On Pilgrimage

How does it feel to be 70?

2012-01-06T14:21:00.000+01:00

the Pentagon's War Room, as envisioned in "Doctor Strangelove"

Yesterday a friend asked, “How does it feel to be 70?”

I’m mainly astonished.

I turned 30 in 1971 and was very surprised to have lived that long.

Through much of the fifties and sixties, nuclear war seemed extremely likely -- a maybe-today-or-tomorrow event. For years I had expected few people would be alive in 1971, with no chance of survival for those of us living in high-priority target areas like New York and Washington.

I’m not old enough to remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but in the fifties there were the frequent open-air explosions of nuclear weapons in the Nevada desert as well as on various Pacific islands and remote areas of the USSR. No one in the northern hemisphere wasn't exposed to fallout. As a kid watching many of the blasts on television -- truly a theater of the Apocalypse -- I didn’t feel at all confident about the human future.

For a school project in the eighth grade, using a cardboard tube plus cotton and spray paint, I made a foot-high model of the mushroom cloud produced by an atom blast,

In high school, as a member of the school debating club, I gave a talk that had the title “Generation in the Shadow.” The shadow looming over us, I argued, was the mushroom cloud.

In 1960-61, while part of a Navy unit at the US Weather Bureau just outside of Washington, one of our regular exercises was to plot fallout patterns in the event a 20-megaton nuclear weapon to explode today over the capital. The drill made readiness for nuclear war very real.

Out of the Navy and part of the Catholic Worker community in New York, I tacked up a cover of Liberation magazine on the wall of my room that reproduced poet Kenneth Patchen’s brush-stroke calligraphy, “Get ready to die.” Sobering.

In those years, millions of school kids took part in duck-and-cover exercises. The entire city of New York along with many other cities had compulsory annual drills to prepare for nuclear attack. Year after year Dorothy Day was among those arrested for refusing to take part, sitting instead on a park bench in front of City Hall. Across the US, suburban families were encouraged to build bomb shelters in their basements or underground in their backyards.

In October 1962, there was the Cuban Missile Crisis. I doubt any adult lived through that week without the awareness he or she might become radioactive dust before nightfall. For a lot of people, probably including many atheists, it was truly a week of prayer.

In recent years we’ve come to know more and more about the many instances since 1945 when nuclear weapons were almost used. It’s remarkable we have lived to tell the tale.

Nor is the danger purely in the past tense. Far from it.

I feel like a survivor living in the world of Doctor Strangelove.

For more than half a century, the surprise of a World War III not yet having happened has given me a sense of every day being extra.

Having survived to celebrate my 70th birthday has also renewed my awareness that the efforts made by so many people (not only anti-nuclear campaigners but people in government and the military who might have pushed the button but didn’t) to protect the world we live in really do matter. Meager, yes, but not inconsequential.

Strangelove director Stanley Kubrick was one of the life savers. Thank you, Stanley.

I really can say, and not just to myself, “Happy birthday.”

-- Jim

A dream

2011-12-30T19:48:00.002+01:00

Grant Wood: Young Corn (1931)

A dream. I am lying on an old gray and white mattress in a large, unfamiliar house. Slowly the mattress rises from the floor and floats through a nearby door, then through other rooms and passageways until reaching a wide, roofed-over veranda. The house reminds me, as I think about it, of a building in Rivendell. We -- the mattress and I -- pass not under but through the roof as easily as light through a window. Below there are green hills dotted with old trees, the hills descending toward an ocean. The colors and contours could be from a Grant Wood painting. The mattress is now quite high up but I feel no anxiety about falling off. The air is comfortable and sweet. Passing over sandy beaches far below, the mattress carries me out over the deep blue water. I admire waves crashing against several small stone islands, too far below for me to hear the impact of water turning white. Now the mattress turns south (I have the feeling of being a passenger simply going where the mattress chooses to go). Soon we're back over land, slowing descending toward a a rural town -- farms, lanes, wooden houses, gardens. Now we're coasting along one of lanes past houses with fences that border their lawns. A woman on one of the porches sees me being carried along by the floating mattress. I see the surprise in her face and wave at her. She waves back. A little further we pass a father and son in a garden between the road and their small house -- the father tries to grab the mattress but his hand seems to pass through the material. All I feel is a kind of ripple. The mattress responds by rising just out of the man's reach. Meanwhile the boy is watching with astonishment. Now we gain altitude -- the town becomes smaller and smaller while the countryside around it expands. And I wake up feeling great joy.

-- Jim

A Pilgrimage to Hell

2011-11-30T11:48:00.001+01:00

where the trains entered Birkenau,
but there was no fence in those days

No one is certain how many died at Auschwitz. Most prisoners were gassed soon after arrival without having been registered, while, for those who were registered, the SS destroyed the bulk of their records before abandoning the camp. But years of research have shown that the figure is not less than 1.1-million people. Even that minimum figure leaves us with a number beyond comprehension. One million plus one-hundred thousand. In the summer months, there are perhaps that many leaves on the trees in the park where I take a walk each morning before starting work. I live in a city of 100,000 people -- thus the number killed equals everyone in this city plus ten more of the same size. But in fact there is no way to envision such a number meaningfully. I cannot take it in.

The way we usually deal with so large a number of human casualties is to focus on just a single face. One face, one story. This is manageable. A single life and death can open a window on a vast crowd.

The most well known face of the Holocaust is Anne Frank, who was fifteen when she and her family arrived at Auschwitz. (Later she was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where she died.) It is consoling to know that her diary has been read or seen enacted in film or on stage by far more people than died in all the Nazi concentration camps combined. In July 1944, shortly before she and her family were taken away from their hiding place, she wrote in her diary, "I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquillity will return once more."

Or there is the face of Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish scholar and gifted writer who wrote another widely-read diary of life in Amsterdam during the German occupation. She died at Auschwitz on the last day of November 1943. Turning down offers to go into hiding, she explained that she wished to "share her people's fate." The Nazis, she wrote in her diary, “are out to destroy us completely, we must accept that and go on from there. Very well then. I accept it. I work and continue to live with the same conviction and I find life meaningful...”

Or it could be the face of the Edith Stein, a nun with Jewish roots whose life ended on the 9th of August 1942 in a gas chamber at Auschwitz. She had been born in Poland, had lived in Germany and was in a Dutch Carmelite convent at the time of her arrest. “I told our Lord,” she wrote, “that I knew it was His cross that was now being placed upon the Jewish people; that most of them did not understand this, but that those who did would have to take it up willingly in the name of all. I would do that. At the end of the service, I was certain that I had been heard. But what this carrying of the cross was to consist in, that I did not yet know.”

For me, living in the Dutch city of Alkmaar, there is another way of making an intimate connection. On the 5th of March 1942, 213 Alkmaar Jews -- all the local Jews not in hiding -- were gathered at our one synagogue and from there transported, via Amsterdam and Westerbork, to Auschwitz. Only a few survived. (Today, after a 69-year recess, the old Alkmaar synagogue is under reconstruction.)

So many names, so many stories, so many faces to choose from. More than a million.

It had long been a hope of mine to visit this Golgotha of the modern world. Though far from the only one, Auschwitz provides one of the most vivid images of the factory production of dead bodies and of the assembly-line hells that can be created by fear and obedience.

The chance finally came this November, thanks to an invitation to give a lecture at an interfaith conference on peace at the University of Wroclaw in Poland. Appropriately for a pilgrim to a death camp, my topic at the conference was a rescuer -- Saint Maria Skobtsova of Paris, founder of a house of hospitality in Paris who saved the lives of many Jews and others before her arrest. A twentieth-century martyr, her life ended at Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany.

I was one of three Orthodox Christians from outside Poland who came to the conference. The other two were Metropolitan Kallistos Ware from Oxford, who led our small delegation, and Archimandrite Ignatios Stavropoulos from a monastery near Nefpaktos in Greece.

The day after the conference ended, we drove by car to the camp, now the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Also with us was Father Vladimir Misijuk, an Orthodox priest who has translated several of Metropolitan Kallistos’s books into Polish, and Dr. Pawel Wroblewski, one of the prime movers behind the peace conference at the University of Wroclaw.

The local weather itself seemed to be in mourning -- chilly, gray, on the edge of foggy. The area for miles and miles around is flat and thinly populated. The town near the camp, Oswiecim, is almost entirely of post-war construction -- the population had been removed by the Germans before construction of the concentration camp was started.

Standing near the camp’s only surviving crematorium, our delegation was met by an historian on the museum staff, Teresa Wontor-Cichy, who led us under the camp’s notorious Arbeit Macht Frei sign -- Labor Brings Freedom. It was here that the famous Auschwitz inmate orchestra played as columns of famished prisoners marched in and out twice a day to their places of labor. The music, Teresa told us, made it easier for the guards to count.

I had imagined Auschwitz-Birkenau as two inter-connected camps, but soon learned that Auschwitz served as the nucleus of forty-five other camps, with nearby Birkenau the point of delivery for the daily trainloads of prisoners, mainly Jews but also Christians, gypsies, homosexuals and political opponents of the Nazis.

In Auschwitz itself, nearly all the buildings had been constructed of brick. It could pass for a solidly-built military post. It would not have been hard to convince a naive visitor, so long as he didn't look behind the wrong doors, that the conditions of life at Auschwitz weren't so bad. Why there was even an orchestra! On the other hand, were a visitor to be taken inside nearly any building, he would have discovered that there are hells in this world worse than any hell he might imagine in the next. For example, there was Block 10 -- the domain of doctors carrying out the most vile medical experiments. One of the physicians, Josef Mengele, became known as the "Angel of Death." Block 11 served as a "prison within the prison." A small court operated here at which many were sentenced to death. The basement cells were for those deprived of all food and water. Among those who died in one such cell, now marked by a tall Paschal candle, was Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan priest who managed to take the place of a Jewish mother. He has since been canonized by the Catholic Church.

We stopped for a time in the yard between Blocks 10 and 11. This had been used as a place of summary execution for those convicted of breaking camp rules. Even a baseless accusation could mean death before a firing squad. Here Metropolitan Kallistos led us in a prayer, long silences between each phrase, both for those who died here and for the guards who had caused so much suffering.

The charts, maps and photos we saw in the various buildings we passed through effectively told the story of the creation and uses of Auschwitz and the surrounding camps, but what made the deepest impression were the many items the SS had failed to destroy as, the Red Army fast approaching, they made their hurried retreat in January 1945. We passed through room after room containing the mute evidence of people who, after stripping naked for a delousing shower (so they were told), were gassed by the hundreds at a time. The lucky ones were those closest to the shower heads -- they died immediately -- while those further away took up to twenty minutes to breathe their last.

Even as they were dying, their possessions were being carefully sorted. We saw a grim mound of reading glasses, thousands upon thousands of shoes, the train tickets more affluent passengers had purchased for the privilege of riding to Auschwitz first or second class instead of traveling in freight cars, countless suitcases bearing names and addresses of the doomed, and finally empty canisters of Zyklon B, the substance from which the lethal cyanide gas was released. We also saw dense piles of hair that had been cut from the bodies of women after being removed from the gas chamber. The hair was for use, Teresa told us, as a commercial component in making textiles.

Our final stop in the original Auschwitz was the camp’s one surviving place of gassing and body burning. It had escaped destruction because, when much larger gas chambers were built at Birkenau, this smaller space had been converted into a bomb shelter. The adjacent two-oven crematorium with its tall square chimney were also left intact.

Birkenau, about a mile away, didn’t bother with brick structures for housing its captives. It was a gridiron of quickly-erected wooden barracks filling a vast area, barrack after barrack as far as the eye could see. Though a small number of barracks survive, in most cases only the foundations remain. The one brick building left standing is at the entrance to Birkenau, a one-storey structure with an observation tower in the center built over a passageway through which trains arrived from every part of Europe. A few hundred yards beyond the station, literally the end of the line, was the area where an SS doctor presided over the selection of those healthy enough to work -- a slow death sentence for most -- while the rest were led away to the nearby gas chamber. About 75 percent were killed on arrival, including mothers and their under-fifteen children.

We visited two barracks, one of them still containing the deep wooden bunks on which inmates -- up to a thousand per barrack -- were stored at night like cigarettes in a carton. There was almost no defense against the elements.

Walking from place to place in the two camps, I felt as if I had turned to wood. Words failed me -- indeed my emotions failed me, and they still do. It’s not possible to respond in word or sentiment in an adequate way. But the awful facts and images are unerasable. Having been there in the flesh, the events that happened in this rural corner of Poland are forever real to me. Any pilgrim to Auschwitz is brought closer to the mainly anonymous people, saints among them, who died here.

One thought kept running through my mind. This human-made hell could never have existed without fear and obedience. Those who ran the camps, from the commandants to the lowest ranking soldier, knew they would themselves be killed if they failed to obey orders. While no doubt some of the staff were already psychopaths, most of those who were assigned here were, at least at the start, ordinary people, probably relieved that they weren’t being sent into combat.

Adolf Eichmann, the chief bureaucrat of the Holocaust, claimed that he had no ill feeling against Jews. He did what he did because it was his assigned duty. He was “just following orders.” We have heard the same justifications from everyone involved in all the concentration camps: “I was just following orders.” The same was true of those who created and staffed the Gulag Archipelago or who dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or who firebombed Tokyo or Dresden or Coventry or London. It remains true of those today whose daily work involves killing. Only psychopaths want to kill. The rest of us are “just following orders,” whether because of a sense of duty or driven by fear of what the consequences would if we dared to say no.

Following orders is made easier by propaganda -- slogans inciting fear and hatred, slogans to kill by. For everyone involved wants to believe that the murderous work he or she is doing serves, at least eventually, some larger good. But underneath it all is fear -- fear of punishment, fear of exclusion, fear of death. Thus we conclude that it’s better to remain alive by becoming a murderer than to die without innocent blood on our hands.

At Auschwitz I kept thinking of Easter, an event which, for Christians at least, ought to equip us not to fear death and no longer to be prisoners of hell. But how rare are the Paschal people.

Jim

* * *

Photos of our visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157628042735399/with/6358571131/

* * *

2011-10-10T13:31:00.002+02:00

After the War Was Over: Seeing What You’d Rather Not See

My Lai massacre, 16 July 1968

It was in 1975 that the Vietnam War came to an end with the sudden collapse of the South Vietnamese regime. The iconic image of that event was a helicopter taking off from the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon carrying diplomatic and military personnel to safety aboard an offshore aircraft carrier.

The Vietnam War was one of the main events of the Cold War — three decades of combat that began in 1946 with the French attempting to regain their colonies in Southeast Asia. That stage of the war ended in 1954 with French defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. The result was the division of Vietnam into two zones, North and South. As French influence waned in South Vietnam, little by little the US took on the war the French had abandoned. One gets a vivid glimpse of the early stage of American engagement in Graham Greene’s novel “The Quiet American” or the film inspired by the book in which Michael Caine plays a jaded British journalist trying the make sense of what a very quiet American is up to.

The US objective was to prevent the Communist regime in North Vietnam from taking over the South as well. This meant not only taking sides in a civil war but to a great extent covertly creating the Saigon government we were supporting. Does this sound a little like current events in, for example, Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya?

If you have ever been in Washington, DC, perhaps you visited the Vietnam Wall and walked the length of its 58,272 names, all the US service members who died in that war. How many Vietnamese were killed is unknown — estimates range from one-million to more than three-million. For years American bombs rained down on jungles, towns and villages. Many thousands of those bombs carried napalm, a jellified gasoline designed to stick like glue to the body of whoever happens to be nearby when the bomb explodes. Napalm was only one of many varieties of “anti-personnel” weapons that were developed for use in Vietnam — another type exploded thousands of fragments of razor-sharp blades. Every war is hellish, but few have shown less interest in protecting non-combatants. In fact non-combatants became targets. At a place called My Lai, US soldiers methodically killed each and every man, woman, child and infant in the village.

When the US engagement in Vietnam was gathering momentum in the late fifties and early sixties, most Americans thought of it as something necessary to halt the spread of Communism and, shrugging their shoulders, paid little attention. Even if you offered a $20 bill as a reward, you wouldn’t have easily found people on the streets who, shown a map of Asia, could have pointed out the location of Vietnam.

At first it was only American military advisors who were sent, but then came combat troops, a few thousand at first, large numbers before the war ended. As troop levels rose and military conscription was imposed, public interest rose too. You pay a lot of attention to a war in which a family member has been forced to participate. The war became increasingly controversial. Small demonstrations eventually grew into mass events involving tens of thousands — in one 1969 demonstration, two-million protesters clogged the streets of Washington, DC.

Part of the disgust and repugnance that took hold of many Americans was due to the fact that this was the first war Americans were able to watch on television as it was happening. On the one hand there was nothing inspiring about the series of Saigon regimes on whose behalf we were fighting. On the other hand there was the sheer horror of seeing the casualties of the war. Most of the dead were women and children, the aged and sick — the people, that is, who were least able to protect themselves. About ninety percent of Vietnamese casualties were non-combatant.

As time passed and the war got worse, many protesters began to sympathize with the other side — the Vietcong, as they were called, the forces of the National Liberation Front, and North Vietnam as well, for what was a ground war in the South Vietnam was an air war in the North. Before the war ended, a good many American peace activists had been honored guests of the North Vietnamese. They were taken on tours, visited bomb victims in hospitals, met American prisoners of war who assured their visitors they were being well treated (in fact many suffered torture), and took shelter with their hosts when US bombs began to fall on the places they happened to be visiting. Many of them came back to the US with glowing reports of how warmly they had been treated by their hosts.

My own engagement in protest against the war began quite early, July 17, 1963. At lunchtime the day before, two members of the Catholic Worker community, Tom Cornell and Chris Kearns, had demonstrated outside the building in midtown Manhattan where the South Vietnamese Observer to the United Nations had his apartment. Their signs read, "The Catholic Worker Protests US Military Support of Diem Tyranny." Diem was president of South Vietnam at the time. It was the first US protest of Vietnam War. Hearing from Tom that this small action would continue each lunch hour until the 25th, I joined the next day. By the last day, our number had swelled to several hundred and drawn TV news attention.

In 1964, less than a year later, I wrote an article meant to give readers some basic knowledge of Vietnam and its recent history. It wasn’t easy doing the research. At the time there were very few books about Vietnam in the New York Public Library. There were also no privately owned computers and there was no web.

Not many months later I had left my newspaper job and was working full-time for the newly-established Catholic Peace Fellowship, an offshoot of the Catholic Worker. Our work focused mainly on assisting conscientious objectors who were refusing to fight in Vietnam and also making it better known to Catholics that conscientious objection as well as draft resistance was an option.

One of the events that brought Vietnam much closer to me at the personal level was a friendship that developed with a Vietnamese Buddhist monk and poet, Thich Nhat Hanh. In 1967, he asked me to accompany him on his lecture trips in the US. Vietnamese food, music, language and poetry became part of my daily life for weeks on end. I began to understand that the population of Vietnam was not tidily divided between Communists and anti-Communists. There were millions of South Vietnamese in the middle, many of them Buddhists. They identified with neither side and sought what they called a “third way” solution. They suffered a great deal of persecution from the Saigon government. A number of Buddhist monks and nuns gained international attention when they immolated themselves in acts of anti-war protest.

In 1968, I was part of a group of fourteen people, half of them Catholic priests, who filled sacks of key files from Milwaukee’s nine draft boards and burned them, using homemade napalm, in a little park in the center of the city. We were protesting both the war and military conscription. Following our trial, we began serving one-year prison sentences. I look back on it as a kind of sabbatical.

Released from prison in 1970, I renewed my efforts to end the Vietnam War. In 1973, I was appointed editor of Fellowship magazine, the monthly journal of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, America’s oldest and largest peace group. Two years later, it was my joy to edit an issue of the magazine celebrating the end of the war, at the same time raising the question: “And now what?” So much of our energy had been devoted to Vietnam, it wasn’t an easy question to answer.

What I didn’t anticipate was that Vietnam would still hold a major place in my life and in the lives of many others who had welcomed the war’s end.

While I was in France the following summer staying with the small Vietnamese community led by Thich Nhat Hanh, letters smuggled out of Vietnam arrived with the news that the Hanoi government was arresting and jailing not only participants in the former Saigon administration but also Buddhist nuns, monks and lay people who had actively and courageously opposed the war. Also at that time the French journal, Nouvel Observateur, was publishing a series of lengthy reports about post-war Vietnam. The author, Jean Lacouture, was the first western journalist invited into Vietnam by the Hanoi government. He was deeply jarred by some of what he saw, not least by his visits to prison camps. He estimated there were 300,000 prisoners, 100,000 more than Vietnam had admitted. He asked why there were so many? After all, there had only been 35,000 army officers in the forces of the South, and thousands of them had fled Vietnam after the northern victory as did nearly all government officials.

It turned out that many of those imprisoned were people, including Buddhist monks and nuns, who had opposed the war, siding with neither North or South. Those whose lives were centered in their religion rather than in politics, whether Christian or Buddhist, were being singled out, temples and churches closed, publications suppressed, charitable and educational projects locked up.

Thich Nhat Hanh showed me photos of Buddhist nuns and monks who, that past November, had burned themselves to protest government actions along with a letter from the nuns explaining their action. He also had news of the arrest and imprisonment of leaders of the Unified Buddhist Church.

Back in the US, I wrote an article about the reports that had reached Thich Nhat Hanh plus the reports by Jean Lacouture, a name well known and respected in the anti-war movement in the US. Circulating the text in draft to peace movement leaders prior to its publication, I vividly recall a phone call from a colleague who urged me not to publish it. Should it appear in print, he warned me, “it will cost you your career in the peace movement.” My caller was a member of the national staff of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization. Our conversation ended abruptly when he slammed down the receiver at his office in Philadelphia. I was astonished. Why would a peace organization wish to ignore human rights violations, especially in a country in which they had contacts in the government?

The caller’s key word was “career.” Until he called, I had no idea I had a “career,” but I began to realize that even in peace groups one can embrace a careerist mentality.

My article — “Vietnam: Reunification Without Reconciliation” — was in fact published in the October 1975 issue of Fellowship, by which time I was one of several people (the others included Tom Cornell and Robert Ellsberg) drafting an appeal to the government in Hanoi. Here are the main paragraphs:

“Beginning soon after the victory of North Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government in the Spring of 1975, and sharply increasing in recent months, reports have reached us indicating grievous and systematic violations of human rights by your government. The evidence is too specific and persuasive for us to ignore.

“Especially with regard to those imprisoned or otherwise detained, in May a Vietnamese official stated that 200,000 were being held in re-education camps. While some respected foreign journalists in Vietnam have estimated 300,000 detainees — the actions of your government constitute a great disappointment to all those who expected not the ‘bloodbath’ so eagerly predicted by the American White House but rather an example of reconciliation built on tolerance. We realize that those held include individuals responsible for aspects of the war and the repressive mechanisms of the former Saigon government. But, having believed your fervent past expressions of commitment to human rights, we are deeply saddened to hear of the arrest and detention of a wide range of persons, including religious, cultural and political figures who opposed the Thieu government despite considerable personal risks… [A list of names was included.]

“Differences among us on what could be hoped for in the revolution’s victory did not in the past hamper our solidarity in opposing America’s intervention. Our agreement, then and now, transcends difference in ideology and analysis, being firmly grounded in our concern for the lives of the Vietnamese people. We have recognized that the credibility of our witness is related to the candor with which we demonstrate our concerns and our commitment to certain ethical precepts regardless of politics…

“We therefore call upon you to honor the concern for human rights which you have expressed both in formal agreements and in countless conversations with peace activists. We call for a complete public accounting of those detained or imprisoned indicating as well, the charges for which they are held. We call on the government of Vietnam to facilitate on-the-spot inspection by the United Nations, Amnesty International or other independent international agencies in order to assure that those in the government’s charge are treated in accord with international covenants regarding human rights. We call on you to release any individuals who are held purely because of their religious or political convictions. We call for government recognition of the right to open and free communication.

“We recall the tragic self-immolation of twelve monks and nuns in Can Tho Province last November 2, protesting administrative orders redefining and drastically restricting their religious practice. We have noted reports that many service projects of the Unified Buddhist Church … including those assisting war orphans, have been closed, their funds frozen and properties confiscated.”

Quite a number of people quickly signed. Just as quickly passionate opposition arose.

Some of the appeal’s opponents were so outraged that they accused me of being a CIA agent. The author of an article in one peace movement publication proposed that I should to be sent to a re-education camp. Another accused me of being a white bourgeois American — which was true except for the adjective “bourgeois.” I was also charged with being a covert anti-Communist. (That reminded me of how, in the fifties, my father had often been accused of being a Communist, except in his case it was true.)

Rational opposition to the appeal largely fell into two categories. Some objected that the reports of human rights violations could not possibly be true. Another group said some of the reports, possibly many of them, might be true, but — given what America as a nation had done to Vietnam — no American, even those who had spent years of their lives opposing the war, had the right to protest what the Vietnamese government was doing.

On the positive side, the appeal was signed by ninety well-known Americans who had struggled to end the war, many of whose names would have been known and respected by leaders of the Hanoi government. We could reasonably hope to be taken seriously.

One of the appeal signers was Joan Baez. She called me one morning to describe the intense pressure she was under to withdraw her signature. It had been exhausting. The night before she had endured a six-hour coast-to-coast phone call from one weighty opponent of the appeal. In addition Joan told me that a distinguished friend, recipient of several peace prizes, had made a personal visit to warn her of Jim Forest’s “possible CIA connections.” Her first response to her guest, she said, was laughter. She then told him, “Jim Forest is much too nice — and much too disorganized — to work for the CIA.” (In fact how does one prove he isn’t working for the CIA? Should you ask the director of the CIA to certify you weren’t an employee? Denial only adds fuel to the fire of suspicion. The only thing you can do is joke about it.)

Joan wanted to assure me that the pressure to withdraw her signature had only made her more determined not to. She said she could hardly imagine what the pressures were on me. Then, to cheer me along, she sang me a song over the phone. Would that I had recorded it.

She also issued a public statement in which she recalled Albert Camus’s comment that justice is the “eternal refugee from the camp of the victor.”

“I have,” she said, “a general expectation that grave injustices will be inflicted upon the defeated after almost any war, and almost certainly after one fought under the banner of revolution. That expectation may be dismissed as undue skepticism or cynicism, as insufficient faith in and reliance upon the goodness inherent in humankind. I would like to be persuaded that this were so and that Vietnam today could be the instrument of my conversion. But the melancholy history of wars and their aftermath, to which recent decades have contributed a possibly undue share, seems not to point in that direction. My own hope is that the injustices that occur will be limited, and finally brought under civilizing control. That is my hope concerning Vietnam.”

What did our controversial appeal achieve? We certainly failed in our main proposal — Vietnam’s camps and prisons were never opened to the Red Cross or Amnesty International. But did we do some degree of good? Governments never acknowledge that appeals or protests have any influence, though occasionally later on we learn the impact was significant. Someone in the government writes a book, an insider makes secret papers public, revelations occur at a hearing or trial. But mainly we never know. Perhaps we made a positive difference for some of the prisoners in Vietnam, perhaps we totally failed. Perhaps we prevented worse from happening. All one can say with certainty is that it was a worthwhile effort.

What did I learn from this event? Here are five lessons:

* There is no peace where there is a systematic violation of basic human rights, beginning with the right to life itself. War of its nature involves a massive violation of human rights.

* Human rights issues can be divisive even in groups that one associates with the protection of human rights. Much of the opposition to the Vietnam War grew out of disgust with the systematic violation of human rights by the Saigon government — imprisonment and torture of dissidents had been commonplace.

* Attention to violations of human rights can severely strain relations not only between governments but between persons and organizations. Whenever we identify with the perpetrator of human rights violations, there is always a temptation to downplay, ignore or even justify violations of human rights. For example, in the 1930s, many on the left were rightly outraged by human rights violations carried out by Nazis and Fascists in Germany, Austria, Italy and Spain, but turned a blind eye to similar actions carried out under the red flag in the Soviet Union. The reverse was true of those on the right.

* Our way of seeing the world around us is often shaped by peer group pressure. Like certain kinds of fish, we humans tend to swim in schools. It happens even to dissidents, who band together in their own smaller schools. If I belong to a group that regards abortion as a human right, the chances are I will adopt that view. If I belong to a group that sees abortion as a violation of human rights, then it’s more than likely I will too. How little independent hard thinking we actually do!

* Last but not least, there is the problem of careerism. Careerism is possible even in idealistic movements. How easy it is for the bottom line in one’s life not to be the search for truth but the search for economic security. We say what our bosses or more powerful colleagues want to hear, and we say it with a smile. We even try to believe what we’re saying.

It’s only graying people who can recall the Vietnam War. It’s in a category of dusty past events that include the Punic Wars and the War of the Roses. Today Vietnam is a tourist destination and a country offering cheap labor to major corporations. But the issues raised both by that war as well as its aftermath remain all too timely. We continue fighting wars that bring us immense shame and cost immense treasure. We continue to pay lip service to human rights while ignoring them when it suits us.

-- Jim Forest

* * *
text as of 10 October 2011
* * *

For more on this topic, see Jim Finn’s essay, “Fighting Among the Doves”: http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2011/08/08/fighting-among-the-doves/

Breathing in the Dead

2011-09-11T12:54:00.000+02:00

[written one month after 9-11]

In the early evening, a month and a day after the twin towers of the World Trade Center suddenly became dust and rubble, I gazed down through the window of a small commuter jet slowly descending into Newark Airport, watching Manhattan unfurl north to south.

At the island’s upper end, rising steeply over the Hudson River, there was the dark patch of Fort Tyron Park containing my favorite New York museum, the Cloisters, a healing place that must have cured many people of suicidal thoughts; then the light-pricked darkness of the Upper West Side and Harlem; the long rectangular blackness of Central Park; next, Times Square and the theater district, glowing like a fireplace; then the Empire State Building rising steeply in Midtown, once again the city’s tallest building, its upper tiers illuminated red, white and blue, a nighttime flag in stone; then the smaller, dimly lit structures of Chelsea and Greenwich Village; and finally lower Manhattan and the Financial District with its own collection of skyscrapers, but now a maimed landscape.

It seemed as if a giant meteorite had hit the southern tip of the island, leaving a smoking cavity where the World Trade Center had stood. The klieg-lit crater had become Manhattan’s brightest spot. I knew there were men hard at work in the artificial light, like players in a football stadium, but couldn’t see them. Finally there was Battery Park and the glistening water of the harbor with the Statue of Liberty still holding her golden torch in the sky, still offering her silent greeting to newcomers who had crossed the Atlantic. But it was mainly the wound in Manhattan that held my attention as our plane descended toward Newark.

I had seen the same view twice while in the US in June. Now not only were the city’s most dominant urban landmarks no longer there, but it was a very different America in October.

The September 11 attack had focused on primary symbols of America, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The White House was the probable target of Flight 93, which instead crashed in rural Pennsylvania after passengers battled the hijackers.

When symbols are destroyed, it isn’t surprising that part of the response is also at the level of symbols: the national flag.

America has long been one of the most flag-displaying cultures in the world, but even on the Fourth of July in earlier years I had never seen anything to match the outbreak of flags that greeted me once I was on the ground.

Those first few days in the US were spent in Red Bank, New Jersey, a town linked to New York City by rail. This is where I grew up and is now the home of my oldest son, his wife and their two young children. In the course of a leisurely walk to the center of the town and back, I counted more than two hundred flags, not including flag pins of various kinds that many people were wearing, or the small flags in a park by the river which had become a spontaneous memorial site for local victims of the events of September 11.

More than a hundred people from Red Bank or nearby had been among the three thousands killed when the towers of the World Trade Center imploded. One of the dead had been a passenger on Flight 93. Here, amid many candles, were their photos as well as displays about them — wedding pictures, medals, prayer cards, poems, drawings and quilts. A smaller memorial was set up outside a nearby firehouse. Since September 11, when so many fireman and policemen sacrificed their lives rescuing others, Americans see heroes when they see people in either profession.

Visiting an Orthodox parish in Princeton, I was given a flag pin by a retired black woman whose son had narrowly escaped death at the World Trade Center. For her, she explained, the flag had become a different symbol after September 11 than it had been before. For her, it represented people trying to protect diversity in the face of ideologies that demand uniformity.

But another member of the parish found himself uncomfortable with the flag. “Before the bombing of Afghanistan started, I saw it as a sign of mourning, but now it might be taken to mean that I support the [Afghanistan] war, which is mainly lengthening the list of victims of September 11.”

Traveling across the US giving lectures and leading retreats in seven states, from Massachusetts to California, I became aware of other changes that were not as visual as the flag.There is the much greater care taken in searching passengers at air terminals. (A British bishop, Kallistos Ware, I know was searched with care three times on his way from London to Louisville because, as one searcher confessed, “you look like an imam.”)

I also noted a greater tendency of strangers to talk to each other while waiting for flights. People seemed more inclined to reach out. Perhaps it had to do with the extreme nervousness everyone feels about flying after September 11. Again and again I heard people remark that not since the Wright brothers got the first plane off the ground has it been so safe to fly as it is today, given all the precautions, but now everyone anywhere near an airport feels a certain dread. With passenger traffic down sharply, there are fewer flights, but these tend to leave on time.

Whenever I mentioned that I live in Holland, I would be asked why it is that so many people in other countries hate and fear the United States? I responded that, while criticism of various aspects of the US is widespread, Americans should be aware that the shock and grief they experienced on September 11 circled the globe.

Again and again I described the response of the Dutch — how on the day of mourning that stretched across Europe on the 14th of September, everything in Holland came to a dead stop at noon: every truck, train, car and bus pulled over, people stood still wherever they happened to be, transactions ceased in stores and banks, and a deep silence blanketed the land. Though the Dutch put out their flags only two or three times a year, every flag was out that day, all at half mast. Neighbors came to our door to express their condolences as if Nancy and I were local ambassadors of the United States.

In conversations at airports, schools and churches, I became aware of other changes that perhaps are best summed up by noting key words that one hears more often.

The word “war,” heard again and again each day, no longer referred to events in some distant place which many Americans would have difficulty finding on a map, but rather war up close, a war that might at any moment take one’s own life or the lives of family or neighbors, yet not war in any traditional sense. No particular country has attacked the United States. It is a war with people who refuse to name themselves, using methods which make it hard to identify those responsible. The main headlines during my month in America had to do with anthrax. Gas masks and anti-anthrax antibiotics were selling in huge quantities.

Another word I heard day after day was “vulnerability.” Americans were painfully aware that their country is no longer behind impenetrable castle walls. Clearly an enemy doesn’t need an intercontinental ballistic missile — he doesn’t even need a nuclear weapon — to become a formidable adversary to the world’s mightiest power.

One of the words being used far more frequently is “evil.” Though most people have had experiences of doing evil things, and also have been victims of evils of various kinds and degrees, the word “evil” itself was hugely neglected in the past generation or two. We preferred to speak of evil actions in psycho-therapeutic terms.

Inevitably the word “Islam” was being used far more than before September 11. I sensed an embarrassed awareness of how little most people know about Islam, how few and superficial or nonexistent are social contacts with Muslims. We are noticing both our own ignorance and the existence of an invisible wall.

The word “God” is being used far more often by people who don’t often enter places of worship and who think of religion as something for the brainless. It had been an embarrassing word for many people, a word one tried not to use, but the shock of September 11 has made Americans people think again about what life is all about, what is of ultimate significance. Many things Americans regarded as treasures on September 10th seemed like trash on September 12th. Churches couldn’t open their doors wide enough. People who hadn’t been at a church service in a long time were streaming in.

Perhaps the word one hears more than any other when talking about September 11 and its aftermath is “fear.” It is not that Americans were a people without fear before September 11. I wonder if there is another country on earth where there are so many privately owned weapons or so many locks per person? But the concentrated dread many have known since September 11 is of a different magnitude. The sale of hand guns has risen sharply. Stores selling gas masks couldn’t keep up with demand. Practically any product that makes the purchaser feel safer is selling briskly. According to press reports, the sale of tranquilizers, anti-depressants and sleeping potions had risen 40 percent.

While leading a retreat on the Beatitudes at Notre Dame University in Indiana during my last weekend in the US, I talked with a student who belongs to a group of peace activists on campus who have been wearing a T-short with the message “Pray for Peace” while handing out leaflets protesting the war, an activity in the present climate that requires real courage. “I think the bombing going on in Afghanistan right now is in part a political response to a contagion of fear,” he said. “Bombing is the government’s way of reassuring frightened people that we are taking the offensive now, even though it may be a strategy that makes acts of anti-US terrorism even more likely in the future. Bombing says, ‘We are doing something,’ even if the main thing achieved is to draw more Muslims to a pro-Bin Laden attitude.”

Before returning to Holland, I had a meeting in New York with a Greek Orthodox bishop. Taking the train from Red Bank to Penn Station, I walked the several miles to his office on East 74th Street. It was a beautiful fall day, the sky a deep cloudless blue, but every step of the way I was aware that this was not the same Manhattan I had lived in earlier in my life. Flags and signs of mourning seemed to be in every shop and bakery window, every restaurant, every newsstand. Everyone was wearing a flag pin. Faces revealed people still in a stunned condition. But what struck me most of all was the smell permeating the air, a strange burned smell. I recalled a phrase from an essay Dorothy Day had written in August 1945 just days after the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though living in New York, she was aware that the radioactive dust of those two pulverized cities was being carried by the winds around the globe. She was, she wrote, “breathing in the dead.”

And here in Manhattan, a month after the destruction of the World Trade Center, so was I. All of us were breathing in the dead.

-- Jim Forest

* * *

All Is Grace: two more reviews

2011-08-10T17:37:00.011+02:00

A publisher once told me, "Writing books is hard -- almost as hard as selling them." One of the chief ways a book gains readers is through reviews. I've been lucky with All Is Grace. There have been at least twenty so far. Here are two of the latest.

Jim

PS The most recent spotlight on the book is not in print but was a conversation with Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, recorded earlier today for use on his weekly radio program, "A Conversation with the Archbishop." It should soon be available on Sirius XM Satellite Radio (http://www.thecatholicchannel.org).

* * *

Today's Catholic (San Antonio, TX) / 15 July 2011

All Is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day
by Jim Forest
Orbis Books; 2011, soft cover, 344 pp.; $27.

Reviewed by Carol Baass Sowa

As a young woman, Dorothy Day twice lived with men outside of marriage (obtaining an abortion at the insistence of the first and bearing a child by the second), partied with the likes of Eugene O'Neill and was once employed as secretary to a founder of the American Communist Party.

Hardly appearing a likely candidate for sainthood under the above description, this remarkable 20th century woman's eventual conversion and devotion to the Catholic faith and her intense commitment to the poor and social justice would indeed see her, 17 years after her death in 1980, proposed for sainthood by none other than Cardinal John O'Connor, archbishop of New York. The cause for her beatification and canonization was approved by the Holy See in 2000.

Day herself was uncomfortable with being referred to as a saint during her lifetime. "I don't want to be dismissed that easily," she said. Still, she strongly believed that all are called to be saints, noting, "Sanctity isn't for the few but for the many, not for the exceptional but for the ordinary."

Author Jim Forest, who personally knew and worked with Day, has brought together in "All Is Grace" the various facets of her life to paint a compelling portrait of an ordinary woman who rose to the extraordinary.

Born in Brooklyn to a decidedly anti-Catholic father, a newspaper man whose profession Day would later pursue, her family lived a life of economic ups and downs that took them first to San Francisco, then Chicago. Along the way, Day would stumble onto religious faith, first, through a Methodist family next door and, later, a Chicago neighbor's story of a saint that moved her deeply.

It was through her older brother's job at a newspaper that exposed harsh working conditions that the teenage Day first became acquainted with the American labor movement and the "Left." Her reading would continue to draw her in the direction of the plight of the poor and she would later describe her exploration of the slums of Chicago as her first experience of finding beauty in the midst of desolation. No longer viewing the poor as shiftless, worthless people whose plight was their own fault, her life would become more inextricably linked with theirs as time went by.

In 1914, 17-year-old Dorothy began studies at the University of Illinois. An insatiable reader, she was especially taken with Dostoevsky, as well as other Russian writers, and she eagerly consumed histories of the labor movement. Haunted by the victims of social injustice in the laborers and their families she was surrounded by daily, she grew increasingly disturbed that more was being done to provide relief for the victims of social evils than doing away with the evils themselves.

Two years later she abandoned her schooling to move back to New York, where she found the poverty of New Yorkers even worse than in Chicago. Here she rose through the reporting ranks at various reform-minded publications, beginning with the Socialist daily, The Call, and became involved with ground-breaking social movements of the day, including labor union strikes, socialism, women's suffrage and pacifism.

Later years would find her championing César Chávez and the California grape workers' strike and protesting U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. She would be imprisoned more than once for civil disobedience, the final time as a frail, 75-year-old in 1973.

Day's reading and her renting a room in a devout Catholic household in the 1920s drew her closer to Catholicism, but life and work would take her to New Orleans, then back to Staten Island, before she became fully committed to the faith she would later fiercely defend.

It was the birth of her only child, daughter Tamar, and the desire to have her baptized that brought about Day's own baptism into the church whose practices she had been loosely following for years. Not wanting Tamar to "flounder as I had often floundered," Day would write in later years: "I wanted to believe, and I wanted my child to believe, and if belonging to a church would give her so inestimable a grace as faith in God, and the companionable love of the saints, then the thing to do was to have her baptized a Catholic."

Tamar's father, with whom Day lived for a few years, approved of neither marriage nor religion and they eventually parted ways after her conversion. (In a moving chapter in the book - and in Day's life - she later selflessly nursed, at his entreaty, the woman he had subsequently lived with for several decades, who was dying of cancer.)

Dorothy Day, of course, went on to found the Catholic Worker movement, which would combine her faith with commitment to the poor and social justice. Launched in 1933, in response to the Great Depression and its economic devastation, the movement's publication, The Catholic Worker, was brought about through like-minded Peter Maurin, a French-Canadian immigrant. It was he who convinced Day that what was needed was not a bloody revolution as had taken place in Russia, but a peaceful revolution spurred by a radical Catholic publication that would publicize Catholic social teaching and show how to follow it.

Soon the new publication was attracting the first of what would become veritable legions of volunteers, helping with the paper and with the houses of hospitality known as Catholic Worker Houses which sprang up to feed, house and clothe the homeless and destitute across the nation and beyond. There were also experiments in farming communes.

Espousing voluntary poverty and regarding what little she possessed as being "on loan," Day continued to work tirelessly to bring about the just world she envisioned, one in which all would see the face of Christ in the faces of the poor, the condemned, the marginalized. On the day her soul slipped away, Nov. 29, 1980, she was worrying about the survivors of an earthquake in the mountains of Italy.

When Cardinal O'Connor convened a gathering to discuss the possibility of promoting her for canonization, one of her fellow Catholic Worker staff members perhaps summed it up best. "If Dorothy Day was not a saint," he said, "it is hard to know what meaning that word should have."

* * *

Amazon.com / August 4, 2011

5.0 out of 5 stars

A remarkable book about a remarkable life

By George M. Stapleton (Park Forest, IL)

Some years ago I read Robert Coles' Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion. Just a few years ago I read Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, which interwove the lives of Dorothy, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton and Flannery O'Connor. I also read The Dorothy Day Book edited by M. Quigley and M. Garvey. I found all those books quite enlightening and nourishing. All Is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day, however, leaves me searching for words of praise.

I had read Jim Forest's biography of Thomas Merton, Living With Wisdom, so I knew when starting All Is Grace that I was in for a riveting adventure. By the time I finished this book I felt that I had come to know Dorothy extremely well.

Jim Forest and those who helped him in putting this book together have created something that is definitive and masterly. As he mentions near the end of the book, Dorothy Day is still a person who shakes up the lives of those who get to know her. While I am humbled and put to shame by her life and faith, I rejoice in the knowledge that she existed and lived her life so close to the ideals of the gospels.

* * *

The book's page on the Jim & Nancy site: http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2006/03/24/all-is-grace/

* * *

66 years since atom bombs fell on Hirohima and Nagasaki

2011-08-09T16:15:00.011+02:00

As today is the 66th anniversary of the atom bomb being dropped on Nagasaki, it seems a good moment to share both the article Dorothy Day published in The Catholic Worker shortly afterward and also a short text by Albert Camus published in the French resistance newspaper, Combat, two days after Hiroshima was destroyed.

Not many people at the time wrote with such clarity.

Nagasaki, by the way, was the center of the Catholic Church in Japan.

Jim

* * *

The Catholic Worker, September 1945

http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/daytext.cfm?TextID=554

We Go on Record

By Dorothy Day

Mr. Truman was jubilant. President Truman. True man; what a strange name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as true God and true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother of the Japanese, jubilating as he did. He went from table to table on the cruiser which was bringing him home from the Big Three conference, telling the great news; "jubilant" the newspapers said. Jubilate Deo. We have killed 318,000 Japanese.

That is, we hope we have killed them, the Associated Press, on page one, column one of the Herald Tribune, says. The effect is hoped for, not known. It is to be hoped they are vaporized, our Japanese brothers -- scattered, men, women and babies, to the four winds, over the seven seas. Perhaps we will breathe their dust into our nostrils, feel them in the fog of New York on our faces, feel them in the rain on the hills of Easton.

Jubilate Deo. President Truman was jubilant. We have created. We have created destruction. We have created a new element, called Pluto. Nature had nothing to do with it.

"A cavern below Columbia was the bomb's cradle," born not that men might live, but that men might be killed. Brought into being in a cavern, and then tried in a desert place, in the midst of tempest and lightning, tried out, and then again on the eve of the Feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord Jesus Christ, on a far off island in the eastern hemisphere, tried out again, this "new weapon which conceivably might wipe out mankind, and perhaps the planet itself."

"Dropped on a town, one bomb would be equivalent to a severe earthquake and would utterly destroy the place. A scientific brain trust has solved the problem of how to confine and release almost unlimited energy. It is impossible yet to measure its effects."

"We have spent two billion on the greatest scientific gamble in history and won," said President Truman jubilantly.

The papers list the scientists (the murderers) who are credited with perfecting this new weapon. One outstanding authority "who earlier had developed a powerful electrical bombardment machine called the cyclotron, was Professor O. E. Lawrence, a Nobel prize winner of the University of California. In the heat of the race to unlock the atom, he built the world's most powerful atom smashing gun, a machine whose electrical projectiles carried charges equivalent to 25,000,000 volts. But such machines were found in the end to be unnecessary. The atom of Uranium-235 was smashed with surprising ease. Science discovered that not sledgehammer blows, but subtle taps from slow traveling neutrons managed more on a tuning technique were all that were needed to disintegrate the Uranium-235 atom."

(Remember the tales we used to hear, that one note of a violin, if that note could be discovered, could collapse the Empire State Building. Remember too, that God's voice was heard not in the great and strong wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but "in the whistling of a gentle air.")

Scientists, army officers, great universities (Notre Dame included), and captains of industry -- all are given credit lines in the press for their work of preparing the bomb -- and other bombs, the President assures us, are in production now.

Great Britain controls the supply of uranium ore, in Canada and Rhodesia. We are making the bombs. This new great force will be used for good, the scientists assured us. And then they wiped out a city of 318,000. This was good. The President was jubilant.

[photo: Nagasaki's Urakami -- St Mary's -- Cathedral was 500 meters from the detonation. The many people in the church were among the 73,884 people killed by the explosion.]

Today's paper with its columns of description of the new era, the atomic era, which this colossal slaughter of the innocents has ushered in, is filled with stories covering every conceivable phase of the new discovery. Pictures of the towns and the industrial plants where the parts are made are spread across the pages. In the forefront of the town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee is a chapel, a large comfortable-looking chapel benignly settled beside the plant. And the scientists making the first tests in the desert prayed, one newspaper account said.

Yes, God is still in the picture. God is not mocked. Today, the day of this so great news, God made a madman dance and talk, who had not spoken for twenty years. God sent a typhoon to damage the carrier Hornet. God permitted a fog to obscure vision and a bomber crashed into the Empire State Building. God permits these things. We have to remember it. We are held in God's hands, all of us, and President Truman too, and these scientists who have created death, but will use it for good. He, God, holds our life and our happiness, our sanity and our health; our lives are in His hands. He is our Creator. Creator.

And as I write, Pigsie, who works in Secaucus, New Jersey, feeding hogs, and cleaning out the excrement of the hogs, who comes in once a month to find beauty and surcease and glamour and glory in the drink of the Bowery, trying to drive the hell and the smell out of his nostrils and his life, sleeps on our doorstep, in this best and most advanced and progressive of all possible worlds. And as I write, our cat, Rainbow, slinks by with a shrill rat in her jaws, out of the kitchen closet here at Mott Street. Here in this greatest of cities which covered the cavern where this stupendous discovery was made, which institutes an era of unbelievable richness and power and glory for man ….

Everyone says, "I wonder what the Pope thinks of it?" How everyone turns to the Vatican for judgement, even though they do not seem to listen to the voice there! But our Lord Himself has already pronounced judgement on the atomic bomb. When James and John (John the beloved) wished to call down fire from heaven on their enemies, Jesus said:

"You know not of what spirit you are. The Son of Man came not to destroy souls but to save." He said also, "What you do unto the least of these my brethren, you do unto me."

* * *

On the Bombing of Hiroshima

by Albert Camus

The world is what it is, which is to say, nothing much. That is what everyone learned yesterday, thanks to the formidable concert of opinion coming from radios, newspapers, and information agencies. Indeed we are told, in the midst of hundreds of enthusiastic commentaries, that any average city can be wiped out by a bomb the size of a football. American, English, and French newspapers are filled with eloquent essays on the future, the past, the inventors, the cost, the peaceful incentives, the military advantages, and even the life-of-its-own character of the atom bomb.

We can sum it up in one sentence: our technical civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests.

Meanwhile we think there is something indecent in celebrating a discovery whose use has caused the most formidable rage of destruction ever known to man. What will it bring to a world already given over to all the convulsions of violence, incapable of any control, indifferent to justice and the simple happiness of men - a world where science devotes itself to organized murder?

...Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only goal worth struggling for. There is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments - a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason.

Albert Camus, August 8, 1945 - (On the Bombing of Hiroshima)

* * *

the harrowing of hell

2011-04-20T16:30:00.002+02:00

Into Hell and Out Again

In this Byzantine-inflected icon
of the Resurrection, the murdered Christ
is still in Hell, the chief issue being

that this Resurrection is of our aged
parents and all their poor relations. We
find Him as we might expect, radiant

in spotless white, standing straight, but leaning
back against the weight of lifting them. Long
tradition has Him standing upon two

crossed boards--the very gates of Hell--and He,
by standing thus, has undone Death by Death,
we say, and saying nearly apprehend.

This all--the lifting of the dead, the death
of Death, His stretching here between two realms--
looks like real work, necessary, not pleasant

but almost matter-of-factly undertaken.
We witness here a little sheepishness
which death has taught both Mom and Dad; they reach

Christ's proffered hands and everything about
their affect speaks centuries of drowning
in that abysmal crypt. Are they quite awake?

Odd--motionless as they must be in our
tableau outside of Time, we almost see
their hurry. And isn't that their shame

which falls away? They have yet to enter bliss,
but they rise up, eager and a little shocked
to find their bodies capable of this.

-- Scott Cairns

[note: the icon is in a chapel of the Church of the Savior at Chora in Istanbul]

* * *

Saint George & the Dragon

2011-04-05T19:51:00.006+02:00

Yesterday I saw the cover art for my fourth children’s book, “Saint George & The Dragon.” It features the most colorful dragon I’ve ever seen, painted by the iconographer Vladislav Andreyev. This is not a dragon to play with! Yet in this profoundly Christian legend the dragon is only wounded by George. After the battle the people in the nearby town, whose children had been his food, are given charge of caring for their former enemy.

Today I have been trying to recall when the writing of this story had its first inspiration and realize it was in July 1987, when Nancy and I were in Russia together -- Nancy’s first visit there.

One of the main events of our days in the Moscow region was driving out to the St. Sergius-Holy Trinity Lavra. Before we finished that visit, we were taken around the monastery’s small museum by a young priest monk, Father Alexei.

Mainly he wanted us to look closely at the icons, one of which was of St. George. He pointed out that the saint’s combat with a dragon was not meant to represent an historical event in George’s life. “The dragon represents evil,” he said. “But the icon makes clear that it isn't George who slays the dragon. If you look closely, you see he isn't really holding the spear, just touching it lightly. It rests in his hand. Also notice the calm dispassion in George’s face. The iconographer makes clear that this is a battle without enmity. Also notice how thin the lance is -- thin as a pencil, not at all suited for combat -- and see the cross at the top. St. George is fighting not with a military weapon but with the holy and life-giving cross. The icon show us that it is only the strength of God that overcomes evil, not our own strength."

An abiding devotion to St. George took root that day -- and this small book had its genesis.

Jim

* more about the book...

* a collection of icons, paintings and sculptures of St. George...

* * *

Here is the entry about that day at the lavra that was published back in 1988 in Pilgrim to the Russian Church:

The most memorable part of our visit was the time we had with a young monk named Father Alexei. He spoke to us chiefly about the vital importance of mystical union with God through Christ: that it is possible, that it is worth one's total efforts, one's life, that indeed life is empty and pointless without it, and that it only happens within the community of faith, the Church.

"This Lavra is the center of the Russian Orthodox Church, and St. Sergius is the heart of the Lavra," Fr. Alexei said in welcoming us. "His heart encompasses the whole world."

As we stood before a model of the Roman catacombs where Christians worshiped during times of persecution, Fr. Alexei asked, "What caused this obedience to Christ? What caused believers to risk their lives but never to threaten anyone and never to defend themselves? The Christians could have taken up arms but instead they gave up their lives. They had the strength of obedience to Christ. Obedience is of the utmost importance, even obedience to death. They gave witness -- the Greek word for witness is martyr -- with their own blood."

As we stood before the oldest icon in the seminary collection, dating from the Ninth Century, he said: "Icons also are witnesses to Christ. It has been said that the fact that there is a Holy Trinity icon painted by Rublev is proof of the existence of God. Without communion with God, such an icon cannot be made. Without God we are not capable of such beauty. A lesser beauty has its roots in a greater beauty.

"Culture is based on cult. Culture forms us. In the Russian icon, the Russian recognizes his own culture, his self, because it is the Russian vision of God, something absolute. It comes from union with God. Western art is a big step down from this. It mirrors the culture only as an image of people removed from union with God. The state of the soul is reflected in what one paints and what one wants to look at.

"God teaches us how to get in contact with each other and how to treat the world. A useful way to understand our relationship to God and to each other is to picture God as the center of a wheel with ourselves at various points on the radii. As we approach God, the center, we approach each other, and as we move away from the center, we move away from each other. You cannot approach God without approaching others also. God asks us to love our enemies. That's difficult! But it is the way of perfection. We are called to achieve it. Someone isn't a saint because of his high morality but because of his communion with God. It is out of that communion with God that a saint loves his enemy. He cannot do otherwise. Love of enemies can occur only with love of God. The two happen simultaneously.

"Christ didn't say thinking is the way. He said love is the way. But sometimes it looks like madness. You have heard about the Holy Fools, the Fools for Christ. Some of the saints intentionally put on the mask of madness. Under their rags they often wear a heavy metal cross. Without a purified heart this wouldn't be possible. It is done to achieve the gift of humility without which it is impossible to love anyone.

"It is said that one of the Fools for Christ was taken into heaven where he saw many saints but not the Mother of God. He asked the angel guiding him where she was. 'She is on the sinful earth helping humanity.' He realized that the saints can enjoy all the gifts of paradise but they continue to be with us in our suffering.

"There are 700 basic models of icons, and far more models of sanctity. But in each case the perfected Christian has not achieved perfection through his own good works, but by faith, which can come only through the sacraments, only through the Church. We cannot be saved alone. We must be part of a community."

Looking at a fifteenth century icon of St. George slaying the dragon. Fr. Alexei pointed out that the saint’s combat with a dragon was not meant to represent an historical event in George’s life. “The dragon represents evil,” he said. “But the icon makes clear that it isn't George who slays the dragon. If you look closely, you see he isn't really holding the spear, just touching it lightly. It rests in his hand. Also notice the calm dispassion in George’s face. The iconographer makes clear that this is a battle without enmity. Also notice how thin the lance is -- thin as a pencil, not at all suited for combat -- and see the cross at the top. St. George is fighting not with a military weapon but with the holy and life-giving cross. The icon show us that it is only the strength of God that overcomes evil, not our own strength."

St. Paul, in a nearby icon, is shown holding the Bible with a powerful grip. "You see him full of life, ready to sacrifice himself. You feel his anguished love of his brothers and sisters so profound that he was prepared to be separated from Christ if that would draw others closer. The Bible is shown in reverse perspective. The Bible is smaller for the person standing in front of the icon than it is for St. Paul. You realize that you are only at the beginning of the road of faith. It is only in deeds for God's sake that we start on the way to God."

We stood before the relics of St. Sergius: two chalices made of wood, several small icons, one of his sandals, a tool he used in making wooden toys. (Zagorsk is still renowned for its wooden toys.)

Fr. Alexei said that there are still experiences at the Lavra of people encountering St. Sergius. "In one case a pilgrim came from a remote part of the country and had made no arrangements to stay anywhere for the night. It began to rain. An old man came up to him and asked, 'Why are you standing in the rain? Please join me.' They walked for fifteen minutes to a little cabin. The old man gave his guest bread and water and a bench to lay on. When the man woke in the morning, the cabin was gone. The pilgrim discovered he was under a for tree. He told the monks what had happened. They knew that once again St. Sergius himself had cared for another pilgrim."

We eagerly listened to everything Fr. Alexei said, like hungry people being fed. We could sense his excitement and the mounting enthusiasm he felt as he shared more and more with us. Finally, when we parted, he thanked us for our attentiveness, and said, "I think one day you will become naturalized Russian citizens."

[The prophecy has yet to be fulfilled, but in 1988 we became “naturalized citizens” of the Russian Orthodox Church.]

Fr. Alexei spoke so intently and with such clear devotion and intelligence that even our translator, Vasili, was impressed, "old hard-boiled egg though I am."

* * *

Close encounters with Einstein

2011-04-01T14:06:00.005+02:00

One of the golden moments of my childhood was, while in Princeton to have lunch with a cousin, my mother, brother and I happened to see Albert Einstein walking down the street toward us. There was no mistaking him -- Einstein looked exactly like Einstein. He also seemed very approachable, though I was too surprised to actually go up to him and say hello.

What would I have said? Maybe, “Mister Einstein, you look just like all the photos of you!”

And no doubt he would have replied to eight-year-old me, “That’s because E equals m c squared.”

* * *

Sharing this story with my friend Ken Curtin, he responded with another:

Legend says Einstein was once asked by a cocktail party hostess to explain his famous theory of relativity. He allegedly answered with an allegory thus:

Once I was walking with a blind friend and mentioned that I would like a glass of milk. He said, "Glass I know, but what is milk?" I said "Milk is a white liquid." He said,"Lliquid I know, but what is white?" I said "White is the color of a swan's feathers." He said, "Feathers I know, but what is a swan?" I said, "A swan is a bird with a crooked neck." He said "Neck I know, but what is crooked?" I took his arm and said, "This is straight," and, bending it, said,"This is crooked." "OHHH!" my friend said, "Now I understand what milk is!"

* * *

To which one might add: "Now I know what milk is, but what is understanding?"

Jim

* * *

A little family history

2011-02-17T13:30:00.020+01:00

I got a query this morning from my 13-year-old grandson Zackary Forest in Red Bank, New Jersey:

I have a question for you, grandpa. In history class we were talking about an explorer named Henry Hudson. I told my dad about it and he said that one of my ancestors was the navigator, his last name was Hendrickson. I told my history teacher about it and he didn't quite believe me. I searched it on the Internet and found nothing, I looked through some books and again, nothing, so now it comes down to you. Was my dad just playing a joke on me or was one of my ancestors the person that led Henry Hudson into the Hudson River for the 1st time?

My response:

Your dad is right -- one of your ancestors is Hendrick Hendrickson (then spelled Hendricksen), who was Henry Hudson’s navigator on the 1609 voyage of the Half Moon that sailed up the river that is now named after Henry Hudson. It was a Dutch ship -- its actual name was Halve Maan. Hudson and his navigator were trying to find “the Northwest Passage” -- a hoped-for shortcut to the Pacific.

Hendrick Hendricksen (perhaps the navigator, perhaps his son) was one of the early settlers of Manhattan. On a Dutch map made in 1660 -- attached is a copy -- you’ll see where he and his family -- your ancestors -- lived. map. It was right at the southeast corner of Wall Street -- that’s where the town wall was located in those days -- and Broadway, then named Breed Straat. In the 1660 map the house is on plot 7 in block B. Above is a copy of the map as drawn by Peter Spier for his book “Nieuw Amsterdam.” He copied it from the original, which I think is in the care of the New York Historical Society. You’ll find a picture of it on the web right here:

http://www.localarchives.org/nahc/images/CastelloPlan_JacquesCortelyou_1665-1670.jpg

And here’s one of the illustrations from the Peter Spier book. It will give you an idea of what New Amsterdam looked like in the mid-1600s.

There is a really amazing high-resolution panoramic view of New Amsterdam in those days here:

http://www.localarchives.org/nahc/images/panorama_96dpi.jpg

One last thing. It seems the Hendricksons mainly settled in New Jersey. One of the family homes is now a museum -- the Holmes-Hendrickson House. Photo below. It’s near Red Bank, in Holmdel, at 62 Longstreet Road -- a brick farmhouse that was built in 1754, 22 years before the Declaration of Independence was written. The house is now in the care of the Monmouth County Historical Association. According to Association’s web site, you can visit May through September on Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 1 to 4 pm. Maybe we can all go for a visit there when I come to visit in May?

Your great-grandmother, Marguerite, was a Hendrickson. That was her last name until she married and she still used it as a middle name throughout her life. It was from her, when I was about your age, that I learned the things that are in this letter. My middle name, by the way, is Hendrickson.

Papa Jim

* * *

And now this addendum from the family historian, Caitlan:

Hi Zackary,

I've been interested in history and genealogy for a long time and have done some research. One of the problems here is that the manifest of the Half Moon (the list of who was on the ship) was sent back to Holland after its voyage and it was lost, so it's very hard to prove who was on the boat. Except for the obvious Mr Hudson, of course.

But Hendrik Hendricksen can be found on old maps of New Amsterdam, or at least his house can. The map Papa Jim sent you is based on a map called the Castello Plan, drawn in 1660 by a man named Jacques Cortelyou (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castello_Plan). It is accompanied by an index called the Nicasius de Sille list (don't ask me why) and this shows that Hendrik Hendricksen purchased Block B plot #6 in 1660. (The numbering used here is different from the Spiers map, so the plot Papa Jim mentioned is probably the right one.) You can find the Nicasius de Sille list here: http://patricia.rootsweb.ancestry.com/nytristate/castello.htm.

Russell Shorto wrote a very interesting book about New Amsterdam called Island at the Center of the World. You might try reading that some time. It has lots of juicy stories about the people who discovered and lived in New Amsterdam, including Henry Hudson himself, who apparently was NOT a nice man. (If I remember correctly, his crew got so fed up with him they stuck him in a dinghy when they were on a voyage somewhere in Canada's Hudson Bay and he was never heard from again!)

There is also a project going on that might be worth checking out called the New Netherlands Project; that might be fun. (http://www.nnp.org/2009/info.html)

One more thing: there is an audio walking tour of lower Manhattan that you might want to look into, called the New Amsterdam Trail. It takes you by all the interesting 17th century sites and tells you all about them. Maybe that's another thing you can do with Papa Jim when he comes to visit in May? (Also, if you could remind him to pick me up a few bags of chocolate chips, I would be eternally grateful.)

Cait

* * *

good guys in a place for bad guys

2011-01-14T13:52:00.003+01:00

From a letter in which a friend in Maryland relates how she explained to her son why Jim Forest once spent a year in prison:

"On another note, I was giving Matthew a bath today and suddenly he asked me why our friend Jim Forest went to jail. The kid has a mind like a steel trap, forgets nothing. He specifically wanted to know why, if you are a good guy, you went to jail if that's a place for bad guys.....so, we had a long conversation and I made it as simple as I could given his age. I explained that you were trying to do something good, work for peace and protect young men from having to go to war, but you broke the law doing it... I gave an example of someone breaking into a store to get food for their kids if they had no money or help. Their intent was good, to feed their hungry kids, but in breaking the law, they might have to go to jail as a consequence....I did tell him that it's usually the bad guys who continue to break the law and do things that hurt others, like killing people, that stay in jail for a long time....and I told him that there are very few of those."

* * *

Care to know more about the Milwaukee 14, the event that resulted in my prison sabbatical? See:

http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2006/03/03/looking-back-on-the-milwaukee-14/

* * *

Sr. Rosemary Lynch, a peacemaker beloved by many

2011-01-11T14:24:00.005+01:00

Rosemary Lynch, a Franciscan nun beloved by many, died the day before yesterday (January 9) at a hospital in Las Vegas, Nevada, four days after having been hit by a car. She was 93.

After retiring from work at the Franciscan headquarters in Rome, Rosemary accepted an assignment in Las Vegas working with refugees and the poor. Once there, she quickly became deeply engaged in organizing resistance to nuclear weapons and war, as a result of which she became a co-founder of Nevada Desert Experience. Over the years, she was often arrested at the Nevada nuclear test site for participation in nonviolent acts of civil disobedience. (In the photo, above, taken last August, she is the person in the broad-brimmed hat behind the banner.)

I came to know her in 1985 when we co-taught a course at the Ecumenical Institute at Tantur, on the road between Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

I included some of my Rosemary stories in Ladder of the Beatitudes. Here are extracts in which she figures.

Jim

* * *

(From Ladder of the Beatitudes by Jim Forest, Orbis Books)

.... One of St. Francis's efforts as a peacemaker concerns Gubbio, a town north of Assisi. The people of Gubbio were troubled by a huge wolf that attacked not only animals but people, so that the men had to arm themselves before going outside the town walls. They felt as if Gubbio were under siege.

Francis decided to help, though the local people, fearing for his life, tried to dissuade him. What chance could an unarmed man have against a wild animal with no conscience? But according to the Fioretti, the principal collection of stories of the saint's life, Francis placed his hope in the Lord Jesus Christ, master of all creatures. Protected neither by shield or helmet, only arming himself with the sign of the Cross, he bravely set out of the town with his companion, putting his faith in the Lord who makes those who believe in him walk without injury on an asp . . . and trample not merely on a wolf but even a lion and a dragon.

Some local peasants followed the two brothers, keeping a safe distance. Finally the wolf saw Francis and came running, as if to attack him. The story continues:

"The saint made the sign of the Cross, and the power of God . . . stopped the wolf, making it slow town and close its cruel mouth. Then Francis called to it, 'Brother Wolf, in the name of Jesus Christ, I order you not to hurt me or anyone.'

The wolf then came close to Francis, lowered its head and then lay down at his feet as though it had become a lamb. Francis then censured the wolf for its former cruelties, especially for killing human beings made in the image of God, thus making a whole town into its deadly enemy.

"But, Brother Wolf, I want to make peace between you and them, so that they will not be harmed by you any more, and after they have forgiven you your past crimes, neither men nor dogs will pursue you anymore."

The wolf responded with gestures of submission "showing that it willingly accepted what the saint had said and would observe it."

Francis promised the wolf that the people of Gubbio would henceforth "give you food every day as long as you shall live, so that you will never again suffer hunger." In return, the wolf had to give up attacking both animal and man. "And as Saint Francis held out his hand to receive the pledge, the wolf also raised its front paw and meekly and gently put it in Saint Francis's hand as a sign that it had given its pledge."

Francis led the wolf back into Gubbio, where the people of the town met them in the market square. Here Francis preached a sermon in which he said calamities were permitted by God because of our sins and that the fires of hell are far worse than the jaws of a wolf, which can only kill the body. He called on the people to do penance in order to be "free from the wolf in this world and from the devouring fire of hell in the next world." He assured them that the wolf standing at his side would now live in peace with them, but that they were obliged to feed him every day. He pledged himself as "bondsman for Brother Wolf."

After living peacefully within the walls of Gubbio for two years, "the wolf grew old and died, and the people were sorry, because whenever it went through the town, its peaceful kindness and patience reminded them of the virtues and holiness of Saint Francis."

Is it possible that the story is true? Or is the wolf a storyteller's metaphor for violent men? While the story works on both levels, there is reason to believe there was indeed a wolf of Gubbio. A Franciscan friend, Sister Rosemary Lynch, tells me that during restoration work the bones of a wolf were found buried within the church in Gubbio. ...

When I think of people I have known personally who in various ways have shown a similar love and courage, a similar commitment to conversion, one of the people who springs to mind is Sister Rosemary Lynch. Now in her eighties, she has been a Franciscan since she was seventeen. She and another Franciscan, Sister Klaryta Antoszewska, live in Las Vegas. Their Las Vegas isn't the familiar gambler's mecca of bright lights and roulette wheels but of people who clean hotel rooms, work in laundries, clear tables, and wash dishes.

Those who meet Rosemary are impressed with her radiant smile and the interest she takes in others, no matter how minor their position in life. She tends to call people "Honey." Though she is preoccupied with some of the most troubling problems in the world, I have rarely met anyone over the age of ten so free of anxiety, a trait she credits to her parents. She recalls that, as a child, she misunderstood the words of a certain hymn. "The hymn started off, 'O Lord, I am not worthy,' but for years I thought the words were, 'O Lord, I am not worried!' And actually, in our home, that was our attitude toward the Lord and toward life. We weren't worried -- not about the Lord or anything else."

Saint Francis inspired her from an early age. "He was almost a member of my family. In our home we had an understanding of that marvelous universality, that cosmic love, that integrity of creation that are at the heart of Saint Francis. While we didn't fully understand how radical Francis was and what a reformation he started, in our home Francis hadn't landed in the bird bath."

In 1985, when Rosemary and I were teaching a course entitled "Making Peace, Serving Peace" at the Ecumenical Institute near Jerusalem, I asked her if seventeen hadn't been too young an age to commit herself to a religious community.

"Not at all," she assured me. "In those days we started just about everything younger. We took responsibility in our teens. It's a pity that nowadays we seem to be developing a culture of permanent immaturity, permanent dependency. You find university students who haven't the remotest idea what they want to do with their life. But when I was young, people had a goal that they were going toward. And this is what you still find among the refugee children."

Rosemary says the most important educational experience in her life began in 1960 when she was elected to serve at her congregation's headquarters in Rome, her home for sixteen years. "That's where I lived, but actually I was traveling a lot, months at a time. I would be visiting the different places where our sisters were working -- Europe, North America, Mexico, Africa, and Southeast Asia. I began to look at the world with different eyes. One of the life-changing events was my first encounter with starvation. I happened to be in Tanzania during a drought. For the first time I was surrounded by starving children. It was a conversion experience -- the realization that things were terribly out of place in the world. For months afterward I could hardly enter a store in the consumer society of Rome and see all those nonessentials and all the people buying them. I wanted to scream out loud, 'Doesn't anyone know that I saw a child die of hunger -- and you are buying false eyelashes!'"

Rosemary and Klaryta's work in Las Vegas centers on refugees, immigrant families, prisoners, and peace.

"We try to do these things on two levels, to combine immediate, necessary work in the community and work to change structures that cause suffering. Working with refugees, we have tried to change the notion of the State Welfare Board, which was denying refugees financial help. Visiting prisoners, we have worked for a pre-trial release program. Working for peace, we not only try to get rid of nuclear weapons but also to help victims of Nevada's many nuclear tests. We don't want just to apply band-aids, but neither do we want to lose contact with people by becoming too abstract."

In the years when nuclear weapons were still being tested in mine shafts beneath the desert, Rosemary spent hundreds of hours standing in prayer on a highway adjacent to the nuclear test site and many more hours meeting with test-site employees. She helped initiate Desert Witness, which each Lent brought thousands of people to fast and pray at the nuclear test site until the explosions finally stopped. Time and again she crossed the property line and was arrested.

Despite her many arrests, Sister Rosemary won the respect of people who were among the most law-abiding citizens. In 1985 the governor of Nevada and the mayor of Las Vegas honored her with an officially proclaimed Rosemary Lynch Day. (However, not all the responses to Rosemary's efforts were so appreciative. In February 1988, following another arrest at the nuclear test site, she lost her job with a social service agency. "I have observed that the more deeply a person enters into this endeavor of peace-serving," she wrote the agency's director, "the more the cost of discipleship goes up. For me to abandon my hours of prayer and fasting in the desert would be a betrayal of my own conscience.")

Rosemary sees her peace activities as a continuation of the renewal of Christianity associated with Saint Francis. "Not only were the brothers and sisters forbidden to have weapons or to use them for any reason," she often explains, "but so were the lay people who followed the rule he wrote for those living a family life."

In 1989 she and several co-workers decided to focus more intensively on nonviolence as a means of personal and social transformation, founding a group that took its name from a phrase often used by Saint Francis: Pace e Bene (peace and goodness). "Even if nuclear weapons were abolished," Rosemary points out, "unless we defuse the bombs in our own hearts, the human family is quite capable of finding other even worse means of destroying life."

The refugees Klaryta and Rosemary received in the days when the United States was geared for war with the Soviet Union was a young Russian couple and their son. They had been given permission to leave because they had Jewish family backgrounds, though they were not active in synagogue or church.

"The man was a sculptor and graphics artist," Rosemary recalled, "the woman a restorer of icons and an illustrator of children's books -- skills not in demand in Las Vegas! In the man's case it seemed Sister Klaryta was lucky -- she found him a job in a graphics studio, but all we could get for the woman was a job as a 'bus person,' clearing tables in a casino restaurant. It was a humiliating job for a sensitive woman and skilled artist. She accepted it, but it was very hard.

"We had found them a small apartment, but they often knocked on our door. We would make a pot of good strong tea and talk for hours. For both husband and wife it soon became obvious that they couldn't continue with their jobs. It turned out that this 'art studio' wanted the husband to make posters for pornographic movies. But for him art is a sacred thing. This violated the nature of his being. We told him he had to stop.

"In his wife's case, the crisis was caused by a state law requiring that bread left on the table must be thrown out, even if no one has touched it. She came home one night completely broken, in tears, saying, 'They make me throw away the body of Christ!'

"That night I finally understood something basic in Slavic culture. They understand that all bread is holy, all bread is linked to the body of Jesus, not only bread consecrated on the altar. I'm sure our ancestors knew this too, but in the degenerate society that we now have, we no longer see this. We can easily throw bread into the garbage. But our friend could no longer violate her heart and her spirit by throwing away bread. So we told her, 'You have to stop immediately.' And she did. Finally Klaryta arranged for the family to go to New York, where there is a large Russian community and a much better chance to work as artists and icon restorers. It has never been very happy for them, but at least it's better than it was."

Rosemary regards her activities not as making peace but being in "the service of peace." As she says, "None of us can make peace. Peace is God's gift. But we can serve God's peace."

Nuclear weapons and warfare were not at all in her thoughts when she moved to Las Vegas. "But in Nevada, where so many nuclear weapons have exploded, you can't not think about what a nuclear war would mean. Thank God so far there has been no World War III, but we have many victims of the preparations for World War III. They are all around us. Some are the people working at the testing site, where the cancer rate is much higher than the national average. Many employees have been radiated in nuclear accidents. In addition there are all those soldiers who were close to ground zero when there were above-ground tests. Many have died already, and many have had defective children -- the greatest sorrow. There are also the 'down-wind victims' who were in the path of fallout clouds."

Rosemary's focus has always been on people, not weapons. "Of course we hope our efforts make it more likely that the day will come when there will be no more testing and no nuclear weapons, but what we are doing has another, deeper meaning -- the recognition that we too, not only those making and testing weapons, are in need of conversion. Our motto has always been, 'Convert!' What we are doing concerns conversion. We need to convert our own hearts. As long as the bombs are exploding in our hearts, we have little hope of even understanding what is going on in the world around us. We hope not only for our own conversion but for a conversion that will lead our whole society in a new direction. The desert is a place linked to conversion. The desert has always been the classical place of spiritual solitude. The prophets of old searched for the voice of God in the desert. This is true for us too. So we go out to the desert to fast and pray. In the winter it is often windy and frigid, but in the warmer seasons it comes to life. You should see the desert at Easter time!"

Rosemary has developed a profound sympathy for those who work at the test site, many of whom she has come to know personally. "They are hostages of the bomb, just as we are," she comments. "Many friendships have taken root, especially with guards and police. Many people working at the site wave to us. I remember one worker who brought us a box of fresh donuts. He said, 'I may be on the other side, but I have to admire your perseverance.' Sometimes I am asked to help with very complex personal and family problems. There are people involved with nuclear weapons who have called me late at night with some personal crisis they needed to discuss. I have had sheriffs and military officers cry on my shoulder."

"Isn't there the danger of abusing people's vulnerability in such situations?" I asked. She told me, "I never say to them, 'You should quit.' I don't have the right. This is something you have to come to on your own. With the economic situation in the country so bad, many are glad to have a job, no matter what it is. Even so, some have left the test site, even at the cost of a lot of personal and family sacrifice."

When I asked how she justified breaking the law, she responded: "The real evil is perfecting methods of killing people and destroying God's creation. Breaking a trespass law -- crossing a white line in a road miles from the test site -- respects the essence of civil law and is obedience to the higher law. Sometimes the law needs help. Of course, you have to have a certain amount of openness and patience with people who don't see this and you must be willing to go to jail, which gives you a chance to 'visit the prisoner,' as Christ told us to do. But civil disobedience isn't for everyone. It is a call, a vocation. I would never say to anyone, 'You should do this.' But I ask others to respect the force of conscience that compels us who commit civil disobedience.

"We always practice openness with the police and everyone concerned about what we are doing. One consequence of this is that the police have always been gentle and courteous with us. They have even had a sense of the joy of the occasion. They try not to hurt us when they put on the handcuffs. They assist us getting into the police buses. It's remarkable."

Rosemary urges those who commit acts of disobedience to respect those who may feel threatened or be inconvenienced by such actions and to carefully avoid sarcasm, abrasive words, or rude gestures. "It is our policy never to have the kind of blockade where people go limp and thereby compel the police to have to carry us away. We don't want to call forth hostility in other people. Sometimes people kneel down in the roads to pray. Sometimes we hold up the cross. But when they ask us to stand up, we do so."

I asked Rosemary what she had learned from her years of talking to people whose life's work is linked to weapons. She responded:

"The main thing is not to fear approaching anyone. We need to learn to approach those whom we or others regard as our enemies, whether people in another country or the White House or people anywhere in positions of political or religious leadership -- people who have authority and power which could be used for the welfare of the human family. We need to think about the manner in which we approach them. If we can possibly imbibe a little of the spirit of Saint Francis, it will help. He always approached his opponents -- even a wolf -- in humility but also perfectly confident that he should go. He had a very great simplicity, something that we tend to lack today. We are far too complicated. We need to approach those we are trained to hate or resent or fear, and to do it on a very human level, in a loving way, seeing them, as Francis saw the sultan, as a brother given to him by God. If we can do that, what can we not accomplish?"66

What is striking about a person like Rosemary is the modesty and kindness that marks her efforts as a "servant of Christ's peace." She seeks nothing for herself, not even recognition, and is embarrassed on those occasions when she is singled out for attention. She is not undertaking such activities because they are good deeds or a credit to her or to her religious community, but because she has been drawn deeply into God's love and as a consequence sees everyone, even the most difficult or dangerous person, as a child of God, someone beloved of God, someone made in the image of God -- even if the likeness is damaged or almost completely hidden.

How desperately we need people like Rosemary, and not only in places where wars are being fought or planned or where weapons are being perfected, but wherever people are targeted, whether in the womb before birth or at any stage along the way. We need servants of peace in our communities, work places, homes, and parishes.

And who is the peacemaker who is needed? It is each of us. The beatitude of peacemaking is part of ordinary Christian life in all its daily-ness.

* * *

Las Vegas Review-journal / January 11, 2011 | 12:00 A.m.

Longtime Peace Advocate Dies after Being Struck by Car

By Mike Blasky

Ever since she was a child, Sister Rosemary Lynch took comfort in daily morning walks.

She maintained her routine when she moved to Las Vegas in the late '70s. Friends and colleagues said she liked to explore her community and examine all its nooks and secrets up close.

On Wednesday, the 93-year-old Franciscan sister and longtime peace advocate was struck by a vehicle while taking one of those walks. She died Sunday night at Nathan Adelson Hospice.

"She loved her walks. She did it for exercise and health reasons, but it was more than just that," said Peter Ediger, Las Vegas office manager of international organization Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service, which Sister Lynch co-founded in 1989. "It was a walking meditation."

Sister Klaryta Antoszewska, 78, first met Lynch in Rome in 1962, she said. They reunited in 1968 or 1969, and lived together until Sunday.

She was with Lynch on Wednesday on her last walk, when a "young kid" in a cul-de-sac backed into the women in a central Las Vegas neighborhood, Antoszewska said. Lynch fell and cracked her head on the sidewalk.

She was taken to Valley View Hospital and Medical Center, and her kidneys failed over the weekend. She was placed in hospice care Sunday and died that night.

Las Vegas police are investigating the incident and have not released details.

Lynch was an uncommonly forgiving woman who would have never blamed anyone for the accident, Antoszewska said. "She would not have any kind of negative feeling toward him (the driver of the car)," she said. "Everything was forgiven on the spot."

Lynch was born in Phoenix in 1917. It was here that she would ride her bicycle to the edge of town and walk in the desert. According to a church biography, she also fell in love with the Franciscan parish she attended. In 1932, she joined the Sisters of St. Francis of Penace and Christian Charity, where she taught grade school.

In 1960, she was sent to Rome by her local congregation, where she became part of the central leadership team and remained for more than 15 years. During that time, she made visits to her congregation's provinces around the world, including Indonesia, Mexico and Africa. "The exposure to the other cultures and countries makes you more sensitive and understanding and ready to help," said Antoszewska. "She always said, 'Never judge, because we don't know what's going on inside of someone else.'?"

When she settled in Las Vegas in 1977, she quickly became an advocate against testing nuclear weapons in the Nevada desert.

She'd often walk into the desert and pray, sometimes with a friend, but often alone. She believed that bombs were the common enemy of all mankind, she often said.

Despite her views, she became friends with Nevada Test Site workers, who could not resist her passion, Ediger said.

"They differed with her on the issues, but they recognized and appreciated her spirit very much," he said.

Sister Antoszewska said everyone touched by Lynch's hand remembered her.

Lynch still received letters and pictures from families of students she taught more than 50 years ago, she said.

"They would send boxes of pictures of kids and she wouldn't even know who they belonged to sometimes," said Antoszewska. "But she kept every picture."

As she approached her 90th birthday, she told Review-Journal columnist John L. Smith that she still spoke five languages and had forgotten several others with the passage of time. And she talked optimistically of the people of Las Vegas.

"There are so many good, well-meaning people here," she told him. "There are people who don't have very much but are willing to share. There are beautiful and authentic people who, somehow or another, managed to gravitate together. There are thousands of sturdy people who are doing their best in a culture that's not very encouraging. That's kind of how I look at it."

A memorial service will be held at 4 p.m. Jan. 23 at Saint James the Apostle Catholic Church, at 1920 N. Martin Luther King Blvd.

* * *

a stunning film

2010-11-06T12:43:00.002+01:00

Nancy and I watched "Sophie Scholl" last night, a remarkable film about courage, faith and martyrdom.

Arrested on the 18th of February 1943, 21-year-old Sophie was beheaded four days later. She and her brother Hans, a medical student, were members of The White Rose group based at the University of Munich. The group's first activity had been the distribution of a sermon by August von Galen, the anti-Nazi Catholic bishop of Munster, in which he denounced Hitler’s euthanasia program.

The group managed to publish and widely distribute six leaflets before they were caught. An extract from one leaflet: "Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes—crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure—reach the light of day?"

The film focuses on Sophie and Hans from the evening before their arrest until their execution.

It's clear that their religious faith was a key element in their actions.

Jim

The Battle of Blair Mountain

2010-11-01T13:26:00.002+01:00

When Alex Patico and I were driving from the Patico home in Maryland to Murfreesboro, Tennessee a few weeks ago, we stopped midway in Charleston to visit a friend and spend the night at a bed & breakfast. There we happened to meet a West Virginian who mentioned a significant event in the state’s history, the Battle of Blair Mountain. She referred to it as if you would have to be a piece of driftwood not to know about it. For me, it rang only the faintest of bells. I’ve since had an e-mail from our chance acquaintance with a link to a Wikipedia text about this important confrontation between the owners with their private army and the men who mined the coal. To be a union organizer, or even a union sympathizer, was to invite your own murder. The miners were treated pretty much as slaves, if not worse. During the Battle of Blair Mountain, the US military intervened, dropping bombs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

Elements of this story made their way into the film “Matewan.”

Jim

Thank you, Nancy...

2010-10-31T15:12:00.003+01:00

For many people, today is Halloween. For Nancy and me it’s the third anniversary of the relocation of one of her kidney’s into my abdomen where it has dwelt happily an efficiently ever since. Three years! If I had a bottle of champagne in the house, this would be the right day to open it.

My first words today were addressed to the donor: “Thank you, Nancy.”

For nearly two years the backbone of my life in so many ways was the dialysis. Everything had to be arranged around those three weekly sessions of blood filtering. Normally this was at the local hospital, but, if I were traveling, sometimes in hospitals or clinics in other countries: Greece, Spain, Italy, England, France, Canada and the US.

Ever since the transplant, I have felt something like Lazarus after being brought back to life by his friend Jesus three days after being placed in his tomb. Of course I had no real death experience, but kidney illness is, even in these days, a close encounter with death.

In case you have never read it, I recommend something Nancy wrote about deciding to make that donation, “Saying Yes” -- see: http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2009/07/29/saying_yes/

Jim

the vocational book seller

2010-10-26T19:17:00.008+02:00

I have never forgotten a lunch I had many years ago with Alice Mayhew, a vice president of the publisher Simon & Schuster. She told me the main problem publishers faced was “the demise of the vocational book seller.” She defined the vocational book seller as someone who knows and loves books and knows her/his customers, old and young and in-between -- someone who can say to a customer (a person known by name), “I have a book I think you’ll want to read.”

In the years since Alice made this observation, thousands of independent book shops -- the place one found vocational book sellers -- have been forced to close their doors. It’s a story that is part of the plot line in the film “You’ve Got Mail.”

Yet some independent book shops survive. My favorite is Eighth Day Books in Wichita, Kansas, whose founder is Warren Farha, a member of St George Cathedral, the Antiochian parish in that city.

Eighth Day specializes in Christian books. I know of no book shop so likely to have books -- new and used -- of special interest to Orthodox or Catholic Christians.

Eighth Day also occasionally publishes books. The latest is Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology by Fr Andrew Louth (patristic scholar and a member of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship advisory board). It was originally published by Oxford University Press but has been out of print for a long time. Used copies were not easily found.

One of the many pluses of Eighth Day are the helpful descriptions of each title provided on the online catalog. To give an example, here is the entry for the Louth book:

Published twenty-five years ago, Discerning the Mystery is still the finest critique of the Enlightenment's ways of knowing, coupled with a winsome description of a distinctly Christian alternative. Responding to what he sees as a "division and fragmentation" both in theology and the larger culture due to "the one-sided way we have come to seek and recognize truth? manifest in the way in which all concern with truth has been relinquished to the sciences," Louth sets out to describe the source of that fragmentation and to challenge the notion that we must "accept the lot bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment." He carefully reviews central themes of several precursors who have already forged a critique of the epistemological imperialism of the Enlightenment, principally Giambattista Vico, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, who in distinct ways demonstrated the legitimacy of the humanities' unique apprehension of truth. Further relativizing Enlightenment claims, Michael Polanyi proposed that science itself depends on non-empirical elements of investigation for its method to function, what he termed "the tacit dimension." It is here that Louth sees a "pattern underlying the apprehension of truth" that is strikingly similar to that of the Fathers of the Church, who set forth an approach to knowing and experiencing truth that ultimately can be "seen and heard and handled" (1 John 1:1-3), but only by those who reside in the bosom of the Church's tradition and avail themselves of ways of knowing unique to it. Louth's rather brilliant rehabilitation of the Fathers' use of allegory in scriptural interpretation, which interweaves Scripture and tradition seamlessly, illustrates this approach. The matrix of allegory requires and manifests the "tacit dimension" of the guidance of the Spirit, and underlines the theologian's need to hear Him. Or as Evagrios of Pontus might put it, "Knowledge of God--the breast of the Lord. To recline there--the making of a theologian."

I suggest you visit the web site of Eighth Day Books -- http://eighthdaybooks.com -- and bookmark it. You might also want to get a copy of Discerning the Mystery.

Jim

Remembering Ivy

2010-09-26T15:46:00.013+02:00

As a boy growing up in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, I added to my dollar-a-week allowance by delivering morning and evening newspapers. One of my customers was a retired actress named Ivy Troutman, a famous beauty in her youth, as you see in this photo in her taken in her Broadway days. (It’s now in the photo collection of the New York Public Library.) She was still quite stunning even in her sixties.

About 1950 or so, Ivy purchased a run-down mansion built in the mid-19th century and made it into something of a palace. For some reason, she took a special liking to me. The result was that I put Ivy at the end of my newspaper route, as she often invited me to stay for a while. Serving me a small glass of Dubonet (imported from France, but with water added in light of my age), she generally talked about her “salad days” as a Broadway actress, a career that stretched from 1904, when she was 20, to 1942.

The First World War took her to Europe to perform for the troops. After the war ended, she joined the colony of American expatriates living in Paris -- one of the “lost generation,” a term coined by Gertrude Stein and popularized by Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was a close friend of Ivy’s husband, the artist Waldo Peirce, a fellow American who had been an ambulance driver in France during the war.

One of Ivy’s closest friends in Paris was James Joyce. Perhaps the greatest treasure in her treasure-filled house was a copy of the first edition of Joyce’s Ulysses, published by Shakespeare & Company. Joyce had penciled in corrections on nearly every page. Ivy sometimes went to Manhattan for meetings of the Joyce Society. Its gatherings were on West 47th Street, over the legendary Gotham Book Mart, which later, when I moved to New York, became one of the book stores I visited most often.

Ivy had a marvelous art collection -- I found especially fascinating a small Alexander Calder mobile hanging in the living room and, in a hallway, one of Calder’s large black-ink circus drawings, drawn in a single line.

Occasionally Ivy had parties -- soirees -- for her friends living in New York. Though Ivy had a maid, I was asked to put on my Sunday best and serve drinks. The guests were mainly theater people. The only one I recognized was Raymond Burr, who at the time played lawyer Perry Mason on a popular TV series. There were also writers. Ivy introduced me to one of them, Allen Churchill, who I think at the time was researching a history of New York’s Greenwich Village eventually published as The Improper Bohemians. Meeting an actual author made a huge impression on me.

When I was fifteen, I moved to Hollywood, California, and lost touch with her, but I think of her often with profound gratitude for all the windows she opened in my life and for taking me so much to heart.

The only material gift from her that I still have is a delightful watercolor by Waldo Peirce. Peirce himself is on the left, manfully cutting down a tree, Ivy seductively reclining on the right, and the Maine wilderness, in which Peirce had grown up, in the background. It hangs in our living room.

-- Jim

* * *

Local archeology: unearthing The Sixties

2010-08-20T12:00:00.003+02:00

The archeologists have finished their work on the Paardenmarkt here in Alkmaar, having found lots of skeletons, one of them dating back to the Iron Age. Nancy and I have been doing a little archeology of our own right here in our house -- searching in closets and cubby holes for a large jar of peace and protest badges. Some of these date back to that remote, lost-in-the-mist era known as The Sixties, though most are from The Seventies, which was pretty much The Sixties, Part Two.

Our motive for doing so? The mother of our son-in-law Bjorn is turning sixty, an event that will be celebrated tomorrow night at a party near Rotterdam. The party theme? The Sixties! All who are taking part are requested to dress is a Sixty-ish way.

Thanks to our success in finding the elusive jar, Nancy and I will be wearing some of our peace button collection.

-- Jim

* * *

the quick and the dead

2010-08-11T15:29:00.011+02:00

Since the end of June, every week day, even in wet weather, archeologists have been hard at work in central Alkmaar looking underneath what for decades was a parking lot and, before that, a horse market. It’s this older role which gives the square its name to this day: the Paardenmarkt. It’s a two- or three-minute walk from our front door.

The archeologists -- most of whom appear to be students -- come both from the University of Leiden and Hollandia, a Dutch archeological research company based in Zaandijk. The project was commissioned by the city of Alkmaar after the decision was made to create a small park where the parking lot had been -- work that would involve disturbing the ground.

I’ve learned some history. Before the horse market, Franciscan friars lived here, members of a community founded in 1448. As they were educators, they must have run a school. Their friary stood on the east side of the square, with a walled cemetery where the digging is now going on.

The Reformation hit the Catholics of Alkmaar with hurricane force. In 1566, there was the “Beeldenstorm” -- the "image storm." Religious paintings were damaged or destroyed and stained glass windows and statues smashed. The only two statues to survive in the town’s cathedral were too high up for the vandals to reach -- no ladders were long enough. Another result of the Reformation, and the nationalism intertwined with it, was that the friars’ chapel was turned into an armory and foundry for making cannons.

In 1573, during the Eighty Years' War, when troops of King Philip II of Spain surrounded the town in an effort to defeat a Protestant-backed Dutch uprising, a small section of the cemetery was used for the burial of victims of the siege. The discovery of the mass grave was headline news throughout the Netherlands. (It was in Alkmaar that the first victory over Philip II occurred, thanks to local farmers breaking dikes, thus flooding the area used by the occupation soldiers.) A lead musket ball was found in one of the skulls, leading to the guess that this victim was Jacob Paulet, shot in the head on the 8th of September 1573 by a Spanish sentry when Paulet took the chance of looking over the wall.

For many people the mass grave -- all those skulls and bones, with their many indications of mortal injuries -- brought the siege of Alkmaar to life. The year 1573 suddenly seemed not so long ago.

In 1574, following withdrawal of the Spanish forces, the six surviving Franciscans were arrested, taken to the town of Enkhuizen and hanged. They are remembered as “The Martyrs of Alkmaar.” The former Franciscan cemetery became a market square and retained that role until the 20th century, when a horse market was less needed than a place to park cars.

The biggest surprise to date, even more than the mass grave, was the discovery three days ago of the remains of someone -- whether man or woman is unknown -- who died about 700 BC. The traces of bone, teeth and spine that are left are hardly more substantial than a shadow. While there has been evidence of human occupation in this part of Holland dating back to 1500 BC, it seems no burial this old has previously been found in this area. The body had been laid on its side with the knees drawn up so that they nearly reach the chin -- an Iron Age grave in the heart of Alkmaar!

Since the digging started, I’ve been spending a little time most days watching the excavation -- the careful removal of sand centimeter by centimeter, the repeated sweeping of each square meter with a metal detector, the regular discovery of skeletons, the making of photos and charts, the gentle freeing of the bones from the earth. (These are to be reburied in the town’s main cemetery.) So far about 150 skeletons have been found.

I’ve saved some of the photos I've taken to this folder:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157624438548719/

The present is fascinating, but at times the past can be even more interesting. It’s also quite moving to watch healthy young men and women armed with plastic spoons and soft brushes ever so gently unearthing the long-buried dead.

I’ve been thinking about how a project like this brings into high relief the tremendous importance memory has in our lives -- not only one’s own private memory, but the gradual expansion of memory to take in other lives, including lives and events in the remote past.

If I were a kid watching all this, maybe I would grow up to be an archeologist.

-- Jim

* * *

In praise of Dante

2010-07-12T21:38:00.008+02:00

Prodded by a question from a friend who has been looking at the photos I took last month in Tuscany, I asked Harry Isbell, who has translated for Penguin and other publishers some of the Latin classics, if he could unravel the text at the bottom of the Dante portrait by Domenico di Michelino that hangs in the Duomo in Florence. Smaller image above, a high resolution version here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/4767251321/sizes/o/

Harry responded this evening:

In my experience the art historian crowd does tend to gloss over anything that looks like an inscription, even at the risk of abandoning a vital piece of context which can very well illuminate the work at hand. This is no exception.

Every inscription of course is complicated by the fact that the realities of cost always demanded condensation and abbreviation. For this reason it is necessary to begin working with what would appear to be an unshrunken fragment. Voila. The inscription is of a poem, possibly by Michelangelo, though I'm far from sure of that, which reads

Qui caelum cecinit, mediumque imumque tribunal,
Lustravitque animo cuncta poeta suo,
Doctus adest Dantes, sua quem Florentia saepe
sensit consiliis ac pietate patrem.
Nil potuit tanto mors sava nocere poeta
Quem vivum virtus, carmen, imago facit.

Who sang of Heaven, and of the regions twain,
Midway and in the abyss, where souls are judged,
Surveying all in spirit, he is here,
Dante, our master-poet. Florence found
Oft-times in him a father, wise and strong
In his devotion. Death could bring no harm
To such a bard. For him true life have gained
His worth, his verse and this his effigy

The translation considerably more verbose than the original, is by E.H. Plumptre D.D., Dean of Wells and was published in 1899 in his 5 volume work, "Dante: The Divina Commedia and Canzoniere."

Another translation, by Edward Wright in 1730 reads

Behold the poet, who in lofty verse
Heav'n, hell, and purgatory did rehearse;
The learned Dante! whose capacious soul
Survey'd the universe, and knew the whole.
To his own Florence he a father prov'd,
Honour'd for counsel, for religion lov'd.
Death will not hurt so great a bard as he,
Who lives in virtue, verse, and effigy.

Jim

Photos of our stay in southern Tuscany:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157624064407075/

Siena photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157624333425634/

Florence photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157624209031657/

* * *

an image of paradise

2010-06-25T22:08:00.006+02:00

Two days ago we returned from a three-week stay in Tuscany. Mainly we were there to work, Nancy on a translation project and me to make headway on the new edition of my biography of Dorothy Day.

The last week we took time to visit Siena (staying in a convent guest house) and then Florence (this time staying in a convent). In both cities we visited churches and museums and saw many icons, mosaics and paintings.

I find this painting is an especially haunting image of the door into paradise: forgiveness. The painting was part of a temporary exhibition -- "The Arts in Siena in the Early Renaissance" -- at Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, an ancient hospital that in recent years has become a museum. Double click on the photo to see, in a larger size, different sorts of reconciliation.

The artist is Giovani di Paolo of Siena. He lived an exceptionally long life -- 1398-1482. This work is dated 1445. It was loaned to the exhibition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

My set of Siena photos, of which this image is a part, is here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157624333425634/

Photos taken in Florence in the days that followed our stay in Siena: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157624209031657/with/4732481089/

If you stand even more Tuscany photos, here is a folder from our two-week stay in Poderetto, a hamlet not far from Sovana and Sorano: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157624064407075/

Jim

Very quiet days

2010-06-10T12:21:00.005+02:00

Our second week in Poderetto.

The best thing about these days in rural Tuscany is that there is no internet connection in the house in which we’re staying. I would be surprised if there are two web-connected households in Poderetto. It’s barely a hamlet, perhaps ten or twelve houses. What matters most here, apart from family, are the olive trees, the grape vines, the farm animals. No shops. There’s a small grocery store in the village of Elmo a few kilometers away. Not far away there is the slightly larger village of Sovana, where we’ve twice gone for pizzas. A little further there is Sorano, a real town, and still further, perhaps fifteen kilometers away, is Pitigliano, the main commercial center of this region, dramatically rising from a steep hilltop.

Mainly we’re here in Poderetto. A quiet life! We’ve done amazingly little actual tourism. I’ve been quickly checking e-mail once a day at the nearby house of our hostess -- and Nancy’s translator colleague -- Diane Webb, opening almost nothing and responding only to a few e-mails, mainly those having to do with our forthcoming stay (the third and final week of our time in Tuscany) at monasteries in Siena (two nights) and then Florence (four nights).

This internet withdrawal has allowed me a kind of attentiveness to writing, revising and expanding my biography of Dorothy Day, still in print but 25 years old, but written when I had no access to Dorothy’s journals and correspondence. As it happens, the one translation of the new edition so far contracted is with an Italian publisher.

I’ve rarely known a similar opportunity for such tight-beam focus on writing, but especially in these years of e-mail. A truly monastic silence. How much more I could have done as I writer if I had been more focused on writing and paid less attention to correspondence!

It’s much the same for Nancy, who is spending most of each day concentrating on a translation project she, Diane and Lynne Richards are doing as a team, the collaborative enterprise that brought us here. (Lynne is staying at Diane’s house -- the “new house” -- just a short walk down the hill.)

Jim

Note: Tuscany photos taken so far: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157624064407075/

Maria on the Metro

2010-05-24T16:45:00.006+02:00

While in Amsterdam to retrieve my lost mobile phone, I happened to meet Maria selling the Daklozekrant ("Homeless Person's Journal") on Metro line 53. Perhaps because Maria has a smile that would light up the darkest night, she has the gift -- in an environment in which any kind of panhandling usually annoys -- to engage in conversation those whom she's inviting to buy the paper. And then there's that astounding wig, a major work of art...

-- Jim

"Acts of God"?

2010-04-20T12:06:00.008+02:00

I had a letter today from a friend whose faith has been profoundly shaken by the devastating earthquake in Haiti, an event insurance companies put in the category of “acts of God.” How could God cause so many desperately poor, defenseless people to suffer in this way?

Here is an extract from my response:

So-called “acts of God” -- earthquakes, tidal waves, droughts, floods, etc. -- definitely challenge the idea most of us have of God. What we can know about God is far more limited that what cats can know about people. For many people, the idea is that God runs everything -- from the weather to the stability of the earth. You might call it the “God-as-babysitter” idea.

My own concept of God, inadequate as it is, is quite different. God has given us a very uncertain place to live, and not only does God not protect us from each other (as we see in every war, and see in its most dramatic form in Christ’s crucifixion), but also doesn’t protect us from the unsettled planet that is our home. Among the things that are remarkable about the Christ’s Gospel is that it has to do with how to live in a world that is extremely dangerous, unpredictable and unfair.

I sometimes think about writing a book on various ideas of God that many people embrace but which are profoundly inadequate and which we need to move beyond. Doing so is very scary -- we fear we are losing God altogether -- but all we’re doing is moving into ever-larger rooms. The one constant is that Christ is with us as we make this journey.

It was remarkable to see several news clips made in Haiti after the earthquake in which, to my astonishment, people were singing songs of praise. It is very hard for us to imagine doing the same if we try to project ourselves into similar circumstances. But I think of that attitude -- much rarer in the rich countries than in the poor ones -- when I look at the Haitian wood carving that hangs on the wall in our living room.

Jim

(double-click on images to enlarge)

Ultra-Dutch places, a very Dutch art form

2010-04-14T11:04:00.011+02:00

One of the advantages of being over 60 in Holland is that every two months I get a free train ride wherever in the country I want to go. This time it wasn't far -- to the town of Monnickendam and the nearby island village of Marken, both in the province we live in, a district called Waterland in North Holland. As the name implies, Monnichendam -- meaning a dam with monks on it -- has monastic origins. (In fact there is no train to these towns, but it's not a long bus ride northeast of Amsterdam's Central Station.)

A folder of photos of these two Dutcher-than-Dutch places is here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157623847269118/

What helped me decide to travel near rather than far was a photo I recently saw of a "gevelsteen" (a facade stone sometimes placed on houses) of a guardian angel holding the house. Inspired work. I'd love to know who carved it. Note that the gevelsteen is replicated in miniature in the angel's arms.

I have a long-running love affair with these remarkable bas reliefs, many of which date back to the 17th century, though it's very much a living art form, as you see in the case of the guardian angel -- an carving just a few years old. A folder devoted only to gevelstenen is here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157594219021351/

Jim

Note: Double-click on the photo to see it enlarged.

thyme on my hands

2010-04-11T19:18:00.003+02:00

A favorite saying of my mother was "Time, time, said old King Tut, is something I ain't got nothin' else but." But I was into a different sort of thyme yesterday,thyme that's planted rather than measured, and in two varieties: Thymus Vulgaris (on the left, ordinary thyme, not nearly as vulgar as its Latin name suggests) and Thymus Citriodorus Aureus (thyme that has a slightly lemonly edge). This thymely couple is handily planted just outside our kitchen door.

Jim

Thank you, Glenn Beck

2010-03-26T17:51:00.008+01:00

I live a sheltered life, that is to say I watch very little TV. Until yesterday I had never heard of Glenn Beck. But when a friend in Kentucky sent me an e-mail asking if I was aware that Dorothy Day had been mentioned on Glenn Beck’s weekly TV show, I got curious. Via YouTube, I quickly discovered that Glenn Beck is more than willing to accuse anyone he doesn’t agree with of being a socialist, a communist, a marxist or a nazi, or even all four.

During his latest Fox News broadcast, Beck made mention of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, best known for its many houses of hospitality for the down-and-out.

It was really an aside. Beck’s agenda was to show that Jim Wallis (editor of Sojourners, a monthly Christian magazine that takes social justice issues seriously) is not the Christian he claims to be but is a socialist-communist-marxist -- just like that socialist-communist-marxist in the White House, Barak Obama.

Here’s how Dorothy Day got into it:

Glenn Beck: “Rev. Wallis told a story a couple years ago about the time he met — apparently Marxists know this person, I've never heard of her — the Marxist Dorothy Day. Listen to this:”

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

WALLIS: “My Dorothy Day story happened in Chicago. She was just leaving as we were coming on the scene. So we were living in Chicago. So I ran 20 blocks. And in the parlor of the Catholic Worker -- and in walks the great lady. Dorothy wrote a book about her life called "Love is the Measure." But she wasn't ever soft. Very tough. So you're a radical student like me, right? You're a Marxist like me, right? Yes.” (END AUDIO CLIP) [The part of the interview that followed, in which Day and Wallis talk about their conversion to Christianity was left out.]

Before the day is over, I must send Glenn Beck a thank you note. Thanks to his broadcast, sales are likely to pick up for the one book mentioned in his broadcast, “Love is the Measure.” Actually, it’s a biography of Dorothy Day that I wrote. Jim Wallis probably intended to mention Dorothy’s autobiography, “The Long Loneliness.”

But what is most helpful about Glenn Beck’s broadcast is that, among the millions of people who reportedly listen to his programs, there are bound to be a good many who are curious to know just who is this Dorothy Day.

The web being so helpful for quickly finding out whatever you want to know, without too much trouble they will discover that “the Marxist Dorothy Day” Beck referred to is known in the Catholic Church as “Servant of God Dorothy Day.” The title is granted by the Vatican when it officially decides to consider beatification or canonization of a particular person.

The process was begun in 1997 by the late Cardinal John O’Connor, Archbishop of New York. Here are extracts from what he said at the time, speaking from the pulpit of St. Patricks’ Cathedral in New York:

“Dorothy Day saw the world at large turned into a huge commercial marketplace where money means more than anything else. She saw people turned into tools of commerce. She saw the family treated as a marketplace. She reminded us frequently enough that the Church herself could become simply a marketplace. She loved the Church, and she was immensely faithful to the Church. She had no time for those who attacked the Church as such, the Body of Christ. She loved the Holy Father. But she recognized that we poor, weak human beings -- people like you, people like me -- could turn the Church into nothing but a marketplace...

“She had died before I became Archbishop of New York, or I would have called on her immediately upon my arrival. Few people have had such an impact on my life, even though we never met.

“Dorothy Day was born on November 8, 1897, and died November 29, 1980. Hardly a seminarian of my era escaped her influence. Rare was the young priest untouched by her life. Whether or not we honored in our own lives, her passionate commitment to the poor, or followed even distantly in her footsteps, she worried us. That was her gift to us, a gift I still cherish as I try to maneuver my own perilous way among the accouterments and ‘practicalities’ of life as a Cardinal Archbishop of New York...”

Dorothy Day, Cardinal O’Connor noted, had aborted her first child when she was a young woman:

“I wish every woman who has ever suffered an abortion, including perhaps someone or several in this church, would come to know Dorothy Day. Her story was so typical. Made pregnant by a man who insisted she have an abortion, who then abandoned her anyway, she suffered terribly for what she had done, and later pleaded with others not to do the same. But later, too, after becoming a Catholic, she learned the love and mercy of the Lord, and knew she never had to worry about His forgiveness. This is why I never condemn a woman who has had an abortion; I weep with her and ask her to remember Dorothy Day’s sorrow but to know always God's loving mercy and forgiveness....

“Radical though she was, her respect for and commitment and obedience to Church teaching were unswerving. Indeed, those of us who grew up knowing her recognized early in the game that she was a radical precisely because she was a believer, a believer and a practitioner. She, in fact, chided those who wanted to join her in her works of social justice, but who, in her judgment, didn't take the Church seriously enough, and didn't bother about getting to Mass.

“There are those who believe that because she was a protester against some things that people confuse with Americanism itself that [therefore] her cause should not be submitted. I disagree completely with that position. Some believe that her cause should not be initiated because of their contempt for Church processes. They believe that the whole concept of formal canonization is ‘folderol’...

“There are some who believe that Dorothy Day was indeed a living saint, and that the cause of canonization need not therefore be processed. Perhaps. But why does the Church canonize saints? In part so that their person, their works, their lives will become that much better known and that they will encourage others to follow in their footsteps. And, of course, that the Church may say formally and officially: ‘This is sanctity, this is the road to eternal life, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to house the homeless, to love every human person made in the image and likeness of God.’ It is this and nothing else: Our Lord summarized it all -- ‘You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole soul, your whole mind, your whole strength and your neighbor as yourself.’

“I wish I had known Dorothy Day personally. I feel that I know her because of her goodness. But surely, if any woman ever loved God and her neighbor it was Dorothy Day!”

-- Jim Forest

Saint Gerasimos of the Jordan

2010-03-17T10:57:00.004+01:00

Today happens to be the feast of Gerasimos of the Jordan, a saint who rarely feasted.

Among saints remembered for their peaceful relations with dangerous animals, not least is Gerasimos, shown in icons caring for an injured lion.

The story behind the image comes down to us from Saint John Moschos, a monk of Saint Theodosius Monastery near Bethlehem and author of The Spiritual Meadow, a book written in the course of journeys he made in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. This is a collection of stories of monastic saints, mainly desert dwellers, and also an early example of travel writing.

In the fifth century, Gerasimos was abbot of a community of seventy monks who lived in the desert east of Jericho, not far from the River Jordan. (Jericho is in the left background of the icon, the River Jordan in the foreground.) The monks slept on reed mats, had cells without doors, and — apart from common prayer — normally observed silence. Their diet consisted chiefly of water, dates and bread. Gerasimos, in ongoing repentance for having been influenced by the teachings of a heretic in his youth, is said to have eaten even less than the norm.

One day while walking along the Jordan, Gerasimos came upon a lion roaring in agony because of a large splinter imbedded in one paw. Overcome with compassion for the suffering beast, Gerasimos removed the splinter, drained and cleaned the wound, then bound it up, expecting the lion would return to its cave. Instead the lion meekly followed him back to the monastery and became the abbot’s devoted companion.

The community was amazed at the lion’s apparent conversion to a peaceful life. Like the monks, he lived now on bread and vegetables and shared its devotion to the abbot.

The lion was given a special task: guarding the community’s donkey, which was pastured along the Jordan. But one day it happened, while the lion was napping, that the donkey strayed and was stolen by a passing trader. After searching without success, the lion returned to the monastery, its head hanging low. The brothers concluded the lion had been overcome by an instinctual appetite for meat. As a punishment, it was given the donkey’s job: to carry water each day from the river to the monastery in a saddlepack with four earthen jars.

Months later, it happened that the trader was coming along the Jordan with the stolen donkey and three camels. The lion recognized the donkey and roared so loudly that the trader ran away. Taking its rope in his jaws, the lion led the donkey back to the monastery with the camels following behind. The monks realized, to their shame, that they had misjudged the lion. The same day, Gerasimos gave the lion a name: Jordanes.

For five more years, until the abbot’s death, Jordanes was part of the monastic community. When the elder fell asleep in the Lord and was buried, Jordanes lay down on the grave, roaring its grief and beating its head against the ground. Finally Jordanes rolled over and died on the last resting place of Gerasimos.

It is a story that touches the reader intimately, inspiring the hope that the wild beast that still roars within each of us may yet be converted — while the story’s second half suggests that, when falsely accused of having returned to an unconverted life, vindication may finally happen.

The icon of Saint Gerasimos focuses on contact between a monk and a lion – an Eden-like moment before creatures became a threat to each other. By the river of Christ’s baptism, an ancient harmony we associate with Adam and Eve before the Fall is renewed. At least for a moment, enmity is abandoned. A small island of divine peace has been achieved through a merciful action. The icon is an image of peace – man and beast no longer threatening each other’s life.

But is the story true?

Certainly the abbot Gerasimos is real. Many texts refer to him. Soon after his death he was recognized as a saint. The monastery he founded lasted for centuries, a center of spiritual life and a place of pilgrimage. He was one of the great elders of the Desert.

But what about Jordanes? Might the lion be a graphic metaphor for the saint’s ability to convert lion-like people who came to him?

Unlikely stories about saints are not rare. Some are so remarkable – for example Saint Nicholas’s bringing back to life three murdered children who had been hacked to pieces and boiled in a stew pot – that the resurrection of Christ seems a minor miracle in contrast. Yet even the most farfetched legend usually has a basis in the character of the saint: Nicholas was resourceful in his efforts to protect the lives of the defenseless.

Numerous accounts of the lives of saints show their readiness to offer hospitality to beasts.

In the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, one of the most striking stories concerns a wolf. Francis was asked by the people from the town of Gubbio to help them with a wolf that had been killing livestock. Francis set out to meet the wolf, blessed it with the sign of the cross, communicated with it by gesture, and finally led the wolf into the town itself where Francis obliged the people of Gubbio to feed and care for their former enemy. It’s a remarkable, but not impossible, story. In the last century, during restoration work, the bones of a wolf were discovered within Gubbio’s ancient church.

There are reliable reports that both Saint Sergius of Radonezh and Saint Seraphim of Sarov each had friendly relations with a local bear.

It is not unlikely that Jordanes was as real as Gerasimos. He seems to have been a man so Christ-like that fear was burned away.

In fact it has not been rare for saints to show such an example of living in peace with wild creatures, including those that normally make us afraid. The scholar and translator Helen Waddell once assembled a whole collection of such stories: Saints and Beasts. Appropriately, the copy in our house is scarred with tooth marks in it left by a hyperactive puppy who was once part of our household.

Apart from the probable reality of Jordanes, he happens to belong to a species long invested with symbolic meaning. In the Bible, the lion is mainly a symbol of soul-threatening passions and occasionally an emblem of the devil. David said he had been delivered “from the paw of the lion.” (1 Samuel 17:37) The author of Proverbs says a wicked ruler abuses the poor “like a roaring lion and a raging bear.” (Proverbs 28:15) Peter warns Christians: “Be sober and watchful, for you adversary the devil roams about like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour.” (1 Peter 5:8) Here the lion is seen as representing that part of the unredeemed self ruled by instinct, appetite and pride — thus the phrase “a pride of lions.”

In medieval Europe, lions were known only through stories, carvings and manuscript illuminations. A thirteenth century Bestiary now at the Bodleian Library in Oxford starts its catalogue of astonishing creatures with the lion. It is called a beast, says the monastic author, because “where instinct leads them, there they go.” The text adds that the lion “is proud by nature; he will not live with other kinds of beasts in the wild, but like a king disdains the company of the masses.” Yet the author invests the lion with knightly qualities, claiming that lions would rather kill men than women, and attack children “only if they are exceptionally hungry.”

Yet no one approaches even the most well fed lion without caution. From the classical world to our own era, the lion has chiefly been regarded as danger incarnate — a primary example of wild nature “red in tooth and claw.” And yet at times the symbol is transfigured: the lion becomes an image of beauty, grace and courage. In The Narnia Chronicles, C.S. Lewis chose a lion to represent Christ. The huge stone lions on guard outside the main entrance of the New York Public Library seem to have been placed there as guardians of wisdom.

There is still one more wrinkle to the ancient story of Gerasimos and Jordanes. Saint Jerome, the great scholar responsible for the Latin rendering of the Bible, long honored in the west as patron saint of translators, lived for years in a cave near the place of Christ’s Nativity in Bethlehem. Only two day’s walk away was Gerasimos’s monastery. The name of Gerasimos is not very different from Geronimus – Latin for Jerome. Pilgrims from the west connected the story told of Gerasimos with Jerome. Given the fact that Jerome sometimes wrote letters with a lionish bite, perhaps it’s appropriate that Gerasimos’s gentle lion eventually wandered into images of Jerome. It’s rare to find a painting of Jerome in which Jordanes isn’t present.

-- Jim Forest

note: This is a chapter from Praying With Icons, the revised edition, published by Orbis Books. The icon used here is the work of Emilia Clerkx, a member of St Nicholas of Myra Russian Orthodox Church in Amsterdam. She based it on a similar icon now in the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The painting of St. Jerome is attributed to a Follower of Pietro Perugino (1490-1500) and is part of the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Searching for Kitezh: a conversation with Alexander Ogorodnikov

2010-03-04T15:48:00.009+01:00

Yesterday the first copies of a book about the life of Russian human rights activist and former Gulag prisoner Alexander Ogorodnikov — Dissident Voor Het Leven by Koenraad De Wolf — was presented to both Alexander and the author at a well-attended press conference at St. Nicholas of Myra Russian Orthodox Church in Amsterdam. The publisher is Lannoo.

As Alexander’s name is not widely known outside Russia, perhaps it’s a good moment to reprint an interview with him that was made in 1999 during an earlier visit to Amsterdam.

* * *

Searching for Kitezh: a conversation with Alexander Ogorodnikov
Alexander Ogorodnikov was born in 1950. At age 17, he was a lathe operator at a clock factory. Three years later he began philosophy studies at the University of the Urals in Sverdlovsk, only to be expelled in 1971 for “a dissident way of thinking incompatible with the title of the Komsomol member and student.” He then went to Moscow where he studied at the Institute of Cinematography. He founded the Christian Seminar in 1974. From 1978 until 1987 he was a prisoner, finally released at the order of Gorbachev.

After his return to Moscow, he founded the Christian Democratic Union of Russia and the Christian Mercy Society, a group assisting the hungry and homeless with a special concern for children and adolescents. In 1995, Ogorodnikov set up the “Island of Hope” in Moscow, a center and orphanage for girls, victims of poverty, crime, drug-addiction, parental neglect and extreme abuse.

The following interview with him was recorded in Amsterdam on April 25, 1999, after the Liturgy at St. Nicholas of Myra Russian Orthodox Church.

Alexander began by recalling his time at Perm 36, a notorious camp for dissidents in the Urals near the Siberian border.

-- Jim Forest

* * *

Q: Perm 36 was one of the worst prisons in the Soviet Union. Quite a number of famous prisoners were there, Anatoly Schiransky, for example. Why were you regarded as so dangerous?

It goes back to starting the Christian Seminar in the 70’s. Now there is a fresh interest in what happened at that time — last year there was a television program about it. They united participants of the seminary from 20 years ago, when I was jailed and the Seminar was crushed after five years of life. The television producers wanted to see what had happened to us after 20 years — were we still loyal to the ideals of that time? Sadly, we see that many participants got lost in heresy and left the Church. Listening to my old friends, I realize freshly how difficult it is to get rid of the Communist system. Although 1991 was the official end of the Soviet Union, from the moral point of view it still has not ended. I compare it to a corpse which is decomposing and the poison it creates is everywhere. We carry it in ourselves. It is very important to stress this fact because people tend to underestimate it, and to underestimate the tragedy of Russia in this century.

When the Bolsheviks took over, they fought the Church not only because it was an institution of the Czarist regime, but because the Church was storming heaven and they were at war with heaven. Did you know that in 1923 there was really a trial — a revolutionary tribunal that brought God to court? God Himself was tried! Lunacharsky and Trotsky were the two commissars who led the process, and during this process they sentenced God to death. This was not a carnival — it was absolutely serious. God and the Church had to be crushed. In many of his letters Lenin stressed the importance of getting rid of priests. The whole fight against the church and religion was carefully planned and very fierce. In 1932 there was the 17th party congress which not only produced a five-year plan for the economy but a five-year plan for achieving an atheist society. The plan was that by 1935 the last Church would be shut down, and that by 1936 even the word “God” would have disappeared from the language!

I won’t describe for you all the horrors and all the tortures, and how many bishops, priests, monks and ordinary believers were buried alive or killed in other ways. What I want to stress is that to a great extent the Communists succeeded in converting Russia to Communism. And yet for all their success, hundreds of thousands of people defended the Church and became martyrs and the Church was not destroyed. The Church displayed a unique, quiet belief. Many priests went underground. In the 30’s, there were only three bishops still not in prison. Probably in the whole Soviet Union in the 30’s, just before the war, only 50 churches were still open. Thanks to this war, the fate of the Church shifted. People returned to belief. Stalin invited Patriarch Sergei to come from his small house on the edge of Moscow to live in the former embassy of the German Ambassador — one day in a log cabin with no telephone, the next in a mansion in the heart of Moscow. Many churches were re-opened, and two theological schools.

Still, though the church had survived, when I was a boy we had no living contact whatsoever with the church. None. Most of our generation came from atheistic families. One of my grandfathers was a commissar who died for the ideals of the revolution. My other grandfather has a little different story, a different fate. He was an officer in the Czarist army during the First World War. His orderly converted him to Protestantism — it was a kind of very primitive protest belief against the official Orthodox state Church. Later in his life, when he was 37, they tried to arrest my grandfather. By then he was a school director. He was warned by a KGB member and fled into the woods. For two years my mother went into the woods to bring him food unnoticed. Because of that, he survived. Nonetheless, I was raised as a normal Soviet child.

Q: Where was that?

I was born in 1950 in Christopol, a town in the former Kazan government. We were raised in such a way that by the time we were 14 or 15 years old, we were ready to give our lives for Communist ideals. We were convinced that all these churches, which were only attended by old women, would sooner or later disappear together with their babushkas. Yet finally, in our search for true belief — true Truth — we began to understand that Marxism was a lie.

Q: How did you go from being ready to give your life for Communism to seeing Marxism as a lie?

In our school, there was a map of the world with flags marking every new country converted to Communism. We were singing revolutionary Cuban songs, and we were ready to die for Cuba or for any of these countries. How we moved from that attitude to understanding that the Marxist ideology was a lie is something of a mystery. In the beginning it was just a kind of clash with reality, because we looked at real life and saw it didn’t match all those high ideals we were taught. First we thought, “Well, we live in the provinces — maybe it takes a little longer for all these ideals to reach us,” though later, in Moscow, I could see the very same problems. Finally I was expelled from university because of my growing doubts about materialistic ideology.

So little by little people like me became critics of Marxism and of the Soviet system. Protest became a way of life and also a way of survival in the system of lies. Also little by little, through irony and criticism, we ended up in a kind of vacuum — with only criticism and irony, you end up with denying everything. We didn’t actually have any other choice because we hardly had any information. We were boiling in our own soup. Russian literature offered a kind of revelation for us when we came to know it. However you have to understand that the way Russian literature was taught in the schools was so perverted that you came to hate it. But thanks at last to Russian literature, we finally got a little, not understanding, but a feeling that somewhere there is God. Through our searching, we understood that God exists. This literary understanding of God was more abstract, like as creator or creative force or power, a bag of ideas. We had far to go from this abstract idea of the existence of God to finally reach the living Christ.

By the time I had been expelled from the university I was attending in the Urals, I managed to get to Moscow and enter the film institute. It was a kind of miracle that I was accepted. In that period one of my fellow students gave me a copy of the Gospels, though for a long time I didn’t read it. I couldn’t even touch it. The guy I shared my room with kept his money hidden in the Bible because it was a book that nobody dared to touch.

One day, as part of our lessons, we were invited to a hidden place where forbidden films were kept by the film institute. You had to go train to get there.

By this time the New Testament was the only book I possessed I hadn’t read, but that day I had it with me. There on the train and I opened the book and started reading. Immediately I had this very strange feeling. On one side my mind knew or told me that this is just a legend or fairy tale. But from my heart there arose a different feeling that became stronger and stronger that this is actually the truth. I couldn’t rationally understand that feeling. At that moment the conductor came into our carriage. Of course we didn’t have a ticket. We were all protesting students — the film school was more or less the only place where dissent was tolerated. The way we dealt with these situations when we didn’t have a ticket usually was to start arguing with the man, saying things like, “Don’t touch the guy because he is in Nirvana, and if you touch him he will die, and you will be responsible.”

For the first time I did something that rationally I couldn’t understand. I took out my money and wanted to pay. And wanted to pay also the fine for all of us. It was very strange, but I understood that the Gospels had done this to me.

At last we arrived and we walked through the woods towards the restricted cinema, first passing through several security posts. The first film we were shown was “The Gospel According to Saint Matthew.” It was real shock for me. It helped me overcome all my irony and to accept the Savior, Jesus Christ. The background of the film was that Passolini, an Italian Communist, had who stayed some night in some hotel, had the Bible on the bed next to him, read St. Matthew’s Gospel, and decided he wanted to make a film that would simply show every scene from this Gospel. He decided not to use professional actors. He found people on the streets. Jesus Christ was played by a Spanish student he happened to meet. After seeing this film, I couldn’t he silent. I started preaching to my colleagues. They were amazed because I had been such a cynical man, and here I was promoting the film as being the truth.

Thanks to this film, I became a Christian and searched for a Christian way of life. I was a Christian outside the Church. I didn’t know what the Church was. I took my Bible with me and went to look for people thinking similar thoughts. The people I met became the core of that Christian Seminary. This was the summer of 1973. We felt that we were missing something, that there was a mystery hidden somewhere, but we couldn’t touch it. The Church was far from everything we knew, but finally I made a big effort and went to church.

It was a big church near the center of Moscow. I was amazed it was so crowded. It amazed me that so many of those attending the Liturgy were from the intelligentsia. Despite there being so many people, I was able to walk toward the altar right through the crowd. A saw a bishop was celebrating. I didn’t understand what exactly was going on. Almost everyone was crying. I couldn’t understand why, but I was also crying. And when the bishop came out to serve communion, a certain power pulled me toward the chalice. It so happens, without thinking about fasting, I hadn’t eaten the whole day. Even the days before, it so happens, I had been fasting. It was by accident. And I received Communion. After that I found out that it was Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, the bishop in London, who gave me communion. He happened to be in Moscow at that moment.

Q: Were you already baptized?

My grandmother had arranged my baptism secretly when I as a child. My father, a Communist, didn’t know.

Q: What happened after your first communion that day in Moscow?

My friends also started going to church and participating in church life. But we encountered a new problem. It seemed to us that the church as an institution was not ready to accept us. The priests were afraid of us, and not only the priests. I went to a church in Kazan and when I entered, an old babushka tried to push me out. She thought that since I was a young man, I must be a representative of the government or the Konsomol [the young Communist association] who had come to provoke them in order to shut down the Church. At that time young people did not go to Church. She was protecting their church against me, or my kind. It was not easy to stay! But when the old women saw that I went to confession and I received communion, they all cried. At the end they all came and they wanted to kiss me and thank me. It was a powerful experience — they saw a new generation coming into the church.

We young people found ourselves in a very complex situation. It was difficult to find a place for ourselves inside the church. There was no living community, and no education. We were trying to find out what were the possibilities, what could we do in this world as Christians, as Orthodox Christians.

In this kind of schizophrenic situation, we could only pray while we were in church, and then it was like leaving our belief in a kind of waiting room. It was difficult for us to understand because the reason we came to church was because it was the truth, but outside the church we had to go on living as Soviet citizens. This being torn apart was very difficult. We came to church because here was the True Light. That’s why we started the Christian Seminar, because we couldn’t live with this church which was silent.

"Kitezh" by Ilya Glazunov

The Seminar helped us to start a living Christian community, and also to educate us in Orthodox belief. Then we started to travel all over Russia in what we called our search for the invisible town of Kitezh. Kitezh is a fabled place miraculously preserved under the waters of the Svetloyar Lake where the old way of life and worship has continued without pause. According to the legend, occasionally Kitezh rises from the water and appears to the devout. To “search for Kitezh” is a way of speaking in metaphors about the search for holiness. Little by little we were discovering the spiritual life in Russia. It was hidden, but it started to open to us. We didn’t want to remain just a small intellectual circle of Orthodox youth. We found monks and nuns who helped us. Now today we can openly talk about this, how in the Ukraine, at the Pachaiev monastery, they hid us from KGB at a time when the KGB was looking for us. And they helped us with other ways. They gave us money and helped us buy a house for the Seminar. We declared that house to be a kind of free territory, not part of the Soviet Union, a liberated territory. Of course the authorities paid us back and they declared us to be a forbidden zone. We were actually provoked, persecuted.

One day I was called to Moscow by the KGB. Five strong men from the KGB put me in a car and driven out of the city. The car stopped in the middle of the forest and I was thrown out of the car. They put me against the car, and encircled me, holding guns in their hands. At that moment, someone in a black suit came toward us out of the forest, walking in our direction very slowly. And the KGB men opened their circle and stood to the side. The man in black said, “You are free.” But when I tried to get through the circle of the KGB men, they wouldn’t let me pass. So I said to the man in black, “I can’t go, I can’t get out.” He made a gesture, and then I was able to force my way out with my shoulders. And I walked away, all the time waiting for a shot in my back. I didn’t know where I was — a very dark wood.

Then behind me I heard footsteps. The KGB men again surrounded me, one on the left, one on the right, one in front, one in back. They said, me “Now we will look for a place where we can shoot you.” I understood that this is the blind force of evil, which in this world you can never hide from. They brought me to a certain place, then one of them took out his gun and said, “Get down on your knees.” I responded, “I kneel only in front of God.” Then he fired a shot, but over my head. After that he said, “We don’t want any new martyrs.”

After this incident, for a certain time they left the Christian Seminar in peace, but before long once again they were looking for ways to frighten us. There were times when we had to flee over roofs. We had to invent all kinds of conspiracies, not because we were hiding guns or narcotics, but spiritual literature. So we were actually forced to behave in that way.

Yet all this time we were living with the constant feeling of the presence of God. There were many miracles that saved us. But finally there came a moment when I was arrested and was brought to Lubianka, the KGB headquarters in Moscow. They told me, “It is time you put an end to behaving as a hero. You have one month, we give you the possibility to leave, get out.” I said “Why should I leave my country? I was born here, why should I leave?” They started shouting at me, “We give you one month. If you don’t emigrate in that one month, then we will arrest you and you will never get out again, you will die in prison. You will die forgotten and deserted by all.”

In those years it was almost impossible to emigrate. Only 1,500 Jews emigrated in one year. What we understood is that once you were willing to speak, you had to be willing to pay the price. We had to prove that Christianity is not an abstract idea, but that it was real life. And so we decided that I would go to prison. After me 13 others were arrested. There was a kind of systematic arrest of every new leader that came after me. I must say that all of us behaved very bravely in prison. Nobody surrendered.

Before I was imprisoned, I knew that I would have a difficult time in prison — I liked being free, I liked good food, I liked all these things. I was afraid. I thought I would not be able to lead a worthy life in prison. In prison you have constantly to fight for your own rights and for the rights of the other prisoners. But finally when I was imprisoned, I discovered my own depths, and not only inside of myself, but in every man. This was such an elevation, it lifted me spiritually, but also it gave me strength. There are many stories I could tell you, but I’ll tell just one.

This was during my stay at the Habarosk prison. I was being held in a large cell shared with many others. It was the plan of the KGB on this occasion to break me with the help of the real criminals. The door was closed. I heard the lock slam in place, leaving me with about forty men, half naked, all with tattoos.

As I entered the cell, I said, “Peace be with you.” It was strange for them to hear these words — they looked at me in amazement. At that time I did not wear prison clothing — I still had my own clothes. And they said, “Take your clothes off,” and they threw some old rags at my feet, which I had to put on.

I answered, “I can give away my own clothes only to those who really need them, not if you force me to.” They started yelling at me, and they were at the point of violence. The leader of this group, a man sitting on a top bunk, said, “You will be sleeping near the toilets” — the place where the worst criminals sleep, the pederasts. You find this pecking order in every prison. The pederasts are considered subhuman. Most of them are not real criminals, but victims themselves. What happens to them is that they are violated, used sexually as a punishment.

The men in the cell were getting ready to attack me. Then one of them asked me, “You said ‘Peace be with you.’ Are you a Christian?” And I said, “Yes.” He replied, “We heard that if a Christian prays to his God, then a miracle occurs. So please prove to us that you are a Christian and not just somebody trying to make an impression.” In prison it is very important that you take responsibility for everything you say. And I accepted this challenge.

They answered, “We are the scum of the earth, everything is negative as far as we are concerned. We have nothing, not even cigarettes to smoke. And our ears have become thick because of not smoking. So if you really are a Christian, please pray to your God that we get something. Pray to your God that He will bring us something and then we will believe that He exists.”

I said, “I’m convinced that the miracle will happen, but for this we have to pray all together.” That was my condition. I went into the center, or in the middle of the room. And I made them all get up from their beds, because it is our tradition to stand in front of God as a sign of respect. And they all got up. They were all smiling and they thought it was a kind of game, and they would beat me up in the end. So I said, “Please listen carefully to the words of the prayer. And those who are able to, repeat them. And the other who was not able to repeat the words, just listen.” And I started to pray.

After one minute I started to feel by the skin of my back that something was going on. You have to realize that in this atmosphere of hatred and cynicism, and neglect, for the first time these high words of prayer were heard. A devout atmosphere of silence came into the room. And when I ended the prayer, the smiles from their faces had gone, and they were full with a new feeling. It was the first time in their lives that they heard these words, and it probably had touched their hearts. And in this complete silence I showed them with my hands that they could sit down. And at that exact moment, a small window in the door was opened, and cigarettes were thrown through the hole in the door.

Q: Who would believe God can show Himself with cigarettes!

We don’t know His ways. Before the prayer I had told them smoking is a sin, but that God will show this miracle to show His love. Their Creator loves them despite their sins, and because of this love, He will show his miracle even in this way, not withstanding that the behavior is sinful.

I tell you this story just so you will know how my heart was burning when I was in prison. I understood it was not an ordinary imprisonment — it was a kind of mission. And I tried to make something out of this. Finally, when the KGB or authorities understood how dangerous it was to keep me together with other prisoners, I was isolated completely. And then too I understood how wise that was. Because while I was living in the world, my prayer was not strong enough, and I did not have the peace to think. I was very much involved fighting the system, and in a certain sense this influenced my spiritual life. And I understood it was necessary for me to be in isolation. Of course it was very difficult for me — I had no contact with priests, I couldn’t receive communion.

Q: When you say it was necessary, do you mean it was God’s will?

Yes. For instance one day I felt that I absolutely needed to confess, and I started to pray to several saints, and when I directed my words to St. Seraphim, I had this physical feeling that an epitrachelion was touching my head. And literally this heavy feeling was lifted from my heart, and I felt as if I was born again. And I think that I had the strongest experience of gratitude I had during isolation. And that is the reason why sometimes I long to be in isolation again.

* * *

translation from Russian: Kathi Hansen-Love; transcription of the recording: Mitchell Goodman.

The photo of Alexander (with the rector of our parish, Fr. Sergei Ovsiannikov) was taken on the 3rd of March 2010.

The painting of the mystical city of Kitezh submerged beneath the water with a modern city on the shore is by Ilya Glazunov.

Double click on either image to see it enlarged.

* * *

from the Fall 1999 issue of In Communion, the quarterly journal of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship:

http://incommunion.org/?p=284

Photos of the book's presentation are posted here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157623424405901/

* * *

Becoming the Gospel

2010-03-02T18:49:00.010+01:00

This was written for the Sourozh Diocesan Conference that met in Oxford in May 2004, less than a year after the death of Metropolitan Anthony. In the end, I presented instead a paper that focused on five newly canonized saints, including Mother Maria of Paris. See: http://incommunion.org/forest-flier/jimsessays/becoming-the-gospel/

Still, as I read the text again nearly six years later, it seems worth preserving and sharing as a personal reflection on the life of someone who profoundly influenced a great many people, myself among them, and to whom many credit their conversion to Christ.

* * *

Becoming the Gospel:
Remembering Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

by Jim Forest

When a founder dies, people wonder if the structures he or she created can possibly survive in the founder’s absence. The question arises even in the case of ecclesiastical structures. In the last year of Metropolitan Anthony’s life, deep cracks appeared within the Diocese of Sourozh that made the question all too real for many of us. There were letters, floods of e-mail, petitions, articles in the secular press, loud arguments between members of the diocese, the exchange of furious glances, and at least one instance of physical violence. All of us lost sleep. No doubt all of us prayed for God’s help. We don’t yet know if this is entirely behind us. In any event, we are like survivors of an earthquake who can no longer feel complacent about the earth beneath our feet.

The tribulations within the diocese remind me of my travels in India twenty years or so ago during which I visited many of Gandhi’s followers. At that time I was General Secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, a movement that promotes nonviolent approaches to overcoming injustice and preventing war. Gandhi is, of course, someone very interesting for anyone concerned about effective alternatives to violence. Getting around mainly by rail, in the course of several weeks I spent a good deal of time with many people who had worked closely with Gandhi, from the Prime Minister of that time to people involved in a wide range of national and local projects.

One day while in Delhi, I went to visit the house where Gandhi had been staying as guest the final days of his life and discovered the house and its grounds were being occupied by film-makers with a large crowd of extras. Richard Attenborough was directing his movie about Gandhi and had reached the point in the production schedule of reenacting Gandhi’s assassination.

As perhaps you recall, a fellow Hindu had decided that Gandhi was a mortal enemy of authentic Hinduism and made it his personal duty to kill him. Gandhi was unarmed and had no bodyguards. While walking through a crowd of admirers, he made an easy target.

In the course of my travels in India, I came to see that not only had Gandhi died that day but unity among those who had worked closely with him also began to die. Today in India there are various movements that in one way or another bear witness to Gandhi’s values and ideas, all of them doing work of value, yet one can easily find Gandhians who have nothing good to say about other Gandhians. Though Gandhi remains a national icon, his face on stamps and coins, his statue in many places, the sad fact is that many Gandhians hardly speak to each other.

My travels among Gandhians in India reminded me of the fragmented state of Christianity and, when you think of it, also the state of the Orthodox Church. Though thank God the Orthodox Church still holds together, there has been prolonged tension between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Patriarchate of Constantinople. We also have lately had a period when Church in Greece and the Patriarch of Constantinople were not on speaking terms. Various rows boil hotly in other parts of the Church.

How will we in the Diocese of Sourozh fare in the absence of Metropolitan Anthony?

Of course, as he would insist, the situation is fundamentally different. Gandhi was a leader of a social movement that was largely his own invention. Metropolitan Anthony would remind us that he was never the basis of unity, only someone who, as bishop, attempted to be a guardian of unity. Whatever unity we have, he would remind us, is in Christ. No matter whom we lose, no matter how huge a role a particular person may have played in our lives, we have not and cannot lose Christ. Whatever we have lost, we have not lost the Gospel. We have not lost the Creed. We have not lost the saints, the calendar, the Ecumenical Councils, the writings of the Church Fathers.

For Metropolitan Anthony, the Gospel was the guidebook to life in the kingdom of God. On at least one occasion he said: “We should try to live in such a way that if the Gospels were lost, they could be re-written by looking at us.”

Perhaps this one sentence sums up all he hoped be bring about: to inspire us to live in such a way that the Gospel appears not only in what we say but is shown in who we are, what we choose, in our readiness to love, our willingness to forgive, in all our attempts to let God’s mercy become visible in our lives.

Perhaps it was from Metropolitan Anthony that I heard a haunting quotation which I believe was attributed to St John Chrysostom: “In order for Christ to appear, the priest must disappear.”

Whatever the source, these words suit Vladica Anthony. There was a transparency about him. He was someone through whom Christ shined — not each and every moment, but very often. He was never a person eager to be honored, praised or showered with medals. He was not at all offended if you failed to kiss his hand or make other normal gestures of respect with which Orthodox Christians greet a bishop. He was as careless about personal attention as he was about his wardrobe. The last time I was him, I noticed he was wearing a well-used black sports jacket and a battered pair of running shoes — not usual clerical attire. His black robe was faded and frayed. Indeed nothing he wore seemed fresh off the rack. When he spoke about confession in this room four years ago, he wore what looked liked a fisherman’s sweater. I know nothing of the economic details of his life, but watching from a distance, it always seemed to me that here was a man fully embracing the poverty of the first Beatitude, both in the sense of not having what isn’t needed and in the sense of preferring to give rather than receive. He saw both inward and outward poverty as gifts of freedom. As he said in an interview:

“To be poor financially is in a way much easier than to be poor inwardly, to have no attachments. This is very difficult to learn and something which happens gradually, from year to year. You really learn to value things, to look at people and see the radiant beauty which they possess — without the desire to possess them. To pluck a flower means to take possession of it, and it also means to kill it.”

Seeking to preserve rather than destroy all that is beautiful is surely a primary aspect of becoming the Gospel. It is giving a living witness to the Beatitudes, starting with the first: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

“Blessed” is not a word one finds in headlines nor does it often appear in conversation. What does it mean? It’s harder to translate it into words used in everyday life than to see what “blessed” looks like in a saintly life. Still, given the key passages in which we find, “blessed” is a word worth thinking about.

“Blessed” — the word chosen by the English translators of the Authorized Version in the seventeenth century — means “something consecrated to or belonging to God.” In St. Jerome’s translation of the Greek New Testament, the Latin word beatus was used — “happy, fortunate, blissful.” Beatitude is bliss. But neither “blessed” nor beatus seems quite equal to what we find in the Greek New Testament, where each Beatitude begins with the word makarios. In classical Greek makar was a condition associated with the immortal gods. Kari means “fate” or “death,” but given a negative prefix the word means “being deathless, no longer subject to fate.” Being deathless was a condition both inaccessible and longed for by mortals. It was because of their immortality that the gods were the blessed ones.

In Christian use, makarios came to mean sharing in the life of God, the ultimate joy, a happiness without the fault lines of chance running through it. There is no higher gift. We are not simply capable of an abstract awareness that God exists, an infinitely remote Being whom we can faintly glimpse through an intellectual telescope. In the kingdom of God, the blessing extended to us is nothing less than participation in the communion of the Holy Trinity. It is being received into God’s immortality. It is being blessed with qualities that seem humanly impossible.

Understood in this way, the word “blessed” might be translated “freed from death” or “risen from the dead.” To be blessed is to participate in Christ’s resurrection. Risen from the dead are the poor in spirit. Risen from the dead are they who mourn. Risen from the dead are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Risen from the dead are the merciful. Risen from the dead are the pure of heart. Risen from the dead are the peacemakers. Risen from the dead are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness.

To be risen from the dead is not simply a condition of the life to come. It has to do with our lives here and now. St Paul said, “They call us dead men and yet we live.” This is to say that our lives can and should already be a witness to Christ’s resurrection. To live a life saturated with the resurrection is to become the Gospel.

But in what is often called “the real world,” it’s no rare achievement to in a state of semi-death long before burial — to be a person who hardly hears, who hardly sees, who barely loves, who refuses to forgive, who struggles to possess rather than share, who is indifferent to God, a person for whom worship is a waste of time.

In Vladica Anthony we saw a person fully alive — and anyone fully alive, as St Irenaeus of Lyons said, is the glory of God. Vladica Anthony was fully alive even though he had grown up in exile, endured great suffering, lived through a world war in which vast numbers of innocent people died, lived under military occupation for five years, suffered chronic back pain, and made himself deeply vulnerable to the physical and spiritual pain of others.

I think of other some of the other ways that he gave an example of what it is to become the Gospel.

One of the most difficult demands Christ makes on his followers is the love of enemies. Understood biblically, love is not a matter of sentimentality but of actual care for the life of another human being whom we are inclined to hate, wouldn’t mind seeing dead, and under certain circumstances would be willing to kill.

While one finds many examples of such surprising, unexpected love in Vladica Anthony, for me among the most compelling was his determination, as a young physician working in a French hospital during the Second World War, to save the finger of a wounded German soldier. Here is the way he spoke of it in the interview made by Timothy Wilson:

“In the hospital where I was working as a war surgeon, a German came in once with one finger smashed by a bullet. The head surgeon came round and looked at the finger and said ‘Take it off’. That was a very quick and easy decision — it would take only five minutes to do. Then the German said, ‘Is there anyone here who can speak German?’ I spoke with the man and discovered that he was a watchmaker and if his finger was removed he would probably never be able to work again. So we spent five weeks treating his smashed finger and he was able to leave the hospital with five fingers instead of only four. From this I learnt that the fact that he was a watchmaker was as important as anything else. I would say that I learnt to put human concerns first.”

Even in times of peace — as we might use the word when we mean “a time without war” — it is no easy thing to see a person as another human being rather than a being who is first of all the bearer of a nationality, or a person who is first of all defined according to his social role — in this case a soldier of an occupation army. And here was a young physician being disobedient. He had been told by a supervising doctor to do one thing — amputate a finger — and instead he did another: saving a man’s hand and with it the man’s vocation. In such a choice one becomes the Gospel. The action is a translation of the text commanding love of one’s enemies but also to the summons to place human needs before rules that are indifferent to life: “The Sabbath is for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

As one of those persons in whom the content of the Gospel could be guessed simply by observing him, Vladica Anthony gave an tireless example of what Alexander Schmemann recognized as the most essential human attribute: the capacity to worship. The human being, Schmemann said, is not simply homo sapiens but homo adorans.

What is most dangerous about the decayed culture we live in is its marginalization or active dismissal of worship. In consumer societies, worship falls into the category of hobbies. But for Vladica Anthony, as for any disciple of Christ, it is at the center of being. It is at the core of love, not only love of God but love of a child, love of a spouse or love of a friend. Love is worship. Worship is love.

Love is also gratitude. I have never forgotten Vladica Anthony’s response to a question he was asked during a workshop at this conference a few years ago. Someone wanted to know if he had advice about how to become humble. “Humility is too high a goal,” he replied. “Humility is very difficult. But perhaps you could aim for the halfway house of gratitude.”

Gratitude is a component of all worship. Gratitude is part of becoming the Gospel.

In Vladica Anthony, we could see this quality not only in the way he served at the altar — absolutely calm, very attentive, not at all a prisoner of time — but in the way he paid attention to other people, whether well known to him or never met before. It could be a bit unnerving to be looked at so closely, to be listened to so attentively, to experience such undivided concentration, to be seen in so radical and pure a way. It’s not something we’re used to nor afterward can ever forget. We had often heard we were bearers of the divine image but in encounters with Vladica Anthony, one experienced it in his face.

The experience of being the object of such undivided attention was at one with his theology of the mystery of the human person. In a lecture on “The True Worth of Man” that he presented in the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford in 1967, Vladica Anthony explained:

“For centuries … within the Church we have tried to make our God as great as we could, by making man small. This can be seen even in works of art in which the Lord Jesus Christ is represented great and his creatures very small indeed at his feet. The intention was to show how great God was, and yet it has resulted in the false, mistaken, almost blasphemous view that man is small, or in the denial of this God who treats men as though they were of no value. And these two reactions are equally wrong. The one belongs to people who claim to be children of God, God’s own chosen people, who are the Church. They have managed by doing this to make themselves as small as the image they have of men, and their communities as small and lacking in scope and greatness as their constitutive parts. The other attitude we find outside the Church, among the agnostics, the rationalists and the atheists; and we are responsible for these two attitudes and we shall be accountable for both in history and at the day of judgment. And yet this is not the vision of God about man…. When we try to understand the value which God himself attaches to man we see that we are bought at a high price, that the value which God attaches to man is all the life and all the death, the tragic death, of the Only-begotten Son upon the Cross. This is what God thinks of man, of his friend, created by him in order to be his companion of eternity.”

In his lecture, he went on to tell the story of the Prodigal Son. Did he ever speak for more than ten minutes without telling at least one story, either a biblical story or a story that in some way drew one’s attention to the Gospel? To be a living translation of the Gospel implies a reliance on stories. The Gospel is an anthology of stories and Vladica Anthony was a teller of stories second to none, stories told with tremendous immediacy, even urgency, as if our lives depended on them.

He spoke with authority. Perhaps there were occasions when it was otherwise, but I never saw him speak from a written text, though clearly he was following a line of thought he had mapped out beforehand, inserting stories as needed to make his points more vivid. It is a Gospel method of discourse.

In the course of time one would hear certain stories over and over and yet they never became stale because he was not simply reciting a script from memory but always renewing each story, seeing in it something new, some that deserved special attention.

Christ was always his main theme — a Christ who not an abstract figure but someone who seemed better known to him than he knew himself.

One of his often-told stories concerned the turning point in his own life — how he had met Christ, truly met him, as a skeptical young man who had decided to read Mark’s Gospel rather than another Gospel because none was so short as Mark and he wanted to get it over with.

Here is how he put it in on one occasion:

“While I was reading the beginning of St. Mark’s Gospel, before I reached the third chapter, I suddenly became aware that on the other side of my desk there was a presence. And the certainty was so strong that it was Christ standing there that it has never left me. This was the real turning point. Because Christ was alive and I had been in his presence I could say with certainty that what the Gospel said about the crucifixion of the prophet of Galilee was true, and the centurion was right when he said, ‘Truly he is the Son of God’. It was in the light of the Resurrection that I could read with certainty the story of the Gospel, knowing that everything was true in it because the impossible event of the Resurrection was to me more certain than any event of history. History I had to believe, the Resurrection I knew for a fact. I did not discover, as you see, the Gospel beginning with its first message of the Annunciation, and it did not unfold for me as a story which one can believe or disbelieve. It began as an event that left all problems of disbelief behind because it was a direct and personal experience…. I became absolutely certain within myself that Christ is alive and that certain things existed. I didn’t have all the answers, but having touched that experience, I was certain that ahead of me there were answers, visions, possibilities. This is what I mean by faith — not doubting in the sense of being in confusion and perplexity, but doubting in order to discover the reality of the life, the kind of doubt that makes you want to question and discover more, that makes you want to explore.”

Even his autobiographical stories drew one to the Gospel. But mainly he told stories that came directly from the Gospel. He returned again and again to parables which, however familiar they were, however often we had heard them explained in sermons, somehow seemed new texts when he talked about them. I felt I wasn’t listening to an expert of Christianity, of which there are too many in the world, but a simply a Christian — or something even more remarkable, an actual witness to the events recounted in Gospel.

When I hear the term applied to certain saints “Equal to the Apostles,” I immediately think of him. Yes, there are those who, despite the centuries that separate them from the New Testament world, somehow speak of those events as witnesses. Most of all, Metropolitan Anthony was a witness of the resurrection.

He stressed that the Gospel is not something unreachable or impractical. The Gospel is not at an idealistic document. The good news of the Gospel is that the Kingdom of God is something we can experience not after death but in the present. The Church equips us for such a life.

Let me stress that Metropolitan Anthony did not see the Gospel as an idealistic text — another utopian manifesto, another ideology about creating a splendid future through hellish methods. Rather he saw the Gospel as an entirely practical way of life. The requirements of a God-centered life are not out of anyone’s reach. It may seem like hard work to forgive “seventy times seven” but in reality it is much harder to withhold forgiveness. It is like carrying a tower of bricks. Love of enemies may seem humanly impossible — love in the sense of seeking the health and salvation of the other — but when we see what happens when enmity is allowed to grow unchecked, the avalanche of horrors that such enmity eventually produces, and the cost in suffering and death, then we begin to understand why Christ calls on his followers to renounce judgments and hatred and call no one a fool. It is a difficult path but in fact, in the end, much less difficult than the alternative.

When I think of Vladica Anthony’s impact in my own life, one aspect of it was to help free me from the grip of idealistic ideologies.

He knew my work and something of my writings and was aware that I at times referred to myself as a pacifist. I soon discovered that he had a strong aversion to the word “pacifist,” not only because it sounded like “passive-ist,” but because of unpleasant encounters he had experienced with self-righteous people who loudly proclaimed their renunciation of violence and were quick to denounce those who failed to share their ideology.

He told me the story of an encounter he had during a retreat for university students. “After my first address one of them asked me for permission to leave because I was not a pacifist.” “Are you one?” Vladica Anthony responded. “Yes,” said the young man. “What would you do,” Metropolitan Anthony asked, “if you came into this room and found a man about to rape your girl friend?” “I would try to get him to desist from his intention!” the man replied. “And if he proceeded, before your own eyes, to rape her?” “I would pray to God to prevent it.” “And if God did not intervene, and the man raped your girl friend and walked out contentedly, what would you do?” “I would ask God who has brought light out of darkness to bring good out of evil.”

Metropolitan Anthony responded: “If I was your girl friend I would look for another boy friend.”

One cannot be passive in the face of evil. Under certain circumstances each of us is called, as we see in the St George icon, to battle the dragon — and yet no human being is a dragon; at worst a human being is a slave of dragons. This is what is means to practice the Gospel of peace: to fight the dragon without despising the dragon’s slaves, all the time seeking their conversion. Vladica Anthony reminded me in one letter that each of us is called to be “a man — or woman — of peace,” which meant, he explained, a person “ready to work for the reconciliation of those who have grown apart or turned away from one another in enmity.”

It might be that in some circumstances there was no alternative to violence — he saw the war against Nazism as a lesser evil — but we were never allowed, even in wartime, to lose sight of the image of God in the other even if the other has become slave to a dragon.

Because he saw the image of God in a German soldier, he was able to save a watchmaker’s hand and — who knows? — perhaps his soul as well.

One final point about how we see in Metropolitan Anthony what it means to become to Gospel. He was a shepherd of the local Church in a way that welcomed people and cared for them no matter what their mother tongue, culture or citizenship. In a Church that is sometimes a prisoner of national identities, he struggled to build a diocese not only that made space under one roof for different languages of worship but that would as much as possible resemble what one would have found in the early Church — neither Jewish nor Greek, rich nor poor, male or female, but a people who had become one in Christ, association in which each person mattered and all voices could be heard: a church not of rulers and ruled but a eucharistic community of sobornost.

Let me conclude by quoting what Vladica Anthony said while in Russia not quite four years ago, when the 40th anniversary of his consecration as a bishop was being celebrated:

“Some [of my fellow Russians] never understood why I lived in [England]. I remember a man with whom I was in the lift in Russia. He asked me questions about myself, and when he learnt that I lived in London he looked at me and said, ‘Are you a complete idiot? You live abroad when you could live at home?’ It had been my dream to live in Russia. But Providence decided otherwise. It was impossible in the beginning, when I might have done it, because I had no responsibility for the parish. But, it became possible when suddenly I felt, ‘I am responsible for people. I cannot abandon them. They trust me, I trust them unreservedly, we are gradually growing into being a true community, a real church in the image of the Early Church, when people of all nationalities, all languages, all mentalities, all classes, gathered together, united only by one thing: their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.’ And this is what I had dreamt of achieving and tried to do in [my adopted country] in the course of now almost 50 years of ministry and 40 years of episcopal service.”

And in this, too, Vladica Anthony became the Gospel.

* * *

A Hans Brinker winter

2010-02-10T11:37:00.010+01:00

A lot of what Americans know about Holland comes from reading Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates, a novel by Mary Mapes Dodge that was first published in 1865. It’s a great tale about a 15-year-old boy from a poor family who competes to wins a pair of silver skates. Hans Brinker is one of those rare books that not only was a best-seller at the time but has never gone out of print.

The fact that Dodge first visited the country she was writing about only after her book was in print might suggest she didn’t know what she was talking about, but in fact her research was extraordinary, in part thanks to lengthy conversations with Dutch immigrants. The result is a remarkably accurate portrait of Dutch life in the 19th century, the only problem being that the famous story-within-the story of a boy plugging a leaking dike with his finger is very much a work of imagination: when a dike starts giving way, its many leaks cannot be stopped even by a thousand fingers.

I was probably twelve or thirteen when I read the book. It left me with the impression that one thing everyone in Holland could count on every year was an icy winter. When I moved here in January 1977, I was disappointed to discover that in fact Dutch winters tend to be mild. It’s true that ice races are popular on those happy occasions when the ice is thick enough to be safe. There’s one, the 200 km Elfstedentocht, that has happened only six times in the past half century, the latest in 1997. Starting before dawn, the thousands of skaters taking part travel a route of frozen canals that links eleven towns in Friesland. It’s a very big deal when it happens, with day-long television coverage and the winner an instant national hero.

Many of the 33 winters I’ve experienced in Holland have had only infrequent snow and not much ice strong enough to support skating. But this year we’ve been having something of a “Hans Brinker Winter” -- many snow falls, days and even weeks of snow on the ground, and in some parts of the country enough prolonged sub-freezing weather for the kind of solid ice to form that skaters pray for -- though still no Elfstedentocht so far this year!

There was another snowfall last night, and snow is still falling at lunch time.

-- Jim

note: The photo was taken this morning in our immediate neighborhood. In the distance is the Molen van Piet, a flour-grinding wind mill that was erected about 1770. If you double-click on the photo, you'll see a larger version.

Works of mercy

2010-01-24T19:27:00.013+01:00

For many Protestants, the single criterion for salvation is making a “decision for Christ” -- an intellectual affirmation that Christ is Lord. It has very little to do with how we live and everything to do with how we think. But Jesus, as we meet him in the New Testament, says very little about the criteria for salvation at the Last Judgment. Mainly the Gospel has to do with how we live here and now and how we relate to each other. Jesus sums up the law and the prophets in just a few words: to love God with all one's heart, mind and soul, and to love one's neighbor as oneself. Just one sentence.

Yet there is a short text in St. Matthew's Gospel in which Christ speaks in a surprising way about the Last Judgment. It turns out that one isn't saved by getting a passing grade in theology.

Jesus describes all who have ever lived being gathered together and divided "like sheep from goats."

To those on one side, Christ says, "Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world, for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’ Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.’ And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life." (Matthew 25)

Then there are the others. It turns out that those who didn't love their neighbor-in-need failed to love God, no matter many Bible verses they could recite.

Main point? The works of mercy (feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, etc.) connect us to the God of Mercy.

There are many works of art that give visual expression to this crucial aspect of the Gospel. Among those I find most impressive is a very local work of art made in 1504 by an artist who is known only as "the Master of Alkmaar." Originally his seven-panel work hung in the Holy Spirit House of Hospitality in Alkmaar. Later it was moved to the town's cathedral. In the last century, it became part of the Rijksmuseum collection in Amsterdam. Currently, while the Rijksmuseum is undergoing reconstruction, it hangs in Rotterdam at the Boijmans Museum, where Nancy and I visited it yesterday.

In five of the seven panels, Christ -- without a halo -- is present but unrecognized. In this first panel, he looks directly toward the viewer. Only in the panel of the burial of the dead, sitting on a rainbow, is Christ revealed as Pantocrator, Lord of the Cosmos.

I've gathered a series of photos of the seven panels, plus other paintings I've photographed at other times, into a Flickr folder labeled "Works of Mercy":

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157623272202186/

Jim

* * *

a day of hard labor

2010-01-18T21:29:00.003+01:00

This was a day of hard physical labor. As a result, Nancy's office is back downstairs, the guest room is back upstairs (two beds!), and a file cabinet that was buried in the bike room has been put back in the office, making it much more accessible (and the bike room much roomier). As it happens, the family business -- in reality chiefly Nancy's business -- has a new web site designed a few days ago by Caitlan: www.forestflier.com.

City of Belief

2010-01-17T20:37:00.005+01:00

a review published in the February 2010 issue of Sojourners magazine

City of Belief
by Nicole d'Entremont
publisher: CreateSpace / ISBN 978-1442138506
250 pages, $16

reviewed by Jim Forest

In 1965, Nicole d’Entremont, a not-quite college graduate, was one of the young volunteers working at the New York Catholic Worker -- St. Joseph’s House -- on Chrystie Street, a short walk from the Bowery in lower Manhattan. These days the area is fashionable and the rent high, but in 1965, a two-room, cold-water flat could be rented, along with its cockroaches, for as little as $25 a month.

For New Yorkers at the time, the Bowery conjured up images of homeless, alcoholic men panhandling in the day and sleeping in doorways at night. When an ambulance was summoned to aid one of the unwashed men who had collapsed on the street, it could easily take half an hour before it arrived. Dying men in that neighborhood were not a priority.

In a mainly unwelcoming world, one of the few places street people could find a meal and a measure of care was St. Joseph’s House. It was probably the only place in town that provided decent food and a welcome with no strings attached, no sermons to hear, no biblical readings to endure, and no program to submit to.

The year 1965 was also when things were rapidly going from bad to worse in Vietnam -- bombs falling like rain, thatched huts in peasant villages set on fire with Zippo lighters, bewildered U.S. army conscripts as much victims as executioners. Among the war’s casualties was one of the newer members of the Catholic Worker community -- Roger LaPorte, 22 years old. Before dawn on Nov. 9, while standing between the U.S. Embassy to the United Nations and the U.N. headquarters, he poured gasoline on himself and struck a match, exploding instantly into flame. Rushed to Bellevue Hospital, his body 95 percent burned, LaPorte lived more than a day, managing to say that this was a religious act (that is to say, not an act of despair) and that he was “against war, against all wars.” He lived long enough for a priest to hear his confession.

D’Entremont was one of those at the Catholic Worker who was closest to LaPorte. She and a friend had been with him the evening before his self-immolation, unaware of what he was thinking about doing. She was vaguely aware of something LaPorte couldn’t -- or dared not -- put into words, but that hung unspoken in the air. Now 45 years have passed, nearly half a century of trying to understand what she lived through -- and not only herself but LaPorte, Dorothy Day, and the others who were part of the community, young and old, novices and veterans, articulate and inarticulate.

The result is City of Belief, a remarkable novel in which d’Entremont herself is simply one of the people through whom the reader experiences life at the Catholic Worker in 1965. Some names are unchanged (Dorothy Day is one), others altered. D’Entremont has become Del, LaPorte has become Jonathan, St. Joseph’s House has become St. Jude’s, the community journal The Catholic Worker has become The Agitator.

City of Belief is also a portrait of a time when, for an amazing number of people, the goal of life was much more than making a living, being comfortable, and having security. It is startling to recall the sacrifices many made at the time in their struggle to end the war and create a more compassionate society.

While City of Belief has elements of autobiography, it is mainly a work of art. D’Entremont records events not only as she saw them but through the eyes of others, seeing herself with amazing clarity and detachment. Her book also describes in a compelling way her struggle with faith and doubt.

LaPorte’s self-immolation happened at 5:20 in the morning. Twelve hours later, the lights of New York and most of the Eastern Seaboard went out. For nearly twelve hours, New York became a moonlit paradise. The crime rate plummeted; the good-deed rate soared. New Yorkers had no idea how talented they were in finding ways to help each other. It was a night of love in all its varieties. Nine months later, there was a tidal wave of births.

Was there a connection between what happened after sunset and before sunrise? City of Belief suggests the answer is yes.

* * *

Thomas Merton: a poster boy?

2010-01-15T15:12:00.006+01:00

Often works of biography reveal more about the author than about his subject. Mark Shaw's recent book about Thomas Merton strikes me as a case in point. Here is the review I wrote for the Winter issue of The Merton Seasonal.

Jim

* * *

Beneath the Mask of Holiness:
Thomas Merton and the Forbidden Love Affair That Set Him Free
by Mark Shaw
Palgrave Macmillan, 256 pages, $27

review by Jim Forest

While still a young, aspiring writer who had not yet set his sights on becoming a monk, Merton lamented his latest rejection letter in a journal entry with which any writer can identity: "Other people's bad books get published," he noted in his journal. "Why can't my bad book get published?" Mark Shaw has much to celebrate. Despite (or perhaps because of) his purple prose style and sensationalist approach to the life of Thomas Merton, his particular bad book has gotten published.

The book centers on what Shaw presents as shocking revelations of closely-guarded secrets. The reader learns that, while a college student in England, Merton had a sexual liaison that resulted in the birth of an out-of-wedlock child; and then later in life, long after becoming a monk, fell in love with a nurse he met while recovering from surgery.

Is there anyone with the remotest interest in Merton's life who is unaware of Mark Shaw's headline news? Soon after Merton's death in 1968, his friend Ed Rice became the first to write, in The Man in the Sycamore Tree, about Merton fathering a child while at Clare College, Cambridge. No subsequent biographer has ignored the event. As for his affair with the nurse when he was 50, it was first described a quarter century ago by Michael Mott in The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton. It is now more than a decade since Merton's journals about the affair, included in Learning to Love, were published.

Shaw is indignant that Merton's autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, published in 1948, referred in only "watered down" terms to the more serious sins he committed before he became a monk. This is nothing less than intentional misrepresentation, Shaw asserts, "the result of a concerted effort to disguise a tormented sinner as some sort of plastic saint rehabilitated through monastic practices." (21) The real Merton was transformed into a Catholic "poster boy." (p vii)

Continuing in the same vein, Shaw sees the lack of detail as nothing less that the result of "a quiet conspiracy, a cover up, if you will, by not only Merton, but also the Catholic Church hierarchy stretching from the United States to the Vatican, Abbot Frederic Dunne [Merton's abbot when he wrote the book], Merton's literary agent, and his publisher, none of whom did anything other than promote the book as factual even though critical parts did not disclose the whole truth. Strict censorship, in effect, issued a restraining order on Merton's true story, omitting crucial information about him, and readers were hoodwinked and misled into believing that while Merton may have been a sinner prior to entering Gethsemani, he was not 'that bad' a sinner." (21)

Thus the book's title: Beneath the Mask of Holiness. Shaw sees "holiness" as a disguise that the Catholic Church and the Trappist Order managed to squeeze Merton into. But, thanks to his affair in 1965, Merton finally discovered what life was all about and thus was no longer "a schizophrenic persona, passive on the outside while pangs of anguish and fear patrolled within him." (9)

If such over-heated sentences appeal to you, either for content or prose style, I urge you to rush out and buy a copy. Otherwise save your time and money for a better book.

Perhaps it's not entirely accidental that the reader is reminded of Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code, populated by evil Catholics whose goal in life is to conceal the truth. In Shaw's book, Merton is assigned the starring role in an anti-Catholic tract. (In the book's last chapter, Shaw speculates that Merton may have been murdered, in which case "the logical suspects would be directives hired by the Catholic Church hierarchy, who were afraid of a scandal if Merton were to return to his lover or leave Gethsemani." [213-4])

If you want to know about actual Merton's life, including those events that he brought to confession, read Merton himself or one of his less conspiracy-minded biographers.

Regarding his year at Cambridge, Merton asked aloud in The Seven Storey Mountain, “Shall I wake up the dirty ghosts under the trees of the Backs and out beyond the Clare New Building and in some rooms down on Chesterton Road?” He decided to let the ghosts slumber. “There would certainly be no point whatever in embarrassing other people with the revelation of so much cheap sentimentality mixed up with even cheaper sin," as he put it in an earlier draft of the autobiography. It was characteristic of Merton to take pains not to embarrass others.

What Merton makes crystal clear in The Seven Storey Mountain, as published, is that it was a hellish interval in his life, “an incoherent riot of undirected passion,” as he put it — a time of “beer, bewilderment and sorrow,” in the words of his friend, Bob Lax. “I had fallen through the surface of old England," Merton wrote, "into the hell, the vacuum and the horror that London was nursing in her avaricious heart.” He remembers reading Freud, Jung, and Adler, struggling to understand “the mysteries of sex-repression.”

Though clearly something dreadful occurred, the reader was left guessing exactly what actually happened — something to do with the mysteries of sex-repression, clearly, but what? On the other hand, what Merton shared with his readers is a great deal more than is provided by most authors of autobiographies. In Charlie Chaplin's autobiography, to give one typical example, Chaplin simply skipped over some of the more painful or humiliating moments in his life, while inventing or radically revising others.

For all its sorrows, Merton’s year at Cambridge wasn’t a total loss. Perhaps the high point was Professor Edward Bullough’s class on Dante. Canto by canto, Merton read his way to the frozen core of hell, finally ascending through purgatory toward the bliss of heaven, a "slow and majestic progress of ... myths and symbols." It was purgatory’s seven storey mountain that provided Merton with the metaphor for his autobiography.

While Shaw provides a compact if voyeuristic chronicle of how Merton fell in love with a young nurse and what occurred between them in the weeks that followed, by far the best and most vivid and three-dimensional account of the same story is related by Merton himself in Learning to Love. Here the reader gets both a day-by-day history of what happened as well as a poignant account of his struggle to make sense of what all this meant, his justifications side-by-side with his self-recriminations. Here one can also can read about the very human community Merton was a part of and his frustrations with his abbot, James Fox – and then hear him express his gratitude for both.

Unfortunately, Shaw seems to have no understanding of or sympathy with Merton's basic choices: to become a Christian, to be baptized in the Catholic Church, and then to embrace monastic life in a penitential order. It was ultimately because of Merton's renewed realization that he had a monastic vocation, not a vocation to marriage, that made him end the affair.

It wasn't, in my opinion, Merton's finest hour. Many priests suffer from extreme loneliness and have affairs which, in most cases, end as Merton's did. I have known several women at the other end of similar stories who felt abandoned, suffered from a deep sense of rejection for years afterward, and even wrestled with thoughts of suicide. The fact that this particular story involves Thomas Merton doesn't make it better and mean that, thanks to the special magic of the Merton factor, it became an encounter sprinkled with pixie dust for the young woman who so desperately loved him.

"God writes straight with crooked lines," says a Portugese proverb. After the affair, Merton realized he needed not only a hermitage but also vital relationship with several Kentucky families he had begun to know. Never a hard-hearted man, he became even more compassionate. One hopes the nurse he loved was also able to make good use of the intense relationship she had with Merton in that period of her life. (In the past, biographers have shielded her identity, either using the initial "M," as Merton did in his journals, or her first name, Margie. To his shame, Shaw reveals her family name.)

One could write much more about Shaw's book and its thesis that it was only thanks to his affair that the true Merton at last emerged from hiding rather than remaining a masked counterfeit coined by the Catholic Church. But then I would have to discuss every chapter, the reading of which is a penance I leave only to those who find ordinary penances inadequate.

* * *

Ten things my mother taught me

2009-12-29T14:27:00.008+01:00

I’ve made a list of the things my mother taught me. If it had not been for her, I would not have learned these things:

1. How to make do with very little, and not feel sorry for yourself about it.

2. How to make pie crust, spaghetti sauce, roast stuffed turkey, pumpkin pie, apple pie, pecan pie, and generally everything, because she made me feel that cooking is easy.

3. How to sew. How to put together a pattern, to set in sleeves, to put in a zipper, and generally to sew anything, because she made me feel that sewing is easy.

4. How to love poetry: all the Pooh poems, and those from the Golden Book of Favorite poems. And how to read poetry out loud.

5. How to love books. Beautifully made books, with hard covers and good paper, and beautiful illustrations.

6. How to appreciate irony and satire.

7. That it was OK to love classical music, even though no one else in my entire family did.

8. That singing is fun, and dancing, too. And that you can do these things without embarrassment.

9. That art is important.

10. That God is your friend, and that’s all the theology you need to know.

These were hard months for my mother -- being disabled by a major stroke, unable to speak, unable to walk or use her hands very much. Being in a foreign country and in a nursing home where the other residents did not speak her language. But even before that -- just coming here from America, leaving her household behind and her beloved country, and losing her beloved son. She lived for almost two years in that room we all created for her, but the amazing thing was that she did not become depressed, she was not angry at God for arranging her life this way. Instead, she painted pictures -- dozens of them. More pictures than I ever saw her make all the years I was living with her when I was young. Beautiful pictures made with great confidence and joy.

A couple of months ago, a friend of mine at church who knew how difficult it was to live with my mother came up to me with tears in her eyes and said, “You will be so glad you’ve done this.” And she was right. I am so glad we did this. Thanks to everybody. We all did this -- Grandma, too.

Nancy Forest-Flier

(read aloud by Nancy at Lorraine Flier’s funeral December 29, 2009; the photo was taken by Jim 23 May 2008; double-click on the image to see it enlarged)

* * *

Truly the funeral was an event filled with joy, gratitude and peace. The setting was beautiful -- a funeral chapel in Schagen, a small town to the north, with a wall of glass looking out over a frozen pond, a few ducks walking on the ice, reeds the color of wheat, leafless trees, fields glistening with frost.

(photo by Caitlan)

* * *

a death in the family

2009-12-26T11:19:00.009+01:00

Christmas for us this year centered on the death of Nancy’s mother, Lorraine Flier, who passed away peacefully in her sleep Christmas morning at the nearby nursing home, Oudtburgh, where she had lived these past eight months. She was 92.

The nursing home called me at about 9:15 just as we were about to have Christmas breakfast. How could I have known that instead of opening presents I would be picking out a coffin?

By mid-day, a large part of the family had gathered at Oudtburgh, then came back to our home where we had a Christmas meal together.

Lorraine knew she was dying -- only days before she managed to ask Nancy and me if we accepted this. “Yes, of course we do,” we assured her.

One ordinarily wouldn’t want to combine a death in the family with Christmas, but it seemed somehow just the right day for her to slip away, as all of us were planning to go to visit her anyway, as she knew. Nancy had been with her two days before and could see how close death was. She held Lorraine’s hand and Lorraine, though her eyes were closed, was aware enough that Nancy was there to tighten her grip.

We felt a strange mixture of sorrow and relief yesterday. I think Lorraine had been baffled for months that death was so long in coming her way. She couldn’t walk, could barely see, and (since her stroke in March) had a vocabulary of less than fifty words.

Living in Holland hadn’t been easy for her. Moving to any new country is difficult, but when you're 90 and you've just lost a son, it's really tough. We were able to rearrange the house so that she could live on the ground floor, essential as she could only get around by walker. In the time she lived us, almost two years, she spent her days doing jigsaw puzzles, painting, and watching English-language TV. Painting was the most important activity for her prior to her stroke. We kept her supplied with lots of canvases and paints and she made dozens of beautiful paintings, many of them scenes from around Sundance, Wyoming, where she was born. She only lived in Sundance until she was seven, but for her it was always "home."

We’re so very grateful she spent the last part of her life with us. She came to realize for the first time how large a family she had. With Lux’s birth eight months ago, she was overjoyed to become a great-grandmother. (Of all the photos hanging in her room at Oudtburgh, probably the one that was most significant to her was a “four generations” photo -- herself, Nancy, Cait and Lux.)

Her funeral will be on Tuesday morning.

In the Orthodox Church, when someone dies, it is customary to say ”Eternal memory!” Of course it is only God’s memory that is truly eternal. My God receive her into his kingdom.

Jim & Nancy

PS There is a folder of photos of Lorraine plus a number of her paintings in his folder:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157603780115420/

* * *

Rescued by Christmas

2009-12-24T07:51:00.007+01:00

“What shall we offer you, O Christ, who for our sake has appeared on earth as man? Every creature made by you offers you thanks. The angels offer you a hymn; the heavens a star; the Magi, gifts; the shepherds, their wonder; the earth, its cave; the wilderness, the manger; and we offer you a virgin mother.” -- from a prayer for the Orthodox Christmas Vespers Service

Many people see Christ as a long-dead, myth-shrouded teacher who lives on only in fading memory, a man “risen from the dead” only in the sense that his teachings have survived. There are scholars busily at work trying to find out which words attributed to Jesus in the New Testament were actually said by him (not many, it turns out). Yet even skeptics celebrate Christmas with a special holiday meal and the exchange of gifts.

The problem of miracles doesn’t intrude, for what could be more normal than birth? If Jesus lived, then he was born, and so, with little or no faith in the rest of Christian doctrine, we can celebrate his birth. Pascha, with its miraculous resurrection from the grave, is more and more lost to us, but at least some of the joy of Christmas remains. Perhaps in the end the Nativity feast will lead us back to faith in all its richness. We will be rescued by Christmas.

The icon of Christ’s Nativity, ancient though it is, takes note of our “modern” problem. There (usually in the lower left hand corner) we find a morose, despondent Joseph listening to a wizened figure who represents what we might call “the voice of unenlightened reason.” What is the old man whispering to Joseph? Something like: “A miracle? Surely you aren’t so foolish as to believe Mary conceived this child without a human father. But if not you, then who was it?” As we read the Gospel passages concerning Joseph, we are repeatedly reminded that he didn’t easily make leaps of faith.

Divine activity intrudes into our lives in such a mundane, physical way. A woman gives birth to a child, as women have been doing since Eve. Joseph has witnessed that birth and there is nothing different about it, unless it be that it occurred in abject circumstances, far from home, in a cave in which animals are kept. Joseph has had his dreams, he has heard angelic voices, he has been reassured in a variety of ways that the child born of Mary is none other than the Awaited One, the Anointed, God’s Son. But belief comes hard. Giving birth is arduous, as we see in Mary’s reclining figure, resting after labor — and so is the labor to believe. Mary has completed this stage of her struggle, but Joseph still grapples with his.

The theme is not only in Joseph’s bewildered face. The rigorous black of the cave of Christ’s birth in the center of the icon represents all human disbelief, all fear, all hopelessness. In the midst of a starless night in the cave of our despair, Christ, “the Sun of Truth,” enters history having been clothed in flesh in Mary’s body. It is just as the Evangelist John said in the beginning of his Gospel: “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.”

The Nativity icon is in sharp contrast to the sentimental imagery we are used to in western Christmas art. In the icon there is no charming Bethlehem bathed in the light of the nativity star but only a rugged mountain with a few plants. The austere mountain suggests a hard, unwelcoming world in which survival is a real battle — the world since our expulsion from Paradise.

The most prominent figure in the icon is Mary, framed by the red blanket she is resting on — red: the color of life, the color of blood. Orthodox Christians call her the Theotokos, a Greek word meaning God-bearer or Mother of God. Her quiet but wholehearted assent to the invitation brought to her by the Archangel Gabriel has led her to Bethlehem, making a cave at the edge of a peasant village the center of the universe. He who was distant has come near, first filling her body, now visible in the flesh.

As is usual in iconography, the main event is moved to the foreground, free of its surroundings. So the cave is placed behind rather than around Mary and her child.

The Gospel records that Christ’s birth occurred in a cave that was being used as a stable. In fact the cave still exists in Bethlehem. Countless pilgrims have prayed there over the centuries. But it no longer looks like the cave it was. In the fourth century, at the Emperor Constantine’s order, the cave was transformed into a chapel. At the same time, above the cave, a basilica was built.

We see in the icon that Christ’s birth is not only for us, but for all creation. The donkey and the ox, both gazing at the newborn child, recall the opening verses of the Prophet Isaiah: 'An ox knows its owner and a donkey its master's manger..." They also represent “all creatures great and small,” endangered, punished and exploited by human beings. They too are victims of the Fall. Christ’s Nativity is for them as well as for us.

There is something about the way Mary turns away from her son that makes us aware of a struggle different than Joseph is experiencing. She knows very well her child has no human Father, but is anxious about her child’s future. She can see in the circumstances of his birth that his way of ruling is nothing like the way kings rule. The ruler of all rules from a manger in a stable. His death on the cross will not surprise her. It is implied in his birth.

We see that the Christ child’s body is wrapped “in swaddling clothes.” In icons of Christ’s burial, you will see he is wearing similar bands of cloth. We also see them around Lazarus, in the icon of his raising by Christ. In the Nativity icon, the manger looks much like a coffin. In this way, the icon links birth and death. The poet Rilke says we bear our death within us from the moment of birth. The icon of the Nativity says the same. Our life is one piece and its length of much less importance than its purity and truthfulness.

Some versions of the icon show more details, some less.

Normally in the icon we see several angels worshiping God-become-man. Though we ourselves are rarely aware of the presence of angels, they are deeply enmeshed in our history and we know some of them by name. This momentous event is for them as well as us.

Often the icon includes the three wise men who have come from far off, whose close attention to activity in the heavens made them come on pilgrimage in order to pay homage to a king who belongs not to one people, but to all people; not to one age, but to all ages. They represent the world beyond Judaism.

Then there are the shepherds, simple people who have been summoned by angels. Throughout history it has in fact been the simple people who have been most uncompromised in their response to the Gospel, who have not buried God in footnotes. It was not the wise men, but the shepherds who were permitted to hear the choir of angels singing God’s praise.

On the bottom right of the icon often there are one or two midwives washing the newborn baby. The detail is based on apocryphal texts concerning Joseph’s arrangements for the birth. Those who know the Old Testament will recall the disobedience of midwives to the Egyptian Pharaoh; thanks to a brave midwife, Moses was not murdered at birth. In the Nativity icon the midwife’s presence has another still more important function, underscoring Christ’s full participation in human nature.

Iconographers may leave out or alter various details, but always there is a ray of divine light that connects heaven with the baby. The partially revealed circle at the very top of the icon symbolizes God the Father, the small circle within the descending ray represents the Holy Spirit, while the child is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Son. At every turn, from iconography to liturgical text to the physical gesture of crossing oneself, the Church has always sought to confess God in the Holy Trinity.

The symbol is also connected with the star that led the magi to the cave.

Orthodoxy often speaks of Christ in terms of light and this, too, is suggested by the ray connecting heaven to the manger. “Our Savior, the dayspring from on high, has visited us, and we who were in shadow and in darkness have found the truth,” the Church sings on Christmas, the Feast of Christ’s Nativity According to the Flesh.

The iconographic portrayal of Christ’s birth is not without radical social implications. Christ’s birth occurred where it did, we are told by Matthew, “because there was no room in the inn.” He who welcomes all is himself unwelcome. From the moment of his birth, he is something like a refugee, as indeed he soon will be in the very strict sense of the word, fleeing to Egypt with Mary and Joseph, as they seek a safe distance from the murderous Herod. Later in life he will say to his followers, revealing one of the criteria of salvation, “I was homeless and you took me in.”

The icon reminds us that we are saved not by our achievements, but by our participation in the mercy of God — God’s hospitality. If we turn our backs on the homeless and those without the necessities of life, we will end up with nothing more than ideas and slogans and find ourselves lost in the icon’s starless cave.

We return at the end to the two figures at the heart of the icon. Mary, fulfilling Eve’s destiny, has given birth to Jesus Christ, a child who is God incarnate, a child in whom each of us finds our true self, a child who is the measure of all things. It is not the Messiah the Jews of those days expected — or the Christ many Christians of the modern world would have preferred. God, whom we often refer to as all-mighty, reveals himself in poverty and vulnerability. Christmas is a revelation of the self-emptying love of God.

-- from Praying with Icons by Jim Forest (revised edition, 2008, Orbis Book)

[The Nativity plaque is Byzantine, 10th or 11th century. The original is in the collection of the Vatican Museums in Rome. This is a reproduction produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.]
* * *

a triptych of stamps

2009-12-23T20:45:00.004+01:00

This amazing triptych of postage stamps was on an envelope in today's mail -- Bob Hope on the left (the American comedian who seemed never to find a war he didn’t like), the Virgin Mary and Christ Child on the right (icons of peace on earth, good will to the human race), and, between them, an eagle-crowned clock, relentless reporter of the passage of time and stern reminder of mortality.

-- Jim

Remembering dialysis

2009-11-27T15:48:00.002+01:00

Today I happened to come upon the attached memo, something I routinely sent out to people who asked about my kidney illness before the transplant took place. The memo evolved during the two-year period I was on dialysis -- this may be the final form of it.

Jim

* * *

Kidney illness update (as revised June 28, 2007)

Here are some of the questions friends have asked and brief responses...

>> What is the illness you have?

The gradual failure of my kidneys. Mine still are working, but at only about 9 or 10 percent of normal function.

Since January 2006, I have required dialysis (the filtering of my blood with an artificial kidney).

>> How sick are you?

Quite sick, but I don't feel sick. I'm far from a "worst case" patient. I was fortunate to become aware of the illness much earlier than is the case for many others thanks to blood tests several years ago. Because of early treatment, my kidneys are still working, though at a reduced capacity. My situation is fortunate. For many patients, by the time kidney illness is recognized, kidney function is close to zero. When that happens, daily liquid intake has to be drastically reduced. Patients may feel they're on an endless roller-coaster -- energy one day, following dialysis, then exhausted the next.

>> Is kidney illness painful?

Not really, at least not in my case. The insertion of the two hollow needles into my left arm when I have dialysis is not pain free, but the pain is usually over quickly.

>> What caused the kidney damage?

It's not certain, but most likely it had to do with high blood pressure.

>> Is kidney illness fatal?

Without treatment, indeed. But with dialysis, one can go on for many years, though with gradual deterioration as dialysis doesn't equal having a fully functional kidney. (Not long ago I witnessed a death in the dialysis clinic -- an 83-year-old patient who simply faded out. It seemed he had fallen asleep. As is often the case with dialysis patients, kidney failure was only one of the problems he was facing.)

>> Is there any cure?

Though there is work going on to develop an artificial kidney that can be implanted in the body, none exists so far. Perhaps in another generation?

The only cure to date is a kidney transplant. After many tests, it has been decided that I'm a suitable candidate for a transplant. Unless one find a kidney donor, the average waiting time is 54 months, and it can be as long as 72 months. A transplant can occur much more quickly if a living donor offers a kidney.

>> Do you have a kidney donor in sight?

Nancy is exploring the possibility of donating a kidney. She has had quite a few tests these past half year. So far she appears to be a good match (same blood type, in good physical condition, heart fine, etc.). We know from a renogram that both of her kidneys are working equally well, so that a) she will still have a kidney capable of doing all that it needs to do and b) the one she gives me will also be up to its task in my body. More recently she has had a CAT scan and another round of tissue matching tests.

Here are two web pages about kidney transplants:

http://www.kidney.ab.ca/treatments/transplant.html

http://www.answers.com/topic/kidney-transplantation

>> Is kidney donation a risk to the donor?

While any surgery involves risks, the risks are regarded as slight for kidney donors. People who have given a kidney go on to live normal lives. (One of the early tests for potential donors is a scan to see if you do in fact have two kidneys. Not every one does. One healthy kidney, however, is all you need.)

>> What is hardest about dialysis?

For me, mainly the time it takes -- three sessions a week. Altogether dialysis involves approximately 50 hours a month or 600 hours per year -- about a quarter of my former working time. I normally leave the house about 2:30 and get back home about 6:30, traveling by bike. The hospital is only a kilometer away, so travel time isn't a big factor.

>> Can you travel outside Holland?

Yes, but not easily. I can't go anywhere for more than three days without first arranging dialysis care locally. This turns out to be a very time-consuming process. If the local dialysis clinic has too many patients already, as may easily be the case, they will not accept me. I had a great deal of trouble finding a clinic with space for me in London last May. I ended up in a private clinic that mainly serves wealthy patients from the Middle East. Later the same month, with the help of French friends, I was able to arrange five sessions of dialysis in Perpignan while taking part in a Merton conference in Prades. I've since been on lecture trips in Italy, Canada Spain, the USA, Greece, and -- most recently -- Memphis, Tennessee, for a conference on Thomas Merton.

>> What does a dialysis machine look like?

There's a photo of me hooked up to a dialysis machine at the Alkmaar hospital here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/91857028/in/set-151995/

>> How does a dialysis machine work?

There are drawings with brief explanations on these two web pages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemodialysis

http://www.davita.com/article/dialysis/181

>> How are the people who take care of you?

I'm impressed with the nurses. All of them are extremely good at what they do and are, no less important, caring, good- humored people. The majority are women but there are also a number of male nurses.

>> Can you write during dialysis?

No. I really have effective use of only my right arm, though, with care, I can do a little with the left hand (the arm connected to the dialysis machine. I'm able to manage books and magazines. Dialysis has become mainly a time of reading. On the occasions when I'm too tired to read, I have a small DVD player and so cnn watch films.

>> Have you written anything about being ill?

I've written a chapter on "The Pilgrimage of Illness" for a book that Orbis will publish later this year ("The Road to Emmaus: Pilgrimage as a Way of Life"). The chapter is posted at:

http://incommunion.org/forest-flier/jimsessays/the-pilgrimage-of-illness/

Please keep us in your prayers.

Jim

* * *

photo: A maple leaf that was along my path in at the Antiochian Village in Pennsylvania last month, not quite two years after the kidney transplant.

* * *

Jerome, patron saints of translators

2009-11-04T13:49:00.008+01:00

Due to his having translated the Bible into Latin, St. Jerome (340-420) was recognized by later generations as the patron saint of translators. Few saints have inspired so many paintings, especially during the Renaissance.

In many of them, Jerome is shown as the desert ascetic he was for a significant part of his life. I saw one example of such a painting last month at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/4007080840/

The paintings of Jerome in the desert are wonderful and connect with a major part of his life, but my personal favorite is one by Antonello da Messina that hangs at the National Gallery in London.

Da Messina removes Jerome from the wilderness, placing him instead in an academic carrel, putting the stress on Jerome as scholar. It was the scholarly Jerome who became a hero of Christian humanists like Erasmus in 16th century Europe.

There is always a lion in paintings of Jerome. In the example by da Messina, one has to look in the shadows to the right to find him.

In Christian art, there are two sorts of lions, the baptized and the unbaptized. Jerome's lion is in the former category, a pacified lion who has embraced a vegetarian diet.

In fact the lion wandered into paintings of Jerome from the life story of a saint with a similar name, Gerasimos, who was abbot of a monastery along the Jordan River, not far from Jerome's cave in Bethlehem. Here is an example of a Gerasimos icon that's part of our icon corner, with a caption of which explains the lion story:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/962851700/

A comment about the da Messina painting from Nancy:

"This is Jerome of the well-ordered mind. Note that the center of the painting is not Jerome but the open book. Everything around it is peace, harmony and beauty. No street noise outside, no telephone ringing, no postman knocking on the door. All is tranquility, and the work goes on unimpeded. No distractions, no Facebook, no YouTube. Ahh, you can almost feel it. But then again, no wife to talk to, no children, no worldly cares. Just the task at hand, total focus on the work. Is this possible for us, or even desirable? Even writing this e-mail is keeping me from my work..."

We have a print of the da Messina painting that hangs near Nancy's desk. I'm sure she's not the only translator who finds encouragement in having an image of Jerome close to her work place.

-- Jim

note: Wikipedia has a good entry about Jerome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Jerome

Two years on...

2009-10-31T12:30:00.003+01:00

To celebrate the second anniversary of the kidney transplant (31 October 2007), at breakfast this morning I gave Nancy the new edition of the Van Gogh Letters. Given all the Van Gogh-related translation work that Nancy has done in the past two decades (currently she's working on a book about Van Gogh forgeries), it seemed doubly appropriate. Also the CD of the letters that comes with the set is likely to be a useful resource.

The book had a big launching at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam the day before I flew to the US several weeks ago. Nancy went the next day with Diane Webb, one of the book's three English-language translators. Here's an extract from a letter Nancy sent me that evening:

"What a lovely day! Diane asked if I wanted to go with her to the Van Gogh Museum to see the new exhibition on the letters. She had been there the evening before for the opening (attended by the Queen), but so much else was happening that she didn't actually see the exhibition. She said all she saw was wine and canapes and lots of people. So we spent the rest of the day there. It was fabulous. The exhibition is definitely worth a visit. A selection of Van Gogh's letters are shown in glass cases, with the paintings and drawings he refers to on the walls. Breathtaking. You just can't believe what you're seeing. No catalogue, no matter how good the picture quality, comes close to being face to face with the real thing. And I saw the book -- or should I say books! Diane showed me the whole thing, including the part she did. I have a very serious book lust here. You wouldn't believe how beautiful the design and quality is. A six-volume boxed set. To get a glimpse, check out the museum site: http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/index.jsp?page=200942

"The whole thing is copiously illustrated with everything that Vincent refers to in his letters -- his own paintings and sketches and paintings of other artists that he refers to. And the quality is superb. Each of the three translators is being given two copies. When you come back we really should try to see the exhibition."

It's an expensive set of books, but a substantial discount is offered by several online bookshops.

Two years on with Nancy's kidney, I seem more than ever aware of what a miracle it is to be really well, not to say no longer being a prisoner of dialysis.

If you want to take a fresh look at our transplant blog (A Tale of Two Kidneys), it's still up:

http://ataleof2kidneys.blogspot.com/

Also there is a folder of transplant-related photos here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157602782265033/

Jim

* * *

pastoral care of a serial killer

2009-10-16T17:05:00.004+02:00

One of the highlights of the current visit to the US was a meeting with a prison chaplain whom I must leave unnamed.

My questions about her work led to the discovery that one of the people in her pastoral care is a convicted serial murderer. I asked many questions about him. He was a male nurse who worked in a number of hospitals and who has freely admitted to ending the lives of many people who were, in fact, already dying. Apparently he couldn't bear to witness the end-of-life suffering of patients he was caring for. For providing pastoral care, the chaplain herself has endured a great deal of harsh criticism, often from her fellow Christians, including threats of attack. (Given the crimes he committed, the man as no right to pastoral care, execution would be too good for him, etc.) At times she has needed police protection -- not that she has ever defended his actions. In fact neither has the man. Police discovered how many were people killed only because, arrested for one death in a "sting operation," he insisted on admitting in detail what he had done with other patients. He pleaded guilty and presented no defense.

Apparently some of the hospitals where he was employed suspected a nurse was in fact giving deadly doses of a heart medication but preferred not to investigate, apprehensive that any investigation would produce results that would result in suits that would cost them dearly.

The man now lives an ascetic life in permanent solitary confinement. His chaplain has helped him develop a somewhat monastic spiritual life with four major elements: the Jesus Prayer, prayer with icons, a rule of daily prayer marked by the seven times during the day when a bell is sounded in the prison, and prayer with the psalms. He is a passionate reader. (It turns out he is one of the readers of my book on praying with icons.) He has also, as a prisoner, become a kidney donor, an act which he was able -- with assistance from his chaplain, prison officials and the doctors who were involved -- to do anonymously. An astonishing story.

You might pray for the man. Let me use a pseudonym. Call him "George the Prisoner" -- God will know who he is.

Jim

The God Problem

2009-10-03T13:30:00.006+02:00

In this period, in which a militant form of atheism is once again becoming popular and widespread, it's interesting to see a review in The New York Times of a book (The Case for God) that takes a fresh look at what is meant by the word "God."

I was also happy to see that book's author, Karen Armstrong, draws attention to the "apophatic" approach to God, something familiar to Orthodox Christians but "Greek" -- and Greek it truly is -- to most Christians in the West. (What apparently neither Armstrong nor the reviewer understand is that the apophatic way of seeking God thrives on apparent contradictions -- a God who is both approachable and unapproachable, known and unknown, a God who seems radically absent and God who is in search of us.)

Some of the people I have loved most were (or are) atheists, my parents for starters, at least during the years I was growing up, though they changed their minds later in life.

There are many good reasons for not believing in God. I find atheism often has less to do with certainty that there is no God than with disgust with religion in general (a disgust I often share), or with various forms of Christianity (there are so many), or with appalling things that have been done by people who claim to be Christians, or simply with the fact that so many Christians seem to be far less influenced by Jesus and the Gospels than by the oppressive political and economic structures they happen to be have been born into and passionately support.

When I talk to people who describe themselves as atheists, I sometimes ask them to describe what god it is that they don't believe in. Most of the time I can respond, "I must be an atheist too -- I don't believe in that god either."

Jim

note: The photo is of the main staircase of the Bible Museum, housed in a Golden Age house on the Herengracht in Amsterdam.

* * *

New York Times / www.nytimes.com / October 1, 2009

Perpetual Revelations

review by Ross Douthat

* * *
The Case for God
By Karen Armstrong
406 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95
* * *

The Bush era was a difficult time for liberal religion in America. The events of 9/11 were not exactly an advertisement for the compatibility of faith and reason, faith and modernity, or faith and left-of-center politics. Nor was the domestic culture war that blazed up in their wake, which lent a “with us or against us” quality to nearly every God-related controversy. For many liberals, the only choices seemed to be secularism or fundamentalism, the new atheism or the old-time religion, Richard Dawkins or George W. Bush.

But now the wheel has turned, and liberal believers can breathe easier. Bush has retired to Texas, and his successor in the White House is the very model of a modern liberal Christian. Religious conservatism seems diminished and dispirited. The polarizing issues of the moment are health care and deficits, not abstinence education or intelligent design. And the new atheists seem to have temporarily run out of ways to call believers stupid.

The time, in other words, is ripe for a book like “The Case for God,” which wraps a rebuke to the more militant sort of atheism in an engaging survey of Western religious thought. Karen Armstrong, a former nun turned prolific popular historian, wants to rescue the idea of God from its cultured despisers and its more literal-minded adherents alike. To that end, she doesn’t just argue that her preferred approach to religion — which emphasizes the pursuit of an unknowable Deity, rather than the quest for theological correctness — is compatible with a liberal, scientific, technologically advanced society. She argues that it’s actually truer to the ancient traditions of Judaism, Islam and (especially) Christianity than is much of what currently passes for “conservative” religion. And the neglect of these traditions, she suggests, is “one of the reasons why so many Western people find the concept of God so troublesome today.”

Both modern believers and modern atheists, Armstrong contends, have come to understand religion primarily as a set of propositions to be assented to, or a catalog of specific facts about the nature of God, the world and human life. But this approach to piety would be foreign to many premodern religious thinkers, including the greatest minds of the Christian past, from the early Fathers of the Church to medieval eminences like Thomas Aquinas.

These and other thinkers, she writes, understood faith primarily as a practice, rather than as a system — not as “something that people thought but something they did.” Their God was not a being to be defined or a proposition to be tested, but an ultimate reality to be approached through myth, ritual and “apophatic” theology, which practices “a deliberate and principled reticence about God and/or the sacred” and emphasizes what we can’t know about the divine. And their religion was a set of skills, rather than a list of unalterable teachings — a “knack,” as the Taoists have it, for navigating the mysteries of human existence.

It’s a knack, Armstrong argues, that the Christian West has largely lost, and the rise of modern science is to blame. Not because science and religion are unalterably opposed, but because religious thinkers succumbed to a fatal case of science envy.

Instead of providing the usual portrait of empiricism triumphing over superstition, Armstrong depicts an extended seduction in which believers were persuaded to embrace the “natural theology” of Isaac Newton and William Paley, which seemed to provide scientific warrant for a belief in a creator God. Convinced that “the natural laws that scientists had discovered in the universe were tangible demonstrations of God’s providential care,” Western Christians abandoned the apophatic, mythic approach to faith in favor of a pseudo-scientific rigor — and then had nowhere to turn when Darwin’s theory of evolution arrived on the scene.

An Aquinas or an Augustine would have been unfazed by the idea of evolution. But their modern successors had convinced themselves that religious truth was a literal, all-or-nothing affair, in which doctrines were the equivalent of scientific precepts, and sacred texts needed to coincide exactly with the natural sciences. The resulting crisis produced the confusions of our own day, in which biblical literalists labor to reconcile the words of Genesis with the existence of the dinosaurs, while atheists ridicule Scripture for its failure to resemble a science textbook.

To escape this pointless debate, Armstrong counsels atheists to recognize that theism isn’t a rival scientific theory, and that it is “no use magisterially weighing up the teachings of religion to judge their truth or falsehood before embarking on a religious way of life. You will discover their truth — or lack of it — only if you translate these doctrines into ritual or ethical action.” Believers, meanwhile, are urged to recover the wisdom of their forebears, who understood that “revealed truth was symbolic, that Scripture could not be interpreted literally” and that “revelation was not an event that had happened once in the distant past but was an ongoing, creative process that required human ingenuity.”

This is an eloquent case for the ancient roots of the liberal approach to faith, and my summary does not do justice to its subtleties. But it deserves to be heavily qualified. Armstrong concedes that the religious story she’s telling highlights only a particular trend within monotheistic faith. The casual reader, however, would be forgiven for thinking that the leading lights of pre-modern Christianity were essentially liberal Episcopalians avant la lettre.

In reality, these Christian sages were fiercely dogmatic by any modern standard. They were not fundamentalists, reading every line of Scripture literally, and they were, as Armstrong says, “inventive, fearless and confident in their interpretation of faith.” But their inventiveness was grounded in shared doctrines and constrained by shared assumptions. Their theology was reticent in its claims about the ultimate nature of God but very specific about how God had revealed himself on earth. It’s true that Augustine, for instance, did not interpret the early books of Genesis literally. But he certainly endorsed a literal reading of Jesus’ resurrection — and he wouldn’t have been much of a Christian theologian if he hadn’t.

Which is to say that it’s considerably more difficult than Armstrong allows to separate thought from action, teaching from conduct, and dogma from practice in religious history. The dogmas tend to sustain the practices, and vice versa. It’s possible to gain some sort of “knack” for a religion without believing that all its dogmas are literally true: a spiritually inclined person can no doubt draw nourishment from the Roman Catholic Mass without believing that the Eucharist literally becomes the body and blood of Christ. But without the doctrine of transubstantiation, the Mass would not exist to provide that nourishment. Not every churchgoer will share Flannery O’Connor’s opinion that if the Eucharist is “a symbol, to hell with it.” But the Catholic faith has endured for 2,000 years because of Flannery O’Connors, not Karen Armstrongs.

This explains why liberal religion tends to be parasitic on more dogmatic forms of faith, which create and sustain the practices that the liberal believer picks and chooses from, reads symbolically and reinterprets for a more enlightened age. Such spiritual dilettant-ism has its charms, but it lacks the sturdy appeal of Western monotheism, which has always offered not only myth and ritual and symbolism (the pagans had those bases covered), but also scandalously literal claims — that the Jews really are God’s chosen people; that Christ really did rise from the dead; and that however much the author of the universe may surpass our understanding, we can live in hope that he loves the world enough to save it, and us, from the annihilating power of death.

Such literalism can be taken too far, and “The Case for God” argues, convincingly, that it needs to coexist with more mythic, mystic and philosophical forms of faith. Most people, though, are not mystics and philosophers, and they are hungry for myths that are not only resonant but true. Apophatic religion may be the most rigorous way to go in search of an elusive God. But for most believers, it will remain a poor substitute for the idea that God has come in search of us.

* * *
Ross Douthat is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.
* * *

Mary Travers, rest in peace

2009-09-17T16:07:00.012+02:00

We heard the news this morning of the death last night of Mary Travers, age 72.

Mary's straight blond hair once inspired Nancy to iron hers straight. There must have been many young women in the late 60s who did the same: the much sought after Mary Travers look.

I doubt anyone in the English-speaking world got through the 60s without getting to know by heart some of the songs recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary: If I Had a Hammer, 500 Miles, Puff the Magic Dragon, Blowin' in the Wind, The Great Mandala, In the Early Morning Rain, Leaving on a Jet Plane...

Nancy and I spent lunchtime today listening to a best-of Peter, Paul and Mary CD. It brought tears to my eyes. There is an earnest innocence and deep purity in their voices that many these days would probably regard as naive.

I recall Peter and Paul visiting the office of the Catholic Peace Fellowship on 5 Beekman Street in Lower Manhattan back in 65 or 66 when Tom Cornell and I were CPF’s co-secretaries. Would that I could remember what we talked about -- probably our work to assist conscientious objectors.

Tom just sent me a note reminding me that they arrived in a red sports car which they parked on the street below (no doubt illegally, as in that part of town, half a block from City Hall, it was easier to find the Holy Grail than a legal parking place).

Then there was the evening when I went with a friend to see “Godspell” (it opened that night) at a small Off Broadway theater in Greenwich Village -- the part of New York where Mary Travers grew up -- and found that we were sitting just a few seats behind all three of them. We had a great time. Between acts the cast served wine to all who had turned out.

Songs and their singers can make a difference. We owe a debt to Mary Travers.

Jim

PS Take a moment and visit the Peter, Paul & Mary web site: http://www.peterpaulandmary.com/

Four hundred years ago

2009-09-11T13:43:00.005+02:00

Here’s a watercolor of Manhattan as it appeared from the Brooklyn side of the East River in 1665. One of the treasures of the Royal Library in The Hague, it’s now on exhibition in New York.

Members of my family were among the inhabitants at the time, but I know little about them. My mother wasn’t the sort of person to devote much time to chronicling the family tree – she was far more interested in current events and her current or forthcoming battles with the Powers That Be. Because I was curious about the centuries-old wooden shoe that had come down to us over the generations, she did occasionally say a little bit about the Dutch side of the family. Mother’s maiden name was Hendrickson. She was a direct descendant of Hendrick Hendrickson who, so mother had been told by her father, was an Utrecht-born navigator who had piloted the Dutch East India ship “Halve Maen” – Half Moon – which was captained by Henry Hudson. The ship entered New York Harbor 400 years ago today: 11 September 1609.

Hudson was the polar opposite of a likeable man, which perhaps was a factor in explaining why Hendrick Hendrickson became part of the first generation of non-native settlers in Manhattan.

There is a famous map of which gives a bird’s eye view of the town on the southern tip of Manhattan, Nieuw Amsterdam, each house clearly drawn and numbered, with a listing on the side giving the names of the occupants. Hendrick Hendrickson’s house was at the north end of Breedtstraat (literally, Broad Street, today’s Broadway), just inside town wall, Wall Street, as it is today.

I would love one day to find out how much of the family story is legend, how much of it is true. Perhaps I will find a book about Hudson’s 1609 voyage with details about the crew of the Half Moon. Who was Hendrick Hudson? Was he really Henry Hudson’s navigator?

The one major relic of the family past in that era is a 17th century New Jersey farm house, the Hendrickson House, now a beautifully restored museum run by the Monmouth County Historical Society.

-- Jim

Memories of the (almost) end of the world

2009-07-25T15:49:00.006+02:00

In a letter just received, my friend Mark Farrington told me his one memory of the Cuban Missile Crisis:

“I was weeks away from my third birthday. My only recollection was seeing my mother, in the basement, storing dry and canned goods in a cardboard box. We had just moved to a house in North Syracuse, NY, within two miles of the commercial airport, and a mile from Hancock Air Force Base, one of the main strategic targets of the Eastern Seaboard. Thunderbird jets would fly over all the time, their barrier-breaking sound immediately distinguishable from ordinary airplanes. Even as a very little kid, one knew enough to not stand close to any window panes during those "flyover" moments. This wasn't necessarily "traumatic" – one just got used to it.

“In the 1980s I asked Mom about the ‘cardboard box’ thing, wondering what she had been up to. ‘That was during the Cuban Missile Crisis,’ she explained. ‘We thought that would protect against radiation’.”

A potent memory – a child’s innocent glimpse of his mom’s preparations for the end of the world.

Mark asked about my own memories of the day the Cuban Missile Crisis was most threatening, October 27, 1962.

The main event, as the day began, was deciding to go to work rather than call in sick. At the time I was a journalist on the staff of a Manhattan-based weekly magazine. “Sick in what way,” I would have been asked. This would have meant explaining that all of us had a really good chance of being converted to radioactive dust before the day was over.

In my office on Madison Avenue, we did hardly any work that day. We were mainly engaged in nonstop listening to the radio. Then, late in the day, came the news that Khrushchev had announced that the Soviet government had issued an order for dismantling its Cuba-based nuclear weapons. The missiles and their warheads were to be put back in their crates and returned to the Soviet Union.

I am sure ours was far from the only office which greeted the news with applause. One of my colleagues went out and bought a bottle of wine – or was it vodka?

At the end of the day, I took the ferry back to Staten Island with a deep sense of being a survivor. No doubt everyone on the ferry boat felt the same way.

(We didn’t yet know that Kennedy had made a pledge, overruling the advice of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not to invade Cuba, nor did anyone beyond Kennedy’s inner circle know of the promise made to Khrushchev to pull US missiles away from the Soviet border with Turkey. The more hidden side of the story is told in Jim Douglass’s book, JFK and the Unspeakable.)

A related memory takes me back maybe a year earlier to a test of New York city’s air raid sirens. I was at the Catholic Worker, alone on the top floor of our modest three-storey building on Chrystie Street, when the sirens began shrieking. I suppose there had been a notice about the test in the newspapers, but I hadn’t been reading them and took the noise to be a summons to take shelter – nuclear missiles were on their way and would shortly be exploding.

I saw no point in taking cover and so decided to experience my last few minutes of life standing at the large plate glass window that looked out over the forlorn neighborhood we were part of. There was not a soul to be seen, not a car or truck in motion. I think I prayed – perhaps the rosary?

Then a lone man in sandals – maybe in his late 20s, lean, short-cropped beard, wearing faded dungarees and an old cotton shirt that wasn’t tucked in – strolled by, calm as a hiker in a national park, paying no attention to the sirens. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He had passed our building and was about to vanish from my line of vision when he turned his head, gazed directly at me, smiled and waved, then walked on. I was astonished. It seemed to me I had seen Jesus and Jesus had seen me. I had felt a deep calm through those few minutes, but, by the times the sirens stopped, I was light years beyond calm.

I opened a window and looked down the street to see where the man had gone, but there wasn’t a soul to be seen.

* * *
icon: The face of Christ, possibly the oldest surviving image of Christ, is at the Monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai Desert.
* * *

The whole Earth in a prison cell

2009-07-14T14:11:00.013+02:00

Attached is a reflection by A.O. Scott not only on the moon landing, whose 40th anniversary is six days away, but on the late Sixties.

It’s a good piece and rings bells for me, but my own take on the moon landing is a bit different than that of A.O. Scott or the other authors he quotes in his New York Times article.

Most people at the time saw the moon landing on television. In my case, I listened to it happening via a pair of low-tech earphones made available to me by the State of Wisconsin. I was in a narrow cell at Waupun State Prison.

Prison had become my temporary home due to an act of protest against the Vietnam War – I was one of 14 people who burned files of Milwaukee’s nine draft boards. Now I was in the early weeks of serving a two-year sentence – in fact one year, given the “good behavior” factor.

My new address was the sort of grim maximum-security prison you see in old James Cagney movies – tier upon tier of cells, each of them 14 bars wide, reached via steel stairways and narrow catwalks. It was a place that seemed black-and white even when seen in color.

It was perhaps more exciting to listen to the moon landing than to see the event on TV. Radio’s advantage has always been to enlist one’s own imagination for all the visual effects. I had plenty of props for my imagination already, after seeing approximately every science fiction film made in the Fifties and having read many volumes of science fiction. Lots of si-fi book covers were embedded in memory.

It was astounding to imagine human beings crossing that dry and airless sea of space, landing, then actually standing – then walking – on the Moon’s low-gravity, dusty surface.

But the main impact of the event came in the days that followed as newspapers and magazines made their way to me full of photos taken by the astronauts in the course of their journey. The whole Earth as seen by human eyes. The Earth rising like a blue marble over the airless horizon of the lifeless Moon.

Then came the biggest surprise of all: a packet from NASA arriving from one of the astronauts containing an actual 8-1/2 x 11 inch color photo of the Earth. I doubt if the photo had reached the White House much faster than it reached my prison. (The same image was to appear a few months later on the cover of National Geographic Magazine, but even there didn’t have the richness of color and detail the actual photo had.)

How did this remarkable photo come to me? There was no letter in the envelop. I could only guess.

The Milwaukee 14 trial had received a great deal of press attention, including many articles in The New York Times and later a lengthy essay in The New York Review of Books. Apparently something I had said during our trial had been read by one of the astronauts and lingered in his memory during the trip to the Moon and back. His sending me a photo of our astonishingly beautiful borderless planet was – perhaps – his way of saying thank you.

The prison administration made it difficult for me to receive the photo – it hadn’t been sent by an “authorised correspondent.” But at last it was delivered to my cell and for the rest of my time in prison it hung on the concrete wall, a kind of icon that I often contemplated: this magnificent fragment of creation that God has given us to share, and in which we are called to love and protect each other.

The giver of the photo was a longtime military officer and I was an anti-war protester locked up in a small cell in middle America. How good it was to feel the bond between us.

Jim

Addendum added six days later: I wonder if it was Neil Armstrong who sent the photo? A news item found this morning makes clear that Armstrong looks back on the Apollo program as a contribution to war prevention.

Speaking at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of his becoming the first person to set foot on the moon, Neil Armstrong, 78, said that he and the two other Apollo 11 crew members recognized that what for them had been a daring mission in space also may have helped reduce hostilities between the Soviet Union and the United States.

"The space race faded away," said Armstrong. "It was the ultimate peaceful competition. I'll not assert that it was a diversion which prevented a war. Nevertheless it was a diversion. It allowed both sides to take the high road with the objectives of science, learning and exploration. Eventually it provided a mechanism for engendering cooperation between former adversaries.”

When I shared this posting with Tom Cornell, he responded: "I wouldn't be surprised if it was Neil Armstrong who sent you the Earth photo. You remember that he stood next to Dorothy Day when they were among a small grouping selected from the 2,500 or so delegates in Rome attending the Third Catholic Lay Congress to receive Communion from the hand of Pope Paul VI. Armstrong, by the way, was born in Rome. When asked how that came about he replied that his mother was there at the time."

* * *

Note: The photo I received is shown above.

* * *

New York Times / www.nytimes.com / July 13, 2009

That One Small Step Is Still Hard to Measure

By A. O. Scott

At the end of the first chapter of John Updike’s “Rabbit Redux,” the title character, a fictional Pennsylvania everyman whose given name is Harry Angstrom, tunes in, like millions of his nonfictional fellow citizens, to watch the Moon landing on television.

Even though the Apollo 11 mission casts a long metaphorical shadow over the book, the second in what would ultimately become a quartet of novels about Rabbit, Rabbit’s experience of the epochal event of July 20, 1969, is curiously equivocal and detached.

It’s not clear what’s going on. On his parents’ television, he sees that “a man in clumsy silhouette has interposed himself among these abstract shadows and glare. An Armstrong, but not Jack. He says something about ‘steps’ that a crackle keeps Rabbit from understanding.

“Electronic letters travelling sideways spell out MAN IS ON THE MOON.”

But the true significance of those words escapes poor Rabbit. “I don’t know,” he says to his ailing mother. “I know it’s happened, but I don’t feel anything yet.”

What was he meant to feel? Was this a small step or a giant step, and in what direction? Perhaps because of the Moon landing’s hybrid nature — it was at once a science project and a media spectacle, an expression of apolitical idealism and an act of national self-assertion, a fact and a symbol — this happening was both dramatic and a bit puzzling, even opaque.

Its historical scale and cultural impact were hard, especially in the moment and its immediate aftermath, to assess. Nothing like this had ever been done before, but what did it mean? What did it change?

Like much else that took place in the summer of 1969, the Moon shot felt like both an apotheosis and an anticlimax, and perhaps, even to Americans with grander imaginations than Rabbit’s, like not much at all.

The mood of the moment, as it survives in the literary and cultural record, was Utopian and apocalyptic — yes, 1969 was the year of Woodstock and “Easy Rider” and the Manson family murders, of the Days of Rage and the Chicago 8 conspiracy trial — but also weary, anxious and confused.

For Rabbit Angstrom, the summer and early autumn of ’69 (rendered by Updike, writing a year later, in present tense) represent a period of personal and domestic chaos, of wild exploration and near catastrophe. The fracture and tumult he experiences are intimations of a wider social breakdown masquerading, at times, as a cosmic rebirth.

Rabbit, like America, emerges from the ’60s neither ruined nor transformed, but rather weary and shaken. The last word of the book is a fretful question, the kind you might hear, or ask, in the wake of a terrible accident: “O.K.?”

And Rabbit was hardly alone. Norman Mailer found himself in a similar mood. Mailer, in his journalistic fantasia “Of a Fire on the Moon,” calls himself Aquarius, but this adoption of the cosmic idiom of the counterculture is more ironic than ecstatic. Instead of standing at the threshold of a New Age, Mailer, dutifully reporting on the Apollo project from the ground, feels himself to be slouching toward a historical denouement.

As the launching date approached, “Aquarius was in a depression,” Mailer wrote, “which would not lift for the rest of the summer, a curious depression full of fevers, forebodings and a general sense that the century was done — that it had ended in the summer of 1969.”

And in the book, Mailer’s hunt for celestial metaphors comes up a bit short, as the great renegade existential explorer of American letters discovers that the conquest of space is being planned and conducted by scientists, bureaucrats and other practical-minded, down-to-earth squares.

Looking at contemporary literary and cultural responses to the Moon landing, like Mailer’s and Updike’s, you find amazement accompanied — and often trumped — by disillusionment.

In “Coming Apart,” his “informal history” of the ’60s (published in 1971), William O’Neill concludes a chapter on the space program on a downbeat, deflating note. In O’Neill’s account, the great triumph of the Apollo project was, at best, a Pyrrhic victory, the consecration of “a monument to the vanity of public men and the avarice of contractors. This made it a good symbol of the sixties.”

Maybe, but of course there was more to the ’60s — and to the space program — than hollow vanity and empty spectacle. If the meaning of the Moon landing as a singular event was hard for writers and their alter egos to discern, that may be because it had already been so thoroughly anticipated, realized in a way that mere reality could not quite match.

John F. Kennedy’s vow, at the start of the decade, to put a man on the Moon by the end had unleashed not only the ambitions of contractors and technicians, but also the imaginations of filmmakers and television writers, who exploited the visionary dimensions of Kennedy’s promise even as NASA scientists and astronauts were sweating the details.

Two examples, now canonical, stand out. The first, “Star Trek,” with its Kennedyesque “final frontier” rhetoric and its spirit of earnest, can-do liberalism, has become a staple of popular culture, so frequently parodied and reinvented that its boldness is easy to forget.

But whereas the science-fiction projections of the ’50s tended to focus on the threat of alien invasion and planetary destruction, and to give expression to a panoply of cold war fears, “Star Trek” celebrated humanism, problem solving and curiosity. Not for nothing was the starship named Enterprise.

And that starship was, above all, an allegorical space, rich with meanings and lessons and food for thought. But the wonkiness of “Star Trek,” which ended its run about six weeks after Neil Armstrong’s Moon walk, was nothing compared with the tripped-out sublimity of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” released in 1968.

In that film, the human adventure beyond Earth — to the Moon and toward Jupiter — brought about a whole new stage in the evolution of consciousness, a fulfillment, transcendence and wholesale alteration of human possibility.

Which did not quite happen when the actual lunar module touched down in the dust. Nor, for that matter, did the Woodstock music festival usher in a new age of peace, love and liberation.

The tendency, endemic to the times, toward the overhyping of singular events and the drastic heightening of expectations may have made the disappointments registered by Rabbit and Aquarius inevitable. And in the years after 1969, public and governmental support for the space program waned.

But the trip to the Moon — which was after all envisioned in 1902 by Georges Méliès, in one of earliest works of cinema — would blossom as a cultural touchstone in unexpected ways. The absence of feeling, the dearth of meaning, that accompanied the widespread awe and wonder guaranteed as much.

Popular culture abhors a vacuum, and for 40 years the empty places beyond our atmosphere have been overrun with stories, fables, parodies, franchises and expressions of pure kitsch. When Neil Armstrong’s likeness became a logo for MTV, it was less the corruption of something noble than the putting to use of an available and recognizable image, and the fulfillment of a possibility that had been there all along.

When I was in grade school, a mural in my classroom spelled out consequential dates in history: Oct. 11, 1492; July 4, 1776; and July 20, 1969, just a few years before. That, a teacher explained, was when “we walked on the Moon.”

But of course, “we” didn’t walk on the Moon. “We” were, like Rabbit and Aquarius, sitting at home, scribbling in our notebooks or, most likely, watching television while something happened to us that we are still trying to figure out.

* * *

large gifts to unlikely recipients

2009-06-18T15:34:00.005+02:00

This story of St Aidan came my way from Frans Zoer of the Amsterdam Catholic Worker community.

“He [King Oswin] had given to Bishop Aidan a very faire and proper gelding ... to passe over waters and ditches, or when any other necessitie constrained. It fortuned shortly after, a certaine poore weake man met the Bishop, riding on his gelding, and craved an almes of him. The Bishop as he was a passing pitefull man and a very father to needy persons, [alighted] and gave the poore man the gelding, gorgeously trapped as he was. The King hearing after hereof, talked of it with the Bishop, as they were entering the palace to dinner, and saied, What meaned you, my Lord, to give awaie to the beggar that faire gelding which we gave you for your own use? Have we no other horses of lesse price ... to bestowe upon the poore, but that you must give awaie that princely horse? To whom the Bishop answered, Why talketh your Grace thus? Is that broode of the mare dearer in your sight than that son of God, the poore man? Which being said they entered for to dine. The Bishop took his place appointed, but the King would stand a while by the fire ... where musing with himself upon the wordes which the Bishop had spoken, suddenly put off his sword and came in great haste to the Bishop, falling downe at his feete, and beseeching him not to be displeased with him for the wordes he had spoken, saying he would never ... measure any more hereafter what or how much he should bestow of his goods upon the sonnes of God, the poore.” (From a chapter on St. Aidan and his royal friends, St. Oswald & St. Oswin, in “A Procession of Saints” by James Brodrick, SJ (London 1949), twelve stories on English and Irish saints, p. 109- 110.)

St Aidan and St Oswin lived in the seventh century. Their lives are known from Bede’s writings. Brodrick is quoting Bede from the translation made by Thomas Stapleton in 1565.

Frans recognized in this ancient story a similar one related in Love is the Measure, my biography of Dorothy Day:

“From time to time Dorothy was able to set a stunning example of giving away what was given to the Catholic Worker. Another story told by Tom Cornell recalls a well-dressed woman who visited the Worker house one day and gave Dorothy a diamond ring. Dorothy thanked the visitor, slipped the ring in her pocket, and later in the day gave it to an old woman who lived alone and often ate her meals at St. Joseph’s. One of the staff protested to Dorothy that the ring could better have been sold at the Diamond Exchange and the money used to pay the woman’s rent for a year. Dorothy replied that the woman had her dignity and could do as she liked with the ring. She could sell it for rent money or take a trip to the Bahamas. Or she could enjoy having a diamond ring on her hand just like the woman who had brought it to the Worker. ‘Do you suppose,’ Dorothy asked, ‘that God created diamonds only for the rich?’”

Jim

* * *

Some thoughts about prayer

2009-06-13T16:59:00.006+02:00

Yesterday I had a letter from a teacher friend about an experience she had of praying for a student who had been very angry with her for a grade she had given him plus some feedback she given him that he didn’t agree with. Though the student wasn’t her enemy, he seemed to regard her as his enemy. Recalling Christ’s advice about praying for enemies, she decided to begin praying for her student. The next few weeks in the classroom were difficult – his anger was obvious. “But God gave me an incredible amount of compassion for him,” she told me, “and also showed me that I should have communicated with him more sensitively. One day he came back to class to pick something after the other students were gone. He was obviously not feeling well, so I just said that I was sorry and hoped he would be feeling better soon. He then began to cry. We talked for about an hour. He shared many things with me including his rejection of the God he was brought up to believe in – the angry, wrathful one. I mainly listened, but also shared a little of my own journey.”

My friend ended up giving him a book that she thought might help (Mountain of Silence). They’ve had more conversations. Things have changed dramatically, not only in the classroom, but in the student’s life and faith.

It’s distressing to recall how many times in my life I have failed to pray, or have even refused to pray, for people who ought to have been high on my prayer list.

It was Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who first impressed upon me the significance of praying for others. She carefully kept lists of people she had been asked to pray for, or felt she had a duty to pray for.

In the period I was closest to her – she was then in her early sixties – I became aware that she spent a good deal of time every day on her knees praying. One afternoon I looked in the prayer books she left on the bench of the chapel at the Catholic Worker farm and discovered page after page of names, all written in her careful italic script, of people, living and dead, for whom she was praying. She prayed as if lives depended on it. The physician Robert Coles, of the Harvard Medical School, credited Dorothy’s prayers with the miraculous cure of his wife, who had been dying of cancer and suddenly recovered.

Dorothy also kept a list of people who had committed suicide and prayed for them daily. I once asked her, “But isn’t it too late?” “With God there is no time,” she responded. She went on to say how a lot can happen in a person’s thoughts between initiating an action that will result in death and death itself – that even the tiny fraction of a second that passes between pulling a trigger and the bullet striking the brain might, in the infinity of time that exists deep within us, be time enough for regretting what it was now too late to stop, and to cry out for God’s mercy.

This attentive praying for others, including many people for whom she probably felt no love at all (love in the emotional sense of the word), was one of the aspects of Dorothy that startled and challenged me. Not that I was very quick to pick on her example – it took years before I started keeping my own prayer lists. Now Nancy and I normally make use of our prayer lists before going to bed.

When Jesus gave his challenging command about loving one’s enemies, he said, at the same time and in the same sentence, to pray for them. Who are the enemies for whom we should be praying? The word “enemies” comes from the Latin word, inamicus, which simply means non-friend – people whom one would love never to see of hear of again or whose death probably wouldn’t grieve us.

I’ve found that in some cases it helps to write out a special prayer for a person one has very urgent needs or from whom I am seriously estranged – for that person’s healing, well-being, recovery of love, recovery of faith, etc – and use it two or three times a day.

I’ve often struggled with the very basic question of why we need to ask God for anything? Doesn’t God know our needs far better than we do? What need can God possibly have for appeals from me? And yet it seems, precisely because God isn’t a Calvinist and isn’t working from a script in which the future is foreordained, that prayers do matter. In any event, praying for anyone creates new threads of connection, new spaces, new possibilities.

– Jim

note: The photo was taken after a Vespers service at St Nicholas of Myra Russian Orthodox Church in Amsterdam.

* * *

Ten Dimensions

2009-06-13T12:04:00.008+02:00

A few days ago, a member of our extended family sent us these links to an interesting short film on YouTube:

part 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA

part 2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySBaYMESb8o

It’s called “Imagining the tenth dimension,” and it’s a simple explanation for non-scientists of the various physical dimensions of the universe, starting with a single one-dimensional point. I find this is one of those places where science and Christianity intersect. It’s also one of those opportunities to talk to a non-religious person about why you happen to be religious. So I sent him this mail:

Jim shared with me the YouTube link you sent about imagining the tenth dimension. Thanks so much. This kind of thing has always been fascinating to me, and you may be surprised to hear that it's one of the reasons why Christianity is so fascinating to me. Setting aside everything negative or repugnant you've ever heard about Christianity, one thing that is very interesting (particularly in Orthodox Christianity) is the concept of infinity. In Orthodox theology, God exists in infinity. There's a standard Orthodox prayer in which God is described as "who art everywhere present and fillest all things." This is religious language, I know, but when I watched the YouTube thing I thought about it immediately. Since God is by definition beyond our comprehension, we've come up with a way of trying to understand him, and that is trying to imagine him as being three persons in one, three at the same time (three dimensional?), which in theology is called the Trinity. The Trinity is an ancient concept, and maybe now, with this idea of ten dimensions, we would have to change it. But it does suggest a fully dimensional being.

When religious people try to come into contact with God, they can only do it by meeting him in his infinite-ness. This is what prayer is. To non-religious people, prayer sometimes sounds pretty silly, but to deeply religious people it's almost like the diagrams on the YouTube thing, folding the dimensions over on each other.

I'm not going to go any further, because this is starting to sound preachy, and I don't want to be preachy! But I thought you might like to know how this struck me.

It's also very interesting that the priest of our church is a physicist. Another friend of ours in church is a particle physicist working at Delft University (he's also Russian). I really believe science and religion have a lot in common and can really inform each other in important ways.

– Nancy

Re the photo: this is a Hubble view of deep space sent to us by the friend who sent us the link to the Ten Dimensions film.

from war games to peace games

2009-05-27T13:08:00.014+02:00

One of our recent visitors was Steve Jacobs, who arrived at our house wearing a t-shirt with the question: “Who would Jesus bomb?”

Steve is one of the founders of St Francis House of Hospitality in Columbia, Missouri. He had come to this side of the Atlantic to take part in the annual European Catholic Worker gathering.

One of the things we talked about is a possible response to an annual military welcome-house at a Missouri army base. The event features a big tent in which kids are invited to play computer war games. It’s very popular.

An idea that emerged in our conversation is the possibility of setting up a peace games tent outside the base where, using borrowed laptop computers, kids (and parents) could play peace games.

Even if no peace game sells nearly as well as various war games, I was pleased to find that there are a lot of peace games out there. Searching this string

computer games peacemaking

pulls up a great many hits.

Steve says there is not enough lead time this year to set up a peace games tent. Even so, it maybe that a folder could be produced that focuses on the issues raised by the war games tent.

I got to thinking about the creation of a hand-out. Possible headline:

“Not all computer games are about killing people.”

A draft opening to the text:

“Today our kids are being invited by the military to play war games – games that make killing people seem like a fun thing to do. The truth is every act of killing is a tragedy, not only for victims and their families, but for all the soldiers who come home burdened with memories of killing real people. In many cases the hidden scars left by war never heal. That’s a big part of the reason why so many returning soldiers can’t hold down jobs, keep their families together, become homeless, turn to drugs, and even take their own lives.

“Do we want war look like a game to our kids?

“Did you know that there are computer games that challenge kids – and their parents – to learn the skills of peacemaking?....”

Something on those lines. Steve is a musician and song writer. If he takes this on, he’ll do a great job of it.

On this theme, Alex Patico wrote me yesterday:

>> Someone actually has devised a computer game called Peacemaker which focuses on Israel/Palestine. I had actually thought of trying to interest him in collaborating on one that would treat the US-Iran relationship in the same fashion. This was Eric Brown (graduate of Washington University and Carnegie-Mellon), who co-founded ImpactGames. He did his game in conjunction with Arun Gandhi of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Non-Violence. <<

Jim

Note: That glass of Tongerlo beer in Steve’s hand was brewed at Tongerlo Abbey not far from Antwerp. On YouTube there's a clip of Steve singing one of his songs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TFINHRLIuc

On love and marriage

2009-05-24T17:41:00.004+02:00

A few days ago I posted to some friends a short extract from Thomas Merton’s essay, “Love and Need.” a chapter in one of his less widely read books, Love and Living:

“Our philosophy of life is not something we create all by ourselves out of nothing. Our ways of thinking, even our attitudes toward ourselves, are more and more determined from the outside. Even our love tends to fit ready-made forms. We consciously or unconsciously tailor our notions of love according to patterns we are exposed to day after day....

“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another. We do not discover the secret of our lives merely by study and calculation in our own isolated meditations. The meaning of our life is a secret that has to be revealed to us in love, by the one we love.

“[In our society] Love is regarded as a deal. The deal presupposes that we all have needs which have to be fulfilled by means of exchange. In order to make a deal you have to appear in the market with a worthwhile product, or if the product is worthless, you can get by if you dress it up in a good-looking package. We unconsciously think of ourselves as objects for sale on the market. We want to be wanted. We want to attract customers. We want to look like the kind of product that makes money. Hence we waste a great deal of time modeling ourselves on the images presented to us by an affluent marketing society.

“In doing this we come to consider ourselves and others not as persons but as products, as ‘goods,’ or in other words, as packages. We appraise one another commercially. We size each other up and make deals with a view to our own profit. We do not give ourselves in love, we make a deal that will enhance our own product, and therefore no deal is final. Our eye is already on the next deal, and this next deal need not necessarily be with the same customer. Life is more interesting when you make a lot of deals with a lot of new customers.

“This view, which equates lovemaking with salesmanship and love with a glamorous package, is based on the idea of love as a mechanism of instinctive needs. We are biological machines endowed with certain urges that require fulfillment. If we are smart. We can exploit and manipulate in ourselves and in others....

“The trouble with this commercialized idea of love is that it diverts your attention more and more from the essentials to the accessories of love. You are no longer able to really love the other person, for you become obsessed with the effectiveness of your own package, your own product, your own market value.”

The night before last Nancy was reading Merton’s essay and was so struck by this passage (seen in context above) that she paused to read it aloud:

“We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another. We do not discover the secret of our lives merely by study and calculation in our own isolated meditations. The meaning of our life is a secret that has to be revealed to us in love, by the one we love.”

Beautiful and true. But how often in marriage husbands and wives fail to see each other but instead see false selves that one or both have created as an adaptation to the other. It’s possible to be married yet never really see one’s partner, or oneself.

I’ve often thought how difficult it is to see oneself – perhaps impossible. The non-seeing of self is one of Walker Percy’s recurrent themes in both his novels and essays. God sees us perfectly and those who know us see us to some imperfect extent, some more clearly, some less or some not at all. It is only with God’s love that we really see another person. Merton mentions this basic truth this in a letter to Dorothy Day: “Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other ... that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who we are. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action.” [Living With Wisdom, pp 170-1]

Ideally in a relationship of love, as fear diminishes, there is the gradual falling away of the costumes we’ve put on out of our own insecurity as a means of self-defense. In a healthy relationship, the true self gradually becomes stronger and more daring – and then a gradual disrobing occurs until the couple find themselves in a state of Eden-like “nakedness” – a state of being without costumes or masks.

But in so many marriages this never happens. We never reach the state of being in communion with each other – rather live in a state of disconnection, where at best we collaborate on practical matters but without the dimension of love.

-- Jim

More on this topic: See Nancy's essay, "Marriage and Hospitality: http://incommunion.org/forest-flier/nancysessays/hospitality/

[The icon is of Saints Anne and Joachim, the parents of Mary, and has the title "The Conception of the Theotokos." As an image of marital love, it is an icon often given to a newly married couple.]

four generations

2009-05-09T17:30:00.006+02:00

Four generations together -- Lorraine, age 92, the oldest, Lux, age 2-1/2 weeks, the youngest, with Nancy (59) and Cait (32) in between. Bjorn and I also took part. The photo was taken earlier today at Oudtburgh, the nursing home where Lorraine is now living.

I don't think I've ever seen Lorraine so happy. Since her stroke she has had access only to a few words and only occasionally has been able to put together whole sentences. Today she managed to say, "That's a beautiful baby" and "I think you have a wonderful family."

Jim

* * *

Several of the residents living in Lorraine's part of the nursing home stopped to admire Lux. It's interesting how babies can break down barriers. Lorraine has been the "foreign" lady in the nursing home -- she only understands English and she can't speak very well at all. Suddenly now she's a real person, with a family and a beautiful great-granddaughter. The same thing happened to me when I moved to the Netherlands in 1982. When Anne was born in 1983, the neighbors suddenly recognized me as a real person and not just a foreign import.

Nancy

* * *

More photos are in the "four generations" folder at this URL:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157617817300151/

Jim & Nancy

* * *

Zen lessons

2009-05-02T15:29:00.012+02:00

A Christian friend in Thailand, Lance Woodruff, sent the following question:

Jim, as one of Thomas Merton’s biographers, do you have questions or comments which come to mind as a Christian encounters the sacred in other religions? Have you received insight or inspiration from Buddhism or other religions which you might share with me?

Here is the main part of my response:

In my own life, a close relationship with Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, has been an immense blessing.

In that regard, Thomas Merton set a good example for me. There was never any question in his mind about how much we Christians have to learn from others of any of the principal (and often some of the minor) religious traditions. Merton had a particular affinity for Buddhism, but also had important relationships with Jews, Hindus, and at least one Moslem of the Sufi tradition. (One might add, in a time when inter-Christian dialogue was exceptional, he had close ties with both Orthodox and Protestant Christians.)

Here is an extract from my biography of Merton, Living With Wisdom, about the meeting Merton had with Nhat Hanh in 1965:

Merton immediately recognized Nhat Hanh as someone very like himself. It was like meeting Chuang Tzu in the flesh. As the two monks talked, the different religious systems in which they were formed provided bridges toward each other. “Thich Nhat Hanh is my brother,” Merton wrote soon afterward. “He is more my brother than many who are nearer to me in race and nationality, because he and I see things exactly the same way.”

When Merton asked Nhat Hanh what the war was doing to Vietnam, the Buddhist said simply, “Everything is destroyed.” This, Merton said to the monks at his Sunday lecture, was truly a monk’s answer, revealing the essence without wasting a word.

Merton described the rigorous formation of Buddhist monks in Vietnam and the fact that instruction in meditation doesn’t begin early. “Before you can learn to meditate,” he said, quoting Nhat Hanh, “you have to learn how to close the door.” The monks laughed; they were used to the reverberation of slamming doors as latecomers raced to church.

Here’s a Nhat Hanh story I told in The Road to Emmaus: Pilgrimage as a Way of Life:

... It was from Thich Nhat Hanh that I first became aware of walking as an opportunity to repair the damaged connection between the physical and the spiritual.

In the late sixties, he asked me to accompany him on his lecture trips in the United States. He spoke to audiences about Vietnamese culture and what the war looked like to ordinary Vietnamese people. At times he also spoke about the monastic vocation and meditation.

In conversation, Nhat Hanh sometimes spoke of the importance of what he called “mindful breathing,” a phrase that seemed quite odd to me at first. Yet I was aware that his walking was somehow different than mine and could imagine this might have something to do with his way of breathing. Even if we were late for an appointment, he walked in an attentive, unhurried way.

It wasn’t until we climbed the steps to my sixth floor apartment in Manhattan that I began to take his example to heart. Though in my late twenties and very fit, I was out of breath by the time I reached my front door. Nhat Hanh, on the other hand, seemed rested. I asked him how he did that. “You have to learn how to breathe while you walk,” he replied. “Let’s go back to the bottom and walk up again. I will show you how to breathe while climbing stairs.” On the way back up, he quietly described how he was breathing. It wasn’t a difficult lesson. Linking slow, attentive breaths with taking the stairs made an astonishing difference. The climb took one or two minutes longer, but when I reached my door I found myself refreshed instead of depleted.

In the seventies, I spent time in France with Nhat Hanh on a yearly basis. He was better known then -- his home had become for many people a center of pilgrimage. One of the things I found him teaching was his method of attentive walking. Once a day, all his guests would set off in a silent procession led by him. The walk was prefaced with his advice that we practice slow, mindful breathing while at the same time being aware of each footstep, seeing each moment of contact between foot and earth as a prayer for peace. We went single file, moving slowly, deeply aware of the texture of the earth and grass, the scent of the air, the movement of leaves in the trees, the sound of insects and birds. Many times as I walked I was reminded of the words of Jesus: “You must be like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven.” Such attentive walking was a return to the hyper-alertness of childhood.

Mindful breathing connected with mindful walking gradually becomes normal. It is then a small step to connect walking and breathing with prayer.

In correspondence with a friend, I was recently reminded of this one:

I recall going with Nhat Hanh and Phuong to one of the Paris airports to pick up a volunteer who was arriving from America. On the way back, the volunteer stressed how dedicated a vegetarian she was and how good it was to be with people who were such committed vegetarians. Passing by a poelier in Paris, Nhat Hanh asked Phuong to stop. He went inside and bought a chicken, which we ate that night for supper at our apartment in Sceaux. It’s the only time I know of when Nhat Hanh ate meat.

Finally, here’s a story Nhat Hanh tells about me in one of his books, The Miracle of Mindfulness:

I have a close friend named Jim Forest. ... Last winter, Jim came to visit. I usually wash the dishes after we've finished the evening meal, before sitting down and drinking tea with everyone else. One night, Jim asked if he might do the dishes. I said, "Go ahead, but if you wash the dishes you must know the way to wash them." Jim replied, "Come on, you think I don't know how to wash the dishes?" I answered, "There are two ways to was the dishes. The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes and the second is to wash the dishes to wash the dishes." Jim was delighted and said, "I choose the second way -- to wash the dishes to wash the dishes." From then on, Jim knew how to wash the dishes. I transferred the "responsibility" to him for an entire week.

If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not "washing the dishes to wash the dishes." What's more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact, we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can't wash the dishes, the chances are we won't be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.

One important sentence Nhat Hanh left out of his account is this: "When you wash the dishes, wash each dish as if it were the baby Jesus.” A very important sentence in my life! I learned from those few words not only something about the potential sacramentality of dirty dishes but of anything we touch and also how times of irritation can easily be transformed into times of meditation and prayer.

I could tell stories about ways Nhat Hanh has influenced my life from now until the next year and perhaps have a few still to tell, but for today this is all I have time for.

Jim

* * *

Here’s a story that Nancy tells about her first encounter with Nhat Hanh.

My first Zen lesson

I came to the Netherlands in April of 1982 with my daughter Caitlan, who was five years old at the time. Jim and I were married shortly after that. We had been friends for many years in the US. Both of us worked together at the headquarters of the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Nyack, New York, and Jim move to Holland in 1977 to serve as general secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR). We had kept in touch during those five years. Jim was Cait’s godfather.

Shortly after I had moved here, Jim told me Thich Nhat Hanh would be coming to Alkmaar to visit. I had never met Nhat Hanh, but of course I had heard a great deal about him, and I knew how close Jim and Nhat Hanh had been over the years. Jim said Nhat Hanh would be coming to our house, and that the IFOR staff would be coming over as well to meet with him.

It was a beautiful day in May. First the staff arrived and took seats in our living room, then Nhat Hanh himself arrived, dressed in his brown robe. A hush fell over the staff members, and everyone was apparently in awe of this man. I remember feeling nervous that he was coming to our house, nervous about hosting this event. After he had sat down a sort of Zen silence fell on the room. It was hard for me to tell what to make of the atmosphere in the living room that day, but it made me uncomfortable.

In the meantime, Cait, who had just been given her first bicycle and was practicing riding it in the parking lot behind our house, kept running in to tell me how far she was advancing. So you have this room full of awestruck adults sitting there with what appeared to me glazed looks on their faces, and my little daughter running in, breathless with excitement.

After Nhat Hanh finished speaking with the staff, Jim came up to me and told me he had invited him to dinner. This was a little more than I could handle. I went into the kitchen at the back of the house and started chopping vegetables. I remember feeling that I really had to get out of that living room, that there was something definitely weird about what was going on there. It didn’t feel genuine, while the vegetables were certain genuine and so was Cait.

After a few minutes, Nhat Hanh came into the kitchen and, almost effortlessly, started helping me with the vegetables. I think he just started talking to me in the most ordinary way. He ended up telling me how to make rice balls -- how to grind the sesame seeds in a coffee grinder, to make the balls with sticky rice and to roll them in the ground sesame seeds. It was lots of fun and I remember laughing with him. The artificial Zen atmosphere was completely absent. Cait kept coming in, and Nhat Hanh was delighted with her.

This was my first Zen lesson.

Nancy

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note: The photo of Nhat Hanh is one I took is Paris in 1975. It is copyrighted and may not be used without written permission.
-- Jim Forest
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What a week!

2009-04-26T17:50:00.003+02:00

It’s been an incredible week. On our visit to Mom at the hospital on Monday we were told that she was going to be moved to a nursing home on Thursday: Oudtburgh, in Bergen. I had really been hoping room would be found there, since I’d heard so many good things about Oudtburgh from friends who had family members there.

Then on Tuesday morning Caitlan called us at 6:30 to announce that she had given birth to a baby girl -- Lux Avalon Plooster. All had gone extremely well. We planned on going down to Rotterdam later in the day and spent several hours with Cait and Björn and Lux. It was hard to let go of Lux, and almost impossible to stop looking at her.

On Wednesday I spent much of the day preparing to get Mom moved to Bergen: washing clothes, packing and writing up a brief biography of her life for the nursing staff there. Jim printed two large photos of Lux and Cait and brought them in for her. She was simply beside herself. Cait and I thought this birth was something she had really been waiting for, every day. Even before the stroke she kept saying to me, “I have to make it until April,” and it seemed so unlikely that she wouldn’t. But she must have had some kind of inkling.

Thursday morning we went to the hospital, where Mom was dressed and ready to go. All her things had been packed up. The photos of Lux and Cait were prominently displayed on the table, and the nurses all came in to say good-bye and to admire her beautiful great-granddaughter. The speech therapist came in and had a chat. She said to Mom, “There’s going to be a speech therapist at Oudtburgh, too, you know,” and Mom answered, rather sarcastically and dismissively, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” It sounded funny and we all laughed, but it indicates how little motivation she has to attempt any rehabilitation.

The wheelchair taxi took us out through the fields to Bergen, which is located near the national dune reservation and very close to the sea. A beautiful spot. We were greeted by Eva, a young woman in charge of my mother’s group of residents. There are 180 residents at Oudtburgh, broken down into groups of 10. For every 10 residents there’s a small parlor/dining room and kitchen area, where they can eat together and sit. Lots of sun, very quiet and peaceful. We were introduced to some of the ladies sitting around a table, and when Eva asked if any of them spoke English one of them said, “I do!”

Mom’s room is small but sunny, with a wooden bed so it doesn’t look like a hospital room. Plenty of room to store clothes and other things, a bulletin board and a cabinet with a glass door for knick-knacks. We set up the big photo of Lux right away, which made her happy.

She was completely exhausted, so we got her into bed (she can’t do this herself anymore) and she was glad to be there. Then Eva talked with us privately about the details of living at Oudtburgh and showed us around. It’s a very comfortable feeling place. The staff don’t wear uniforms and it doesn’t feel therapeutic. There’s a large café, a barber shop, and even a bar. A large garden is being built out in the front, but it’s still under construction.

We walked back to the center of Bergen for lunch (about a 15-minute walk) and took the next bus back to Alkmaar.

On Friday we biked out to see how Mom was doing. It’s about a half-hour bike ride. She was seated at a table in her little parlor with two gentlemen residents. It’s hard to imagine her isolation -- not only can’t she speak Dutch, but she can’t speak at all. I’ve read that stroke victims often become depressed if their lives are radically altered. This kind of situation really calls for an inordinate degree of resolve and positive thinking, neither of which she seems to have right now. The people who work in nursing homes are accustomed to this, of course, and they’ll certainly have some tricks for energizing a despondent lady. I hope.

We took her to the café so she could eat with us, and we all had sandwiches. She ate part of her sandwich and had a cup of coffee. We suggested taking her for a little walk to see the building, but she didn’t want to go. She just wanted to go back to her room and sit. So Jim said, “How about we just see one new thing, and then go back?” and she agreed. So we showed her the bar, which is built like a traditional old Dutch “brown café,” panelled in dark brown wood. We told her someday we’d come out later on in the day and have a beer with her, and she really liked that. But she wanted to go back to her room. When we left she looked tearful.

We’re going to try to arrange to bring her TV out so she can see some English language programs. I’m glad the rehabilitation work will soon begin. This means a daily program will be created for her so she’ll be occupied with the work of getting better. Even if she’s dismissive and unmotivated, at least it fills your day!

-- Nancy

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Meeting Lux

2009-04-22T14:55:00.010+02:00

We spent a good five hours with Cait and Björn and our newborn grand-daughter Lux yesterday afternoon in Rotterdam, arriving only ten hours after Lux’s birth. We were astonished how energetic Cait and Björn were -- the kind of excitement that comes from being in a state, despite a sleepless night and hours of labor, of overwhelming astonishment and joy. It was the same for Nancy and me. We could hardly take our eyes off Lux. Lux took it all very calmly. Most of the time we were there she slept, first on Nancy’s lap, later on mine. I kept stroking her cheek with one finger -- skin silkier than silk, and just a little more dense than air.

I was reminded of a passage from the writings of Alexander Schmemann: "Every birth, every entrance of a new human being into the world, every life, is a miracle of miracles, a miracle that explodes all routine, for it marks the start of something unending, the start of a unique, unrepeatable human life, the beginning of a new person. And with each birth, the world is itself in some sense created anew and given as a gift to this new human being to be her life, her path, her creation."

If you don’t mind looking at photos of people besides themselves with happiness, there is a folder of pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157617052557111/

(The photo above was taken by Björn shortly after Lux's birth at the Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam.)

Jim

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