 employees (to say nothing of the unholy spectre of gentrification) – Mark Zuckerberg himself continues to reproduce the inequality he and his wife are taking aim at with their pledge.

 

John the Baptist, and Luke the Gospel writer, make it very plain. What we are waiting for is not a baby but the Way and the Way requires that we engage in deep self reflection, shed our baggage through repentance and become baptised in an active role in building a new world for all. While the repentance is personal, the Baptism is communal and unless we begin to walk this Way, peace will always remain elusive.

 

Thomas Merton warned in 1962 we were sowing the seeds of future war by our actions in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. We are now reaping what we have sown. It is time to “‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” To ensure “⁵Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill made low, and the crooked made straight, and the rough ways made smooth;” so “⁶all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”

 May Christmas 2015 see the beginning of such peace in our world. 

Jesus, Merton & Non-Violence - A Palm Sunday Reflection

(Mark 15:9-47)

James Hillman, a archetypal psychologist, wrote a book called ‘The Terrible Love of War’, exploring humanity’s simultaneous attraction and aversion to war. The chapters of his book have the following titles: ‘War is Normal’, ‘War is Inhuman’, ‘War is Sublime’ and ‘Religion is War’. He also suggests that peace is just an interlude between war, and can never be a lasting event, for to have peace there has to be a victory, someone has to lose. For peace to remain this has to reoccur over and over again.

As much as we are reviled by some of his premise, the longer I live the more I recognise the element of truth that sits under his ideas. Human beings are violent creatures. The world is a violent place. Watch the National geographic daily footage of animals eating other animals, floods, cyclones and more. The nightly news and the daily headlines scream violence.

I have seen my share of violence. Domestic violence in the house I grew up in, bullying at school, working the drug scene in the 70’s, as a prison chaplain to maximum security prisons and in my work with families and young people.

For 3 months I was posted to Broken Hill as a cadet Salvation Army officer and left on my own for a number of weeks as the officer in charge went on leave. In that time I stood on verandas restraining angry husbands as their wives and children hurriedly grabbed clothes and belongings and fled to a shelter. I remember begging a lady to leave her husband who used to abuse her every day. She said ‘where can I go out here?’ The perpetrator was in his 70’s.

In Brisbane I helped develop a community garden with a Sudanese man whose wife was the only member of her family to survive a massacre in her village.

I stood in the morgue at Mt Isa and saw an aboriginal man who suffered a death we hear little of in the city, but one that is not unusual out there. He had been run over by a road train while sleeping on the road. No-one stopped.

In the Navy we worked with numerous young men and women traumatised by the violence they experienced in the campaign to turn back the boat people. Like most veterans they suffered not only physical violence but a psychological violence which never leaves.

War and violence litter our world with blood. And we seem to need blood to give reason for the loss of innocence and the innocent. Our reverence for Gallipoli as the time when Australia came of age is tied directly to the blood of young Australians.

The Easter story is another story of blood and rightly or wrongly we focus on the death of Jesus as somehow being necessary to set us free from the failings of our own personal humanity. The story of Jesus’ death has been appropriated as a way to set us free from sin and the devil.

On Palm Sunday we are confronted with an option that stands against violence, war and blood, and if taken seriously, it will give us a new understanding of Jesus’ death. It is the option of non-violence. Jesus’s bases his life on the non-violent response to the violence of others, of nature, of political ideology and to those who oppress the people of the land he grew up in.

Palm Sunday ushers in the final confrontation between the way of power and blood, and the way of non-violence. On Palm Sunday we have Jesus riding into the city surrounded by his friends and others. He is seated on a young donkey, a colt. The people sing songs of exultation and lay down their robes and palm branches, the symbols of peace, on the road before him.

At the same time, Marcus Borg and other scholars suggest, there was a procession of a different quality going on on the other side of time. It was a show of military might and power by the Roman occupiers. Men on horses dressed in all their glory showing off the might of the Empire, the might which had and continued to subdue the locals. Ruthless and bloody.

Jesus’ procession mimicked what was probably an annual event at Passover and said loudly and clearly, violence is not the answer. There is another power and it is the power of compassion and acceptance, of love and respect, of hope and freedom. Its way was not to confront power with power, as many had hoped. Jesus reminds us, and those watching, that the act of violence only brings about more violence, as the Zealot’s and others were to find out a little further down the line.

Jesus journey from the last supper, through the garden of Gethsemane and through the Jewish and Roman legal systems and onto his death on the cross, exemplifies Jesus commitment to non-violence.

 What does this non-violence look like:

•  Thomas Merton, Catholic Monk and writer, writes:

“Christian non-violence is not built on a presupposed division, but on the basic unity of man. It is not out for the conversion of the wicked to the ideas of the good, but for the healing and reconciliation of man with himself, man the person and man the human family.”(Faith and Violence, 15) This is the story of the cross. Jesus was not attempting to convert humanity but to heal its wounds by exemplifying the non-violent option. His death said loudly and clearly, enough is enough. Violence has no part in the resurrection we are to live.

•  Merton goes on to suggest:

“ A test of our sincerity in the practice of non-violence is this: are we willing to learn something from the adversary?...” (24) Dialogue and engagement, not acts of defensive or aggressive violence are to be our performative response, although it does not rule out the possibility of the need to protect oneself, it does suggest that this is an option of last resort. 

•  Merton finally suggests, in line with what we see occurring in the face of Jesus’ committed resistance to the brutality of the political and religious world:

“Nonviolence is not for power but for truth. It is not pragmatic but prophetic. It is not aimed at immediate political results, but at the manifestation of fundamental and crucially important truth. Nonviolence is not the language of efficacy but of kairos. It does not say ‘We shall overcome’, so much as to say ‘This is the day of the Lord, and whatever may happen to us, He shall overcome.’ (Nonviolent Alternative, 75)

So what does have to say to us in a world that can, and has been, violent to others and us? How do we practice non-violence in our daily lives? How do we learn from those who appear to be against us? Where do we find the courage to wait on God throughout a difficult time and resist the urge to fight back? How do we ignore the mantra we hear everyday, if you don’t look after yourself, nobody else will, implying we have to fight for what we want? How do we change our mindset from competitive to collaborative, allowing us to work with instead of defeating others?

These are difficult questions for each of us to grapple with. There is no simple answer. We are called to do what as Jesus did – to trust the process and the one who is in charge of the process, allowing ourselves the luxury of hope and confidence, not in a successful resolution but in an outcome based on integrity and truth.

We know Jesus struggled a number of times through his life with the possibility of an unjust and painful death, the apparent failure of his mission. Instead of fighting to win he maintained the integrity of non-violence, showing us that there is another way. He gives us no blueprint to follow. Just an example lived out in dialogue with the same tensions we face everyday. His example simply says, ‘Remain faithful, God will overcome.’ AMEN

The Power of Living Non-Violence

Luke 7:14
14Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, rise!”

The Tank Man of Tiananmen Square June 5, 1989 held up 4 powerful Chinese army tanks by simply standing in the way. Nothing extraordinary about what he did at one level, at another it was extraordinary.

Extraordinary because he defied the culture and the custom of the autocratic society in which he lived. Extraordinary because from the beginning of the student uprisings 14th April 1989, somewhere between 4,000 and 10, 000 people died and some 30,000 injured. He stood out by standing up – it wasn’t anything he said, just what he did. He confronted death, and became a symbol for life.

While it received international focus, most Chinese students didn’t and still don’t know about it. It is suggested that both the Tank Man and the Tank Driver were executed the former for his defiance, the second for failing to drive over the Tank man, but their feate is unsure.

Here we were faced with the type of non-violent response to violence, both rare and desperately needed in our society.

Readings: (1 Kings 17:8-24, Galatians 1:11-24, Luke 7:11-24)

In our readings we are reminded of the intricate relationship between death and life and how that is played out in the lives of those who have little in the way of resources and resistance to the forces responsible for death – poverty. In these readings Elijah and Jesus exemplify the power of non-violence to overcome the violence of death and those who promote death as a way of life for others.

Elijah obeys God and is confronted by the inevitability of poverty (the widow only has enough for her son and herself). Despite sharing her last meal with the prophet she faces the inevitability of death connected to a life of poverty – it is stark and real. Despite doing the right things in God’s name, both the widow and her son, and Elijah cannot avoid the reality of life.

Jesus re-enacts this scene, although in a slightly different environment, not one of drought and famine, but of the colonial (Romans in power) and cultural (the religious law) oppression that continued to impact on the poorest of the poor – widows and their families.

"The stories of Elisha and Elijah and Jesus suggest that radical change requires (non-violent) passion and compassion for our political and personal and religious enemies. (This type of) compassion isn’t formulaic or predictable or tidy or even rational—yet it is perhaps the only thing that can save us." Debbie Blue

Jesus crossed path with a funeral procession and this very ordinary event touched Jesus. It seems Jesus was deeply affected by death. In a violent society he had not become inured to it and felt it deeply. He confronted it in others and was aware of the consequences he himself would face as a result of the style of life he was living and exemplifying. –

He touched the bier. "In the midst of the complexity of human need is hope and the possibility of renewal and life." William Loader

Jesus’ act fulfils Loaders call in three ways:

• It was a non-violent protest that was powerful.
Jesus reached out almost casually but with purpose and love. Almost immediately, the procession stopped, stopped in its tracks. All present turned their focus on this teacher who had dared to touch the funeral bier.
And the procession buzzed with:
‘What is about to happen?’
‘Why would a religious teacher purposefully make himself unclean?”
“What is he going to do now!”

His act, so innocuous and ordinary, was anything but. He made himself ritually unclean by the every act of touching. He placed himself outside the religious respectable and became an outsider, as poor and as broken as the widow herself. He broke the religious rules to show that love gives life.

He was not interested in the myth of an anaemic popular form of love prevalent in our society, but a deep compassionate love that stops a funeral bier at great personal cost and sends a clear and undeniable message to the political and religious powers within his society.

• It was an act where the ordinary met the extraordinary
Death is the prevalent image in our society as it was in Jesus’ time. Fo those in Jesus time colonial and religious oppression brought with it death by separating those who were righteous from those who were not and, for those who were placed on the outside, this hastened death

In our culture we only have to look at:
Television programming:
Murder and murder investigation shows
Reality shows which are little more than a profitable way to publicly humiliate and destroy others in the name of entertainment (and money)
TV news and documentaries
Computer games
Modern music

Government policies on issues such as indigenous, refugee, gender or environmental issues which focus on political expediency as against justice and compassion. Death is our dominant fear and preoccupation.

Jesus confronts the fear of death by touching the bier. By doing so he is saying death is not to be feared, death is in fact just another face of life and, if embraced as part of life, leads to renewal. Luke is also saying boldly that Jesus is more than just a prophet by placing him in the tradition of Elisha and Elijah as one who has life giving power over death, a fact that is confirmed by his death and resurrection.

• It was an act that asks us to get our hands dirty.
Compassion speaks of being at one with another, having a love which sees the other as yourself and by doing so being prepared to meet the other in their pain and poverty. It is the whole meaning of the good news of Jesus – God became man to know what it means to be human. Jesus acts and indentifies fully by becoming ritually unclean, overcoming death through compassion.

‘He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from the town. 13When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her’

Compassion for the widow who was now all alone – outcast – destined to a life of poverty. Compassion included the son, but not as the initiator of the compassion. That was the identification with the one who was now poorer than poor.

For a religious teacher who had a reputation for being confronting, this ups the ante. It was no longer simply good enough to be good, you can’t hide behind it at all. Like the Good Samaritan story Jesus acts foolishly with his compassion, risking his life and his reputation, and asks us to do the same.

Unfortunately like most of Jesus’ teaching this is not formulaic – it isn’t a clear and precise set of actions we can know and follow. How and where we show this non-violent form of love, compassion, is not spelt out for us, except that it is to be how we live our ordinary life within the ordinary events of human life.

Like the Tank Man of Tiannamen Square, Elijah in the famine and Jesus on the road, it will be seen how we respond to others in everything we do. For Jesus Compassion, love, is the hardest commandment, to love God yourself and others is all that matters.

RedShoes & Thomas Merton

At the recent 11th International Thomas Merton Society Conference in Rochester USA a pair of Red Shoes from Down Under made a lot of noise and played, as all clowns do when they get the chance. And the conference was an ideal place to do that.

When the Red Shoes returned home they are often asked where they went and, when told ‘A conference on Thomas Merton’, the usual response is a blank look and, "Who?"

Red Shoes could say he was an American Trappist Monk who was born in Prades France in 1915 to Owen (a Kiwi artist) and Ruth (an American) Merton, that he entered Gethsemani Abbey in 1941 and died in Bangkok in 1968. I could, but that would be of little use to the reader who would still ask, "so who is he?"

It’s a question I would have asked up until about 7 years ago al. I had just returned from the wilderness of alcoholism and begun working at St Clements Stafford. Somewhere somebody suggested I ought to read Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton. Coming from an evangelical background I had no idea who either were. I discovered Nouwen first.

I had some difficulty finding something of Mertons, and when I did, the array of titles was so enormous with over 100 publications and some 4,500 letters, probably qualifying him as the noisiest monk in history, I was unsure of where to start. I picked up the first of his journals (7 volumes) 'Run to the Mountain" covering the years 1939-41. And I was hooked. I devoured all seven volumes and the man I encountered was one whose faith and human experience I identified with.

Here was the clown, the Holy Fool I was looking for, someone who embodied in my lifetime the radical revolution who was Christ. This was no safe Gospel, no easy ride, no simple steps to salvation. This was life in the raw, lived and experienced by a man who endured the century into which I was born and lived in for some 13 years of my life. Not only was Merton real to me, he was real to the world in which I lived.

Because Merton lived in my lifetime and people who knew him are still alive, he has been spared the ignominy of being portrayed as asaint. He wasn’t. He was cheeky, cantankerous, compassionate, playful, petulant and so much more. He was human. He could be deeply insightful and sometimes superficial, full of charity towards the human spirit and frustrated by it, obedient to the Trappist and Catholic leadership and angry at it, he could be both optimistic and pessimistic, he could be dogmatic and, almost at the same time, change his mind. Yet he was obviously deeply in touch with Christ and the task of metanoia in both his own life and the life of the word.

His humanity attracted me. His spiritual journey began with him diving enthusiastically (a Merton trait) into the Trappist life, followed by a period in which his own personal awareness deepened through contemplation and solitude. In the 1950's, and continuing until his death, he engaged with the world outside the monastery walls on issues such as social justice, anti-war, ecumenism and interfaith dialogue.

His forays into writing, becoming a cloistered best selling author with his autobiography Seven Storey Mountain, his passion for solitude and contemplation that saw him spend the last 3 years of his life as a hermit, and his dialogue with Eastern and other religions at a time when ecumenism and interfaith dialogue was rare could be seen, and was, as foolishness.

So ‘who was Thomas Merton”? He was and is a Twentieth Century clown, a Holy Fool, someone who steps into the space-in-between and connects the extremes we all experience in life. Like Charlie Chaplin he exposes the absurdity in our sane and reasonable world, making nonsense out of our sense, showing us clearly that what divides us is not real, it is simply an illusion.

Merton challenges us to find the space-in-between where we can inhabit our own absurdity.
‘If there is hope anywhere, it lies somewhere in the middle between the two extremes (which in reality meet). The extremes are closer together than the “middle” which seems to be between them.”

Thomas Merton - Who Was He?

As some of you know I just returned from the 11th International Thomas Merton Society Conference in Rochester USA and the usual response when I say this is a blank look translated as "Who?"

I could say that he was an American Trappist Monk who was born in Prades France in 1915 to Owen (a Kiwi artist) and Ruth (an American) Merton, that he entered Gethsemani Abbey in 1941 and died in Bangkok in 1968. I could, but that would be of little use to the reader who would still ask "so, who is he?"

It’s a question I would have asked up until about 7 years ago, before I was introduced to him. I had just returned from the wilderness of alcoholism and began working at St Clements Anglican Church Stafford in Brisbane Australia. Somewhere in a conversation somebody suggested I might be interested in reading Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton. Coming from an evangelical background I had no idea who either were. I found Nouwen first and found him easy to read and very accessible.

I had some difficulty finding something on Thomas Merton, and when I did, the array of titles was so enormous as there are over 100 publications and some 4,500 letters, which probably qualifies him as the noisiest monk in history, I was unsure of where to start.

I picked up the first of his journals (there are 7 volumes) 'Run to the Mountain" covering the years 1939-41. And I was hooked. I devoured all seven volumes and the man I found in there was one whose faith and human experience I identified with.

Here was the clown, the Holy Fool I was looking for, someone who embodied in my lifetime the radical revolution who was Christ. This was no safe Gospel, no easy ride, no simple steps to salvation. This was real life in the raw, lived and experienced by a man who endured the century in which I was born and lived in for some 45 years of my life. Not only was Merton real to me, he was real to the world in which I lived.

Because Merton lived in my lifetime and people who knew him are still alive (met several at the conference who were previously just names in Merton’s books), he has been spared the ignominy of being written as a perfect saint. He wasn’t. He was cheeky, cantankerous, compassionate, playful, petulant and so much more. He was human. He could be deeply insightful and sometimes superficial, full of charity towards the human spirit and frustrated by it, obedient to the Trappist and Catholic leadership and angry with it, he could be both optimistic and pessimistic, he could be dogmatic and, almost at the same time, change his mind. He was very human yet obviously deeply in touch with Christ and the task of metanoia in both his own life and the life of the word.

It is his humanity and his spiritual journey that appealed to me. His spiritual journey began with him diving enthusiastically (a Merton trait it seems) into the Trappist life, which was followed by a period of a deepening of his own personal awareness through contemplation and solitude and then, beginning in the 1950's and continuing until his death, a period of engagement with the world outside the monastery walls including social justice, anti-war, ecumenism, interfaith dialogue and his enthusiasm for Zen (much of his letter writing occurred in this period and included his dialogue with leaders and influential writers across a range of causes, religions and spiritualities).

William H Shannon, in his excellent publication An Introduction – Thomas Merton, recognises the qualities I discovered (and it seems many others do everyday as his popularity in both secular and religious bookshops, reading lists and universities has not decreased) and denotes them as ‘Merton’s themes’. While they are overt themes Merton dealt with in his writing they also identify the underlying quality of Thomas the person reflected in his writing, focus and appeal. Those themes are: his humanness, his ability to articulate the human condition, reverence for people, bursting the bonds of cultural limitation and spiritual director for the masses

For me these themes are the marks of the clown, the essence of the Holy Fool in Christian tradition and Merton, in all that he did and said, is situated within that tradition. The simple act of leaving a promising writing and academic career and the ‘good life’ (Conjectures of the Guilty Bystander 279) to disappear into the desert of the Monastic life follows in the steps of the Desert Fathers, the Russian yurodive and other Christian mystics who’s foolishness challenged the society they left behind.

His forays into writing and becoming a cloistered best selling author with his autobiography Seven Storey Mountain, his passion for solitude and contemplation that see him spend the last 3 years of his life as a hermit, and his dialogue with other religions at a time when ecumenism was not even a word of currency could be seen, and was by some at the time, as foolishness. His dialogue with Eastern and other religions and spiritualities was completely unconventional, particularly for a Trappist monk and hermit, and his involvement in the civil rights, peace and anti-war movements and his passion for non-violence set him apart. He reports that "I am told by a higher superior: 'It is not your place to write about nuclear war:that is for the bishops'". (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander 296)

So how do we answer the question, ‘Who is Thomas Merton”? He is a Twentieth Century clown, a Holy Fool, someone who steps into the space-in-between and connects the extremes we all experience in life. Like Charlie Chaplin he exposes the absurdity in our sane and reasonable world, making nonsense out of our sense and showing us clearly that what divides us is not real, it is simply an illusion we have inhabited to fit in.

Merton never fitted in and challenges us to find the space-in-between where we can inhabit our own absurdity.

‘If there is hope anywhere, it lies somewhere in the middle between the two extremes (which in reality meet). The extremes are closer together than the “middle” which seems to be between them.” Thomas Merton (Echoing Silence 183)

Off to the USA

Just a short note to let those who do not know yet that I am going Stateside June the 8th for a Conference in Rochester, New York.

The conference is the '11th International Thomas Merton Society' conference and will involve, pigs permitting, people from all around the world who share a passion for Thomas Merton, like I do.  Often we spend much time with figures of a bygone era in the form of saints from another age, but Thomas Merton was a man of the 2oth century who influenced his contemporaries via his teachings on solitude and meditation, peace, non-violence, human rights and dialogue with thinkers of all the major religions. 

His understanding of man and his world and the relationship with God and Jesus Christ is as relevant today as it was when he was alive (born 1915, died 1968).

While away I will update this blog and provide information on the conference for those interested.

For more information visit this website:  www.merton.org

What is thing called Christmas?

What is this thing called Christmas? What is this thing we have celebrated? What is the point of re-enacting an event which occurred so long ago and today has little meaning or relevance for those born into the consumerist world of advertising jingles, product placement and Boxing day sales? How does a baby born in an ancient and forgotten time speak to us today, at the cusp of another year?

How does this little child connect to us in the isolation and violence we encounter in our everyday life, for our world is no less violent than the one into which he was born, a time of military occupation, soldiers and oppression, of mandatory census taking and control, all of which is still the experience of those who live in the land of his birth.

Yet at his birth the world celebrated, the stars in the night sky shone brighter than before, the heavens seemed to sing and the animals of creation gathered to welcome him into this world. In the midst of tragedy was triumph, in the midst of violence was nonviolence, in the midst of angry voices came the gurgle of a baby boy.

This thing we call Christmas is a reminder of the birth that changed a world, of a day when all that occurred after was heralded by all that came before. It is the day in which God visited and said everyday you live can be as this one, the hello to the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God was incarnate in Jesus as he kicked and slept in the stable and is incarnate in us as we live everyday of our lives. Jesus grew and became a threat to the powers to be but also a symbol of hope to all who encountered him in the very ordinariness and oppression of their daily lives. He asks no less of us.

He comes to us in the extraordinary event of his birth to give birth to the kingdom of God in this world through the ordinariness of our daily lives. His coming was the epitome of nonviolence, the exact opposite of the power hungry oppressive violence of the society into which he was born.

He comes to us today into that same world, the world in which we live. William Shannon in discussing Thomas Merton and nonviolence comments ‘Active nonviolence must unmask the contradiction of a society based on force. Unfortunately, the affluent industrial society (in which we live), with all the freedom it presumes to offer its people, is a society that survives because it lives by systemic greed and a subtle violence that makes the affluent richer and the non-affluent poorer. Those who practice nonviolence will almost of necessity find themselves at odds with such a society.’ But always walking in the footsteps of the babe of Bethlehem.

God heralded in his kingdom, which Isaiah expressed as the hope of the people and that Simeon recognised when he met the little family in the synagogue. It is the kingdom Paul asks us to embrace and birth as children of God, not as slaves, but as those who freely live and act out of love for the love who came into the world as a little child.

Somehow this thing that happened at Christmas gives us permission to live reflecting the love which was the nonviolent birth and life of Jesus. Jesus did not come to confront the violence in others but save the world, to heal the deep disconnection in the soul of humanity and to do it through a life of nonviolent being.

He was not passive. His birth was not passive. His very birth disturbed all those who had most to lose, those who used oppression and power to further their own needs. Nothing has changed. He continues to disturb those who use the modern tools of fear, of desire fuelled by consumerism, by difference as we close our borders and protect our possessions, by the isms that identifies others as different to us. Yet the birth of Jesus calls us to a ‘”[Non-violence] (that) is not out for the conversion of the wicked to the ideas of the good, but for the healing and reconciliation of man with himself, man the person and man the human family”’.

Today as we move towards the New year we look back on the wreckage of 08, marred by the greed of the rich and powerful which will see millions of people around the world lose their homes, their livelihood and a future for their children, marred by violence which has ripped apart countries, peoples and families in places as diverse as the outback of Australia, small countries in Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan and Mumbai and more, marred by the egos of people like Robert Mugabe and ask ourselves what are we to do?

Perhaps the babe of Bethlehem speaks to us to find the violence in ourselves, in our very being and how the actions we do everyday impact upon others in our world and then to find a way to live in love with all, nonviolent in our being and in our actions. It is a sobering moment when we stand still and listening to the violence in ourselves and accept that we are called to mirror the incarnation of Christ, the most surprising entrance into our world of the Kingdom of love.

For that moment when the Jesus entered the world was the moment when the world remembered what it was called to be and began the long and difficult process of reconciling the fall of man into a resurrected world of love and nonviolence, three days after his death. Jesus lived and died so that we could do the same. He rose again so that we could rise above our fallen nature and become the children of God, and we are called to born again each day in the glowing reflection of Bethlehem

It is hoped that today and everyday forward we will discover what Ghandi meant when he wrote “Jesus lived and died in vain if he did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love.”

Sermon Sunday After Christmas Year B 28 12 08 St Judes