#jim forest

"A Candle In Front of the Icon of the Saviour": Archbishop Anastasios

Merton wrote of the irony of the American government promoting “Pray for Peace” as a slogan (for years it was used for canceling postage stamps) while spending a “fabulous amount of money, planning, energy, anxiety and care” on the production of weapons of mass annihilation. “It does not even seem to enter our minds,” Merton wrote, “that there might be some incongruity in praying to the God of peace, the God who told us to love one another as He had loved us, who warned us that they who took the sword would perish by it, and at the same time annihilate not thousands but millions of civilians and soldiers, women and children without discrimination.” “Only love, he wrote, “can exorcise the fear which is at the root of war.”

That last sentence became for me one of the most important insights that I ever received from Merton: “In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.” I know it by heart and recite it often. It sums up incarnation theology. Words and slogans and theories are not nearly as important as how we see and relate to one another--the relationships we build--and not only with friends but with adversaries. In the context of peace work, it suggests getting to know, as best we can, the people and cultures being targeted by our weapons.

"I felt like a man in Germany in the 1930s trying to explain why Jews ought not to be sent to the concentration camps. It all seems so utterly clear. You do not murder. You do not kill the innocent. You do not treat people like blemishes on the landscape, or communities as parcels of real estate, or nations as squares on a chessboard. Yet no group seems more distant from these facts than American (and Catholic) Americans. I have all but given up talking to Catholic audiences about Christ; I simply talk about justice, raw basic justice. I think I’ve come to understand why natural law made its way into our Church. It was simply an attempt to ask us to be, if not holy, then just. At least that.

Merton reminded us of the life of Franz Jäagerstätter, a name familiar to several of the retreatants but generally unknown at the time. Jägerstätter was an Austrian Catholic farmer, husband, father, and church sexton who, for his refusal to serve in the army of the Third Reich, was beheaded in Berlin on August 9, 1943. Despite his modest education, Jägerstätter had seen with amazing clarity what was going on around him, spoken out clearly and without fear to both neighbors and strangers about the hell Hitler’s movement was creating, and finally--ignoring the advice of his bishop to take the military oath--paid for his obedience to conscience with his life.

“By what right do we protest?” It wasn’t a question I had ever before considered. I was born into a family in which protest was a normal activity—protest against injustice, protest against war, protest against racism, protest against cruelty. While not by nature a person drawn to protest, as a young adult I found myself seeing protest as an unfortunate necessity. I could not watch preparations for war and fail to raise an opposing voice or refuse to participate in actions of protest and resistance. To protest was an unpleasant duty, period.