A Letter to Brother Thomas Merton (Fr. Louis)

Picture of St Malo’s Chapel on the Rock (St Catharine of Siena) was taken in June of 2015

Denise and I attended a course in January, 2015 at Columbia Theological Seminary that focused on Thomas Merton’s Journals as Lectio Divina (Sacred Reading). Recently I purchased and tonight began reading the book of his last two years of journals (The Other Side of the Mountain, Volume Seven, 1967-1968). I wrote this paper for the class over a year ago… Merton’s prophetic words continue to haunt me and so, I share with you, dear reader, the “letter I wrote” to Thomas Merton at the conclusion of the class…

Dear Brother Thomas:

I actually do wrestle with what to call you.  Are you Father Louis as a Catholic Priest?  Are you Brother Thomas as a Trappist Monk?  Or are you simply Thomas, a simple Christ-follower?  If I may, I will simply call you Brother Thomas as we are really brothers in Christ’s service.

Please let me introduce myself to you briefly.  I am a Presbyterian minister who has been ordained for twenty-eight years.  Twenty-one of those years were spent on Active duty with the US Air Force as a Chaplain.  The seminary I attended was, I guess you could say, on the progressive/liberal end of the spectrum.  My own journey with the Air Force, as with ministry in general, has been one of ups and downs as I have sought to discover who I am as a believer, Christ-follower, and Pastor/Chaplain.

When I was first commissioned as a Second Lieutenant on 15 April 1985 (ironic isn’t it that the US Government got me twice on that day… taxes and a commission), we were still very much in the midst of the Cold War that you had so adamantly tried to write about/against.

I could sense your frustration, especially in your entry from October 20, 1962.  “The U.S. is now spending more each year on armament than was spent in any year before 1942 for the entire national budget.  The people who demand that the government ‘interfere’ in nothing—just pour money into the armament industry and provide a strong police for ‘security.’  But stay out of everything else!  No interference in medicine, mental health, education, etc.etc.  But these are the ones who have their way.  Never was a country at once shrewder and less wise—shrewd in nonessentials and lunatic in essentials.”

My first assignment as a Chaplain Candidate was to a strategic bomber base in Fort Worth, Texas.  Every day I watched B-52 bombers launch to fly their “classified orbits” in case there was a need for an immediate nuclear response.  And one day I was at the end of the runway as 12 B-52’s and 12 KC-135 Air Refuelers roared to life in a “klaxon drill”.  It was a fierce sound and sight as the ground literally shook under my feet from the other end of the runway where I was standing with the Air Force Security Police patrol I was riding along with.  It was also incredibly frightening as I realized what the payload of those aircraft was capable of!

I also remember a conversation with a retired bomber pilot in the Officer’s Club bar one night that summer.  He was asking about what I did and when I told him that I was in seminary to become a pastor, and hopefully a chaplain one day, he was intrigued.  We talked some about the Cold War and his own experiences as a pilot of one of the fully-loaded bombers.  This was ten years after Saigon had fallen and the rawness of the Vietnam experience and protesters were still fresh in his memory as they had been for two ex-Marines I went to University with in 1980.

He said to me, Lieutenant, I want you to go back to your seminary and tell your classmates something for me.  Tell them that I am not a warmonger.  I am not now, nor ever was when I was in uniform.  And I think I can speak for the majority of my compatriots in uniform.  Why? You ask?  Because if we go to war, if the “balloon goes up”; it is my life and the life of every single person in uniform that will be at risk.  I don’t think they understood that during Vietnam and I hope they can one day understand that for those who are still in uniform.

In your journal entry of October 16, 1962, you mention Pope John XXIII and his thoughts on the world, America, war, and peace.  “He said the people of the world want peace.  That God will judge severely the rulers who fail in their responsibilities to the people.”  Wow, those words resonate with the experience I had twenty-three years later in that Officer’s Club Bar in Texas.  And even more, they resonate with what I see in our world today.

You also asked: “But in America, what is the situation?  The President, certainly, wants peace.  And most of the people, if they know what they think, think they want peace:  at least they will go along with the idea of peace provided it is not definitely clear that Time and Life regard peace as something utterly disgraceful.”  Brother Thomas, having studied the history of that time concerning the war in Vietnam, and having experienced the thoughts of some senior military leaders, I am not certain that people do go along with that thought, sadly.

Today we have agencies like Faux News (okay, it is Fox News, but the Faux fits) and other 24 hour news media that push war.  It is easier to do today since the Draft you remember from WWII, Korea and Vietnam is no longer in place.  So the “volunteer” force is largely comprised of people who are trying to make ends meet and cannot in other settings.

An African-American Airman I met when I was teaching a course on Values Education at a training base in 1991 was from the inner city of Cleveland, OH.  When I asked him why he joined the Air Force, he replied, because I didn’t want to die on the streets or get caught up in gang warfare.  The kid had NO OTHER OPTIONS for a future other than joining the military where the likelihood of his being killed is not as high as on the mean streets of Cleveland, but is still possible!  Sorry about shouting, it is just something that I am very passionate about.  Is this the only option available for women and men of color?  Is this the only option for those who cannot afford to go to college?  Is this the only option for those who want more than a minimum-wage job at a fast food restaurant?

You may wonder why I joined the military if I saw the inequity of something like that from the very beginning.  Well, God called me into ministry in 1980 while I was at University studying to be an accountant.  That course wasn’t going very well and so God called quite literally one night on a river bank as I contemplated life and my future.  The kicker is, God wasn’t just calling me into ministry, God was calling me into ministry as a Military Chaplain.

One of the jobs of a Chaplain (that isn’t done well enough or often enough by Chaplains as I would come to find out in my career) is to be the voice of sanity and thoughtfulness and ethical value in the military.  As you said in your journal from October 16^th, “there are a lot of Americans who want war.  They are already convinced of the necessity of war.  They believe that they are at all times and all sides threatened by communists—which in a way they are, but not in the way they think.  And they want to annihilate Russia.” Today it is terrorists and all Muslims, according to the extreme right wing in this country, whom we need to annihilate.  Or it is people who are different from us. And, as you said, “these people are, by their belligerency and fear, able to plunge the whole world into a disastrous war that will ruin what they think they are trying to defend and perhaps make things impossible for the survivors.”

It was in that environment that I often found myself on the minority side of the opinion.  As much as I had to study military history and strategy in Professional Military Education courses throughout my career, I often came up with more questions than answers.  And when I raised these ethical questions, often times I would get a smile and, in so many words, a “just go back to your chapel and pray Chaplain… that’s your job.”

All the way along in my career as a Chaplain, I saw both incredible opportunities for ministry and great frustrations.  When you are sitting with a young Airman whose boyfriend had just an hour ago, shot himself in the head in front of her, war becomes real.  It isn’t the war in Iraq, Afghanistan or some other place in the world; it is the war in our own back yard.  And in that, I found myself being not as much a Chaplain with the rank of Captain, but rather as a pastor walking with her through the valley of the shadow of death.

As I gained rank in the Chaplain Corps, I began to see something that really bothered me immensely.  My job was always to care for our Airmen, regardless of rank.  And it was also my job at times to be a burr under the saddle of senior leaders when an Airman was being wronged or abused by the system.  I stood my ground in front of a senior ranking officer as I went to bat for the young female Airman who was date raped by an Army Private and then raped again by the system.  Somehow it was her fault that she wasn’t progressing in her training and so she was cast aside like dirty laundry!  Another time I stood up for a young Wiccan Airman as he sought to have his religious rights under the Constitution upheld.  And there was the time I had to confront my own Commander with concerns about his own personal and professional behavior which was not only illegal, but creating a great deal of strife on the base.

I never meant to be a rabble rouser.  All I wanted to do was be a servant of the Lord in this very unique setting.  Did you ever feel like that when you were told that you couldn’t write about certain subjects or that you had to tone down your rhetoric for the good of the order and the church?  I am wondering if you might not have felt like that too.  Your journal entry from October 20, 1962 again reveals to me a bit of that frustration.  Not only were you frustrated with the war-hawks within the church, you were frustrated with the church’s leadership as you compared it to America.

“I have no doubt”, you said, “the world feels towards America the way many monks feel towards an abbot who wants to exercise total power, to receive unquestioning obedience on the basis of slogans about which he himself ceased thinking 25 years ago, and who above all wants to be loved, so that he may never, at any time, to himself, seem to be exercising power, or loving it.  Nobody denies him the power he has: few give him the love that he needs in order to feel safe and content.  And therefore he uses his power, from time to time, in unpredictable, arbitrary and absurd ways in which he defeats his own ends and makes everybody miserable.”

This reminds me of a Chaplain whom I knew fairly well and had worked with when we transitioned the chapel program from one base to another after the base he was in charge of was closed.  A very nice fellow, although he and I didn’t see eye to eye theologically from time to time, we had a good relationship.  Fast forward from 1994 to 2010 and he is in charge of one of the Air Force Major Command’s Chaplain Program.  The Command I worked for had personnel who needed Chaplain Corps support but we didn’t have Chaplains from our Command at that location.  When I asked him for support for our troops, he said no!  Sorry Mike, we don’t have enough Chaplains to care for our own personnel, you are going to have to figure out some way to care for your troops.  I was livid as was our Commander!

Had he forgotten what the job was supposed to be about?  Had he forgotten what we fought for as young Captains now that he was a Colonel?  He loved his rank and the title and the power… and somewhere he forgot what we were supposed to be doing… providing for the free exercise of religion for ALL military members and families and civilians regardless of whose “command” they belonged to.

Was he, Brother Thomas, like that Abbot you talked about, so impressed with his credentials and so eager to be a Colonel that he forgot what it was all about?  Well, like the Abbot, he made himself miserable when the General I worked for (who was furious) went directly to the Chief of Chaplains (also a General) and said something has to be fixed.  It was fixed!  The Airmen received the care they needed from Chaplains and my friend was given a “talking to” by the boss of all the Chaplains.

Brother Thomas, there are so many stories like that bubbling in my soul.  Sadly, the higher in rank I got, the more I saw selfish behavior on the part of senior ranking Chaplains who were more concerned about their careers than they were about caring for their flock as a good shepherd is supposed to.  I also began to see more holes in the “military policy” that we were implementing and how morally and ethically wrong it was.

When the news of Abu Ghraib prison and our torture of enemy combatants in Iraq broke, I was in Afghanistan serving the multi-national coalition as a Chaplain.  A friend of mine from back home asked me in an email what had happened.  How had something like this occurred?  And why didn’t someone (like a Chaplain) intercede before it got so out of hand?  Well, I said (and secretly prayed that it was so) that more than likely there wasn’t a chaplain inside of the prison.

After doing some research, I did find out later on that there wasn’t a Chaplain inside of the prison working with the military personnel guarding the prisoners.  The Chaplain wasn’t allowed into the facility and when she asked her superiors for permission to work with the personnel, she was politely told that it was not a good place for her to be!  She did hear about some of the abuses, and when she raised the concerns up the command channel, she was ignored.  If they had only listened to her, perhaps this travesty against the prisoners (fellow human beings mind you, even if they are enemy combatants) would have been avoided or at least lessened.

I can see how you perhaps felt out of sorts with this sort of thing going on back in the 60’s.  On October 24, 1962 you began your journal with one of your typically beautiful and brilliant descriptions of your surroundings.  Perhaps some of my favorite parts of your writings are when you let your imagination go and paint a masterpiece with your words!  This is one such bit of writing:  “Brilliant cold night.  All the stars!  And a very thin rind of moon.”  Sadly, your reverie and enjoyment of God’s beautiful creation was interrupted when Brother Basil whispered something to you about President Kennedy’s speech about the missile sites in Cuba.

Oh Brother Thomas, how close we were to nuclear annihilation at that time!  Your comment was so on target!  “I would say the folly is inevitable, unless all the politicians and military men suddenly dropped dead—and the business leaders with them, along with the Communist Party and about five million other people.”

Brother Thomas, that one of the reasons I turned down a promotion to Colonel and decided to retire from the Air Force.  I had lost faith in my senior leadership within the military and the Chaplain Corps and no longer felt like I could honestly, and with integrity, continue to serve.  If you add to that my increasing distrust in the policies at the highest levels of the government and military and how they don’t seem to give a damn about the “common foot soldier in the trench” who is being sent to war and who is the first to die; yes, it was time to hang up my hat.

Towards the end, Brother Thomas, I saw how you were reaching outside of the boundaries of the conventional church and seeking dialogue with Eastern Religions and all they have to offer in the area of Contemplation and mystical union.  I sensed that you were trying to see if there was some sort of sanity left in the religious world as you saw so many “religious people” banging the war drums and screaming nuclear weapons to arms!  Was that what was happening?

I loved your quote in your journal on November 2, 1962, from the Indian advocate of non-violence, Vinoba Bhave.  “It is impossible to get rid of violence when one is oneself full of violence.  On the contrary, one only adds to the number of the violent.”  As you processed the results of the standoff over Cuba, I could sense your growing despair.  Your comment, “it seems to show… that the U.S. is more single-mindedly militaristic than the USSR—(but not more than China!)” hit close to home.  Wow!  Watching the news and all of the hatred and lies that are spewed out of the mouths of politicians and so-called “religious” people is gut wrenching to say the least!

How do we, Brother Thomas, get rid of that violence within?  I see even within your own writings that you struggled living in the monastic community.  A friend of mine who has read your journals said that you once quipped that after twenty years, you are finally beginning to like some of your monastic brothers!  I too at times wish to go with my wife and retreat to a hermitage where we can worship, pray, and simply be still in the midst of God’s beautiful creation.  Yet I know, like you, we are called not to live exclusively in solitude but to live in community.

You know, I just realized; if you had lived all your life in solitude, you would never have had your Louisville Epiphany!  You would never have come to see in such an amazing way how we are all connected!  “I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Brother Thomas, thank you for helping me… for walking with me (and continuing to walk with me) as I seek my way on God’s path.  I do believe it is my calling to be a part of that which unites all humankind, and to be an advocate for those who have no voice.  And thank you for encouraging me to see God’s incredible creation through the lens of my camera.

                                                              Grace and Peace,  Michael