My Argument With the Gestapo — Thomas Merton

Today I picked up a new Merton book at the bookstore at The Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Trappist, Kentucky. The book is My Argument With The Gestapo. Of the full-length prose books that he wrote before entering the monastery, only this book survives. Merton wrote the book in the summer of 1941 before he entered the monastery on December 10, 1941.

Even though it is a novel, it speaks a profound truth today just as it did when it was published after his death in 1968. In the introduction, Merton wrote about his own experience while hiking in the Rhine Valley in 1932. What struck me in particular was his comment The road was once again perfectly silent and peaceful. But it was not the same road as before. It was now a road on which seven men had expressed their willingness to destroy me.

Expressed their willingness to destroy me… those words send chills down my spine. A friend and colleague of mine in the USAF Chaplain Corps (Fr Chad) was deployed to the Baghdad (Iraq) International Airport in 2004. He sent me an email close to Christmas and said; Mike, this shit is real, they’re trying to kill us! That was the first of four deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan that he had before retiring.

Both of us were beginning to understand the complicated nature of warfare. For me, this was the beginning of my own journey towards questioning the national security policies of our government and how the US government and the military industrial complex were busy making enemies in the Middle East and other areas of the world through those policies.

While I haven’t nearly been run down by a carload of Nazis or been under attack at a hospital that was trying to save Coalition and Iraqi lives, I have seen and experienced the hatred born of fear overseas and here in the US.

In Merton’s day, he watched as the world careened towards mutually assured destruction via nuclear weapons in the midst of the Cold War. Today I am watching as political divisions in this country and around the world hurl us towards absolute chaos and destruction. Can this be stopped? I believe that only when love is in action through nonviolence we will find a way out of this madness.

Merton wrote about a way forward in his book Faith and Violence. Nonviolence seeks to “win” not by destroying or even by humiliating the adversary, but by convincing him that there is a higher and more certain common good than can be attained by bombs and blood. (p. 12)

My prayer is that I can do my small part in giving peace a chance. Dear reader, will you join me?