Did I bring a smile to someone’s face? Did I say words of healing? Did I let go of my anger and resentment? Did I forgive? Did I love? These are the real questions. I must trust that the little bit of love that I sow now will bear many fruits, here in this world and the life to come.
Some words of wisdom inspire by a beautiful Substack blog by Carrie Newcomer. In response to her writing, I shared these portions of Howard Thurman’s baccalaureate address at Spelman College on May 4, 1980.
There are so many noises going on inside of you. So many echoes of all sorts. So many internalizing of the rumble and the traffic, the confusions, the disorders. By which your environment as people, that I wonder if you can get still enough– not quite enough– still enough to hear rumbling up from your unique and essential idiom, the sound of the genuine in you…
There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself…
There is in every person, that which waits, waits, waits, and listens for the sound of the genuine in himself. There is that in every person that waits, and waits, and listens for the sound of the genuine in other people. And when these two sounds come together, this is music God heard when he said, let us make man in our image.
Baccalaureate Address source
Since coming back to Mobile after the retreat at Our Lady of Gethsemani I have been looking through my pictures and reflecting on our time spent there. One of the wonderful moments for me was being able to watch all of the birds at the bird feeders and in the trees. We have birds in our neighborhood but not like we saw and heard on the monastery grounds. It gave me an even greater appreciation for Thomas Merton’s reflections on the wildlife there, especially what he experienced while living in his hermitage.
This journal entry from July 2, 1964 has a deeper layer of meaning after spending time at the hermitage which he was allowed to build and move into in 1965.
Meadowlark sitting quietly on a fence post in the dawn sun has golden vest—bright in the light of the east, his black bib tidy, turning his head this way, that way. This is a Zen quietness without comment. Yesterday a very small, chic, blah and white butterfly on the whitewashed wall of the house.—(The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals, p. 222)
While I was writing this short reflection, a serious thunderstorm hit our neighborhood. It makes me think of the birds and all of the other animals who are our neighbors. May God protect them and keep them dry and safe. May God also protect and keep my siblings who don’t have homes to take shelter in from the storm.
“Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.”—Franklin D. Roosevelt
Verse of the day
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.
– Psalm 139:14
Voice of the day
Dignity is the soul-knowledge that I am worthy of love and respect.
– Rev. Jes Kast, “’Tis The Season For Family Boundaries”
Prayer of the day
Amid voices who try to tell us otherwise, remind us that you have created us all to be worthy of love and respect. May we see your wonderful works reflected in those around us.
In a day where we are too quick to choose sides in an us versus them battle, I believe we would do well to stop, step back, and check our assumptions. Yes, I am looking at myself in the mirror as I offer this challenge. In his book, New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton offers some very sound advice. And yes, he was looking into the mirror of his own soul as he wrote the following words.
Do not be too quick to assume your enemy is a savage just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy because he thinks you are a savage. Or perhaps he is afraid of you because he feels that you are afraid of him. And perhaps if he believed you were capable of loving him he would no longer be your enemy.
Do not be too quick to assume that your enemy is an enemy of God just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy precisely because he can find nothing in you that gives glory to God. Perhaps he fears you because he can find nothing in you of God’s love and God’s kindness and God’s patience and mercy and understanding of the weaknesses of men.
Do not be too quick to condemn the man who no longer believes in God, for it is perhaps your own coldness and avarice, your mediocrity and materialism, your sensuality and selfishness that have killed his faith.
Denise and I are both attending the International Thomas Merton Society’s Scholars retreat and at breakfast this morning, I was enjoying the garden view as I quietly ate. The beauty of the Abbey gardens and the multitude of birds have been truly inspiring. Both Denise’s Mom and my Mom loved birds, especially cardinals. Since their deaths, whenever we see the cardinals, it is a gentle reminder of their love as we remember them in our hearts and our prayers.
Thomas Merton’s words from his journal entry on June 5, 1960 take on a fresh new meaning as we prepare to hike to his hermitage this morning.
The first chirps of the waking birds: le point vierge—the virgin point—of the dawn, a moment of awe and inexpressible innocence, when the Father in silence opens their eyes and they speak to Him, wondering if it is time to “be”? And He tells them, “Yes.” Then they one by one wake and begin to sing. First the catbirds and cardinals and some others I do not recognize. Later, song sparrows, wrens, etc. Last of all doves, crows.
Source: A Year With Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations From His Journals
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?
“Invisible and indivisible, air is a place without borders or owners, shared by all of life on Earth. It is the rightful inheritance of all future generations, the matrix that has shaped the course of evolution. Air binds us all together as a single living entity extending through time and space.”—David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature
In April, 1962, a Connecticut Congressman named Frank Kowalski wrote Thomas Merton and requested that he write a prayer of peace to be read before the United States Congress. Mer- ton acceded to the Congressman’s request and on April 18, 1962, the prayer was read before the House of Representatives and entered officially into the Congressional Record. (Source)
Almighty and merciful God, Father [and Mother of us all], Creator and ruler of the universe, Lord of all history, whose designs are without blemish, whose compassion for the errors of [humankind] is inexhaustible, in your will is our peace.
Mercifully hear this prayer which rises to you from the tumult and desperation of a world in which you are forgotten, in which your name is not invoked, your laws are derided and your presence is ignored. Because we do not know you, we have no peace.
From the heart of an eternal silence, you have watched the rise of empires and have seen the smoke of their downfall. You have seen Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece and Rome, once powerful, carried away like sand in the wind. You have witnessed the impious fury of ten thousand fratricidal wars, in which great powers have torn whole continents to shreds in the name of peace and justice.
And now our nation itself stands in imminent danger of a war the like of which has never been seen! This nation dedicated to freedom, not to power, has obtained, through freedom, a power it did not desire. And seeking by that power to defend its freedom, it is enslaved by the processes and policies of power. Must we wage a war we do not desire, a war that can do no good, and which our very hatred of war forces us to prepare?
A day of ominous decision has now dawned on this free nation. Armed with a titanic weapon, and convinced of our own right, we face a powerful adversary, armed with the same weapon, equally convinced he is right. In this moment of destiny, this moment we never foresaw, we cannot afford to fail. Our choice of peace or war may decide our judgment and publish it in the eternal record. In this fatal moment of choice in which we might begin the patient architecture of peace. We may also take the last step across the rim of chaos.
Save us then from our obsessions! Open our eyes, dissipate our confusions, teach us to understand ourselves and our adversary. Let us never forget that sins against the law of love are punishable by loss of faith, and those without faith stop at no crime to achieve their ends!
Help us to be masters of the weapons that threaten to master us. Help us to use our science for peace and plenty, not for war and destruction. Show us how to use atomic power to bless our children’s children, not to blight them. Save us from the compulsion to follow our adversaries in all that we most hate, confirming them in their hatred and suspicion of us. Resolve our inner contradictions, which now grow beyond belief and beyond bearing. They are at once a torment and a blessing: for if you had not left us the light of conscience, we would not have to endure them. Teach us to be long-suffering in anguish and insecurity. Teach us to wait and trust.
Grant light, grant strength and patience to all who work for peace, to this Congress, our President, our military forces, and our adversaries. Grant us prudence in proportion to our power, wisdom in proportion to our science, humaneness in proportion to our wealth and might. And bless our earnest will to help all races and peoples to travel, in friendship with us, along the road to justice, liberty, and lasting peace; But grant us above all to see that our ways are not necessarily your ways, that we cannot fully penetrate the mystery of your designs and that the very storm of power now raging on this earth reveals your hidden will and your inscrutable decision.
Grant us to see your face in the lightning of this cosmic storm, O God of holiness, merciful to [humankind]. Grant us to seek peace where it is truly found. In your will, O God, is our peace.
Amen
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