from war games to peace games

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

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

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

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

* * *
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
* * *

What a week!

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

* * *

Meeting Lux

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

* * *

Fiat Lux!

In the Orthodox Church, the days following Easter are called Bright Week.

Bright Week has proved especially bright for us this year with the birth this morning of Lux, Caitlan and Bjorn's first child.

Lux is the Latin word for light. If ever you want to say “Let there be light” in Latin, it takes only two words: Fiat lux!

They often say that newborn children have a remarkable resemblance to Winston Churchill. This doesn't apply in this case.

We'll be off to Rotterdam in just a little while for a first encounter with Lux.

An incredible week, and we're only two days into it.

All Saturday night and Sunday morning we spent at the church. The Paschal service started at 10 with a 90-minute reading, taken in turns, from the Book of Acts. During the reading, and for about half and hour afterward, the main source of light in the church is a single candle. About midnight, as those who serve around the altar come out from the sanctuary, the candle in each person's hand is lit (that would mean roughly a thousand candles this year) and then the light-bearing Pascal procession exits the church and walks around the block singing a simple but powerful resurrection chant: "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and to those in the tombs bestowing life." At the gates of the church, there is a reading of one of the Gospel accounts of Christ's resurrection, and then we enter the church, now brightly illuminated -- a palace of light. Eventually the eucharstic Liturgy begins. By now all of us seem to have arrived in a place outside of time. About 4 or 4:30 (no one knows exactly as time has somehow become irrelevant), the service ends with the distribution of red-dyed Easter eggs.

Photos taken over the weekend, from Good Friday until the parish party Sunday night, are posted here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157617076072276/

One other item of good news: A place has finally been found for Lorraine at a nursing home -- Oudtburgh -- in nearby Bergen. We'll be taking her there on Thursday morning. We brought her the news yesterday afternoon when we went to visit, and you could just see the relief on her face. Bergen is a small and very attractive town between Alkmaar and the sea. We're glad and relieved that she'll be at Oudtburgh. A good friend of our had placed her mother there a few years ago; her mother was suffering from Alzheimer's. The care there is really excellent, she assured us. She had researched several nursing homes in the area, and this was her first choice.

-- Jim

* * *

a blow to the brain

Here are extracts from a journal Nancy and I have been keeping since Nancy’s mother, Lorraine, had a stroke sometime in the early hours of March 25. Lorraine, now 92, has been living with us the past two years. (Photo: Lorraine and Nancy in the neurology ward at the Alkmaar hospital, 2 April 2009.)

March 25, 2009: Lorraine has had some kind of neurological episode. Apparently it's not exactly a stroke, though that was my first guess. She didn't come out of her room for breakfast this morning. She finally opened her door just before 9:30, an hour later than usual. I went in to see how she was and she looked pretty bad. She tried to talk to me, but talking was difficult. She struggled to say that she had tried to dress herself and had had a lot of trouble doing so. She hadn’t been able to put on her earrings or necklace. She didn't feel like eating anything, which is extremely unusual since she usually eats all the time. At first she said, "Well, I guess this is it," and she seemed quite calm about it. We were able to laugh a little and to talk about death. She said we would probably give her a good Orthodox funeral -- “with all the works," as she put it. But it was still difficult for her to talk. Then I called the doctor, who came over about an hour later. He took her blood pressure (normal) and checked her heart (slightly irregular, but not highly irregular), and tried to talk to her. Her speech was more slurred by then. I noticed that when she talked to him, and then to me, she didn't look at us -- she looked off to the side, almost as if she couldn't see us.

The doctor’s guess is that the disorientation is due to a blood disorder she has had for many years, something called polycythemia vera, which essentially is an overproduction of blood platelets. This makes her blood very thick, and there is always a danger that the veins of the brain will be affected. She's been having treatments for this at the hospital (basically old fashioned blood-letting).

Our doctor said ordinarily, if someone has this kind of problem, he'd send them to the hospital for a full day of screening, but when you're 92 and so frail, it hardly seemed a good idea. He said even if you get some results, what do you do with them? So he recommended that she take aspirin to thin her blood (which she had been doing, actually), and asked me to contact him if the situation changed for the worse.

For the past few weeks Mom has been having warning signs: flashes of disorientation, which make her feel very dizzy and anxious. She thought it had to do with the medicine she was taking, but obviously not. For the first time she had been talking about going to a nursing home.

Of course I always knew this kind of thing would happen some day, but when it happens it always throws you off guard. The weird thing is that Dan came to visit us last night, and she ate with us and sat with us on the couch, talking and very animated. She seemed fine. -- Nancy

March 26: Lorraine couldn’t get out of bed this morning. Our doctor came within minutes of my calling him and called an ambulance which arrived almost immediately. It is necessary to know exactly what is going on in her head, which means screening. Actually the screening wasn't so bad. I went with Lorraine to the emergency ward at the Alkmaar Medical Center, our regional hospital, which luckily isn’t far from our house. She was given blood tests, an ECG and a CAT scan as well as various reflex tests. Then she was taken to the Brain Care Unit, which is a special neurology unit with 8 beds, 6 of which have monitoring equipment. She was hooked up to the monitoring equipment (heart monitor) and was given an IV drip to hydrate her. She'll stay there for 24 hours and will then be taken to an adjacent room in the neurology ward hospital to see which way this goes. Although we haven't yet talked about what comes next, the staff suggested that, assuming she pulls through, she would be sent to come kind of rehab facility or nursing home. But that, they told me, is way down the line.

The neurologist told me that the CAT scan did not reveal any bleeding, but that she has had a major cerebral infarction. They will give her medicine to see if the situation can be remedied, and if she can get some functioning back. But you can see that the infarction was on the left side of her brain, since her right side has been affected. She cannot use her right hand, and I don't think she can see on the right side. If you stand on her right she doesn't seem to know you're there. The toes on her right foot are curled up and cramped. As it is now, she can no longer form words, so when she tries to speak she can only make the same sound over and over again, except for a few words (I, you, but, yeah). This is extremely frustrating for her.

Last night we visited with Kylie, and at a certain point Mom tried desperately to tell me something. Finally she began gently pushing me with her left hand, and Jim said, "Do you want us to go?" and she said, relieved, "Yeah." I guess I stayed too long because I'm so worried she'll feel abandoned, or frightened in a strange, foreign hospital. I reassured her that the people there are very good and kind, and the care is excellent. I think she actually trusts hospitals (she's been in enough of them), so I can relax on that count.

Having her room empty now is very strange. -- Nancy

March 27: We visited last night with Anne and Thomas, Anne's boyfriend. There's just one other woman in the room with her, so it's very quiet and private. She was sleeping when we came in, but she recognized us as soon as she saw us and smiled weakly. She did try to speak a little, but not as much as the day before -- not the frustrated wordless noises she had been making. She spent most of the time with her eyes closed and with the smile on her face. She seemed quite comfortable and not afraid.

Earlier in the day one of the ward nurses had called to tell me the hospital speech therapist had been to see her and would leave a long list of questions for me to answer so they will know more about who my mother is. It's called as "aphasia list," so this is the technical word for loss of speech due to brain damage. I told her the speech therapist would be coming to see her, and she just groaned. She doesn't like learning new things (she groaned the same way a few months ago when we got her an alarm phone and had to teach her to use it). I read some of the questions out loud to her and made some jokes along the way ("What are your hobbies?" "Ah, touch football, bowling.") and she chuckled, so she can still understand jokes and respond to them. I told her I'd write down everything -- about painting, ceramics, about her childhood and her family -- and she seemed happy about that.

She seemed weaker. She didn't try to raise her head, and she didn't even open her eyes very much. After about 10 minutes she just said, "Go" (she can still say that!), so we said goodbye and left.

I'm not at all sure the speech therapist is going to get very far with her, but these people know what they're doing and I may be surprised. I'm going to fill in the questionnaire and take it over this afternoon, and hopefully I'll be able to speak with someone about her condition and about what they plan to do. -- Nancy

March 28: We visited Lorraine in the afternoon and found her apparently asleep and struggling to breathe, mouth open, eyes closed. Nancy held her hand and after a time was able to tell Lorraine she was there. Lorraine seemed to respond with recognition. We gave her some water which she drank with a straw -- just a few tablespoons. Lorraine made no attempt to speak except to respond “yeah” when Nancy asked if she should leave now.

The nurse let us read the patient book for Lorraine. It had been noted that Lorraine didn’t seem to care for the food except for the dessert, which she obviously enjoyed. -- Jim

March 29: Cait and Bjorn were with us for a visit with Lorraine in the late afternoon. Lorraine was in a significantly improved state. She woke up as soon as we arrived and stayed wide awake and very attentive throughout the visit, which lasted 20 minutes or more, longer than any of the previous visits. Her face looked brighter and firmer. I noticed she used her right hand to make a gesture; that arm had seemed paralyzed during previous visits. Lorraine was especially happy to see Cait, who is due to give birth about April 21 and so at present is pregnant in a big way. It has been one of Lorraine’s hopes that she would live to see the birth of her first great-grand-child. At the end of the visit, Nancy put Lorraine’s hand on Cait’s tummy and Lorraine beamed like the sun, saying to Cait, “You behave yourself!” Three words. This was Lorraine’s first complete sentence in our hearing since the stroke. -- Jim

March 30: Lorraine has improved quite a bit over the past 24 hours. We visited her this afternoon and again in the evening, when Wendy, Thom and Kylie came to see her. She was delighted to see them. She still can’t talk, but sometimes she manages individual words and three-word sentences. When I was leaving at the end of the afternoon visit she said “See you later” to me. She was able to move her right arm this time and to brush aside her hair with her right hand. Her color is better, and she seems to be fully aware of what has happened to her and what’s going on around her. -- Nancy

March 31: I had a chat with the ward nurse on the phone. She said Lorraine is able to stand, but can’t move her right leg forward, which means she can’t walk. (Actually she hasn’t been able to walk well in several years. Her balance is poor, and she can’t walk anywhere without a walker.) A rehabilitation doctor will be looking at her and deciding on what needs to be done. So while she’s there in the hospital she’ll be undergoing therapy with the speech therapist and the physical therapist to see how much function can be recovered.

The nurse said at a certain point we would be called in for an evaluation and to talk about the future. Lorraine will probably be moved to a rehab facility in or around Alkmaar. She said the waiting lists are very long, but she did tell me the hospital would set things in motion and would help us make choices. She mentioned bringing Lorraine back here to the house, but I told her we couldn’t deal with that. She said, “Well, what did you do before the stroke?” and I said, “Before the stroke she could walk with a walker, she could eat and dress and wash herself and shower. All I had to do was cook her food and do her laundry.” This may require a bit of pushing on our part, but I hope not.

I made an appointment for next Tuesday to speak with the neurologist. At this point the questions I have fall into two general areas: 1) how is Lorraine doing? what’s the prognosis? 2) how does the Dutch health care system work in cases like this? It’s beginning to dawn on me that we’ve entered “the system,” and once you do that the system carries you along. At this early stage I don’t know what this means in actual terms. But when I asked the nurse today if we had to take any initiative and find a care facility on our own, she just said, “Oh, no. We do that,” as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

Visiting again in the evening, we found Lorraine in a deep sleep, and she didn’t seem to want to be awakened. Finally she did rouse herself a little, but was happy when I said we’d come back tomorrow. -- Nancy

April 1: The hospital called and asked me to bring over more clothes, and when I arrived I found Lorraine fully dressed and sitting in a chair! Her hair had been washed and she looked much better. Still having a lot of trouble talking. I asked her about the speech therapist, and she had a fairly negative reaction. She did manage to say, “I will indulge,” which I thought was pretty funny. I think it means that she’ll put up with it all. I had brought two stuffed animals that she keeps on her dresser, the newest one (a cow) that Kylie gave her for her 92nd birthday, and the oldest one, an old sock doll made by her mother when she was four. She put the two dolls together and arranged them against a flower vase on the table, and said very carefully, “They will proceed.” -- Nancy

April 2: It’s been one week since Lorraine was admitted to the hospital. The hospital called and asked if I would bring over something for her to look at or read. She doesn’t read at all any more, and she never looks at magazines, but Jim suggested bringing over a couple of her photo albums. She can spend hours looking at these old photos, some of them from when she was a little girl in Sundance, Wyoming. When we got to the hospital we found she had been moved to a larger, more cheerful room with more people in it. She was dressed and sitting at a table in the middle of the room. The first thing she said when she saw Jim was, “How are you doing?” Jim assured her he was doing fine. She was delighted to see the albums. She kept saying, “Oh, by goodness!” over and over, quite clearly. We looked a little at some of the pictures, and Jim (who was sitting across from her) noticed that she didn’t see anything on her right side, and didn’t even seem to notice that she had a right side. When you point to something on the right, she doesn’t turn her head in order to see it. She just says, “Yes.” The sad thing is that her right eye is her good eye; the left eye is the one with severe macular degeneration. So obviously she doesn’t see much anymore.

I told her she looked much better, and she seemed cheerful. She smiled and laughed, and tried to talk, without much success. She did say, “What happens, happens,” and “the next day and the next day and the next day.” She’s resigned to whatever we do for her, so our job is to make sure we do the right thing and that she gets the care she needs. When we left, I said, “I love you,” and she said, “And I love you.” I told her this was a much nicer room, and I said, “I’m going to teach you a new Dutch word -- gezellig -- this is a gezellig room.” She tried to say gezellig (which is hard even if you haven’t had a stroke), and couldn’t, and we all laughed. (Gezellig, by the way, means cheery and comfy.) -- Nancy

April 3: We went for an afternoon visit. Jim had the idea of taking her down in her wheelchair to the café on the main floor of the hospital. We first checked with a floor nurse, who said she couldn’t drink coffee and was being restricted to thick liquids. The nurse suggested going outside, since the weather today is really warm and sunny, truly a spring day. Mom was sitting in her room at the table. We sat down and she smiled. But when we asked if she wanted to go for a walk, maybe outside, she said no. She didn’t even want to go outside her room. Just stay there in her room, at that table. There was a small container of pudding in front of her, which I think is fortified pudding. We asked her if she wanted some, and she said, yes, so I fed it to her. She ate it all, more or less dutifully. We tried to talk about how things were going, and with the few words she could say clearly she told us she thought the therapies were too much. Her heart is really not into recovery, at least not today. She’ll go along with whoever tries to get her to do things, but she’s not enthusiastic. I had the feeling she was just waiting -- waiting to die. The beautiful weather doesn’t interest her, nor a change of scenery.

We looked at her photo books, so we went over a few pages until she seemed to become tired. We asked if she wanted to stop, and she said yes.

I told her how Cait’s pregnancy is coming along -- the birth will probably be in the next two weeks.

After about a half an hour she seemed to have had enough, so we said goodbye and left.

I went into town afterward to do some food shopping. I found myself moving very slowly, weighed down by the momentousness of what she is going through. She’s not apparently frightened or depressed, but the mere fact that she’s coming to the end of her life is a stunning thing to watch. She’s not fighting it, not raging against the dying of the night. And clearly she doesn’t want anybody to try to pump up her tires. This is the woman who, a little over a week ago, put on jewelry and earrings every day and was constantly complaining about her food. -- Nancy

April 6: This morning I had a phone chat with the speech therapist. She said Mom is slowly improving, but her ability to speak is still very limited. She said this is made more difficult by the fact that she doesn’t really see anything on the right side. If you hold up a page to her, she doesn’t see the right side of the page. I told her I had brought some old photo albums to the hospital, and the therapist asked me to label the photos so she could use them in speech therapy with my mother. On Friday afternoon I’ll meet with the therapist and visit Mom to see if we can make any headway together. She also asked me to come up with a list of Americans songs that we can sing with my mother, since people with aphasia are often able to sing even if they can’t talk.

Later today I went to visit. Mom was in a deep sleep and could not be wakened. I sat at the table with yellow sticky notes and labeled a few dozen of the photos in her albums. The “transfer liaison” came in and talked to me. She wanted to know what my preferences were for a care facility after the hospital. I really don’t know, but I said anything in Alkmaar or nearby. She pointed out that this was only temporary, until Mom was ready to come home. I said I didn’t think I could take care of her at home, and that at this point we were looking for a permanent place for her where she can receive the kind of nursing care she needs. -- Nancy

April 8: At the recommendation of friends in the US, I just watched a YouTube video of a talk by a neurologist, Dr Jill Bolte Taylor, that really impressed me:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

Very interesting, very moving. For Taylor, her stroke brought her to an understanding of existence that borders on the mystical. Orthodox theology has an understanding of mystical prayer that comes very close to what she has experienced -- what the theologians call "bringing the mind into the heart" -- or, in Taylor’s case, moving from your right hemisphere to your left hemisphere. Astonishing.

The stroke Mom experienced wasn’t as severe as Taylor’s. She had an infarction, not a hemorrhage. Yet it helps me understand that when she talks to me, she thinks she's saying something comprehensible, yet all that comes out of her mouth is "wuza wuza wuza." And she can't understand why I don't respond to her. Very frustrating for both of us. -- Nancy

April 9: Lorraine has her up days and her down days. When Nancy went to visit her the day before yesterday, she found very withdrawn, irritated, probably depressed, possibly angry. Nancy wanted to take her in her wheel chair for a walk and perhaps stop in the hospital café on the ground floor. Lorraine made clear she didn’t want that. She “talked” -- that is made sounds in place of words -- that made her feelings clear. But yesterday she was in much better spirits, glad to see Nancy, and -- though still unable to talk apart from a few simple words -- nonetheless able to communicate that she was in a better frame of mind.

One can only dimly imagine her inner struggle. She finds herself suddenly to be unable to speak, unable to get out of bed, unable to walk, and wearing diapers. The morning of the stroke, when she still was able to take part in conversation, she thought she was dying and seemed very much at peace with that prospect. Now she finds herself alive, but in a condition in many ways resembling solitary confinement. She is also aware that she will not be living any longer with us but in a care facility. While she had anticipated that happening sooner or later, and in the past expressed no anxiety about that prospect, now it’s actually happening, and that is almost certainly a source of worry.

One nice thing: There’s a Canadian nurse in the neurology ward and she goes out of her way to talk to Lorraine. Indeed Lorraine is giving all the staff in her ward a chance to brush up on their English. The speech therapist has asked Nancy to teach her English-language songs that Lorraine knows.

I’ll be at the Alkmaar hospital for a CAT scan of my lungs this afternoon (this has to do with fluid accumulation in my lungs -- an apparent side effect of the anti-rejection medication I’ve been taking in recent months; probably there will be a change in medication) and afterward will stop for a visit with Lorraine. Nancy will visit her this evening.

I received a helpful letter yesterday from my friend Alex Patico:

“The last ‘freedom’ an individual has is to determine how they will face that imposed imprisonment. Some "do not go gentle into that good night" while others welcome the release and relief. My mother, who was always the pollyanna in the family, never admitting to pain or troubles, finally, after the indignities and irritations of hip surgery, tests, rehabilitation, the solitude of hospital and nursing home rooms, etc., had just had it, and, at the end, stopped eating. She actually seemed happier, once some switch had clicked over inside her and the way forward was clear. We had some very good moments during her last weeks -- mainly due, I think, to the fact that she was back in control. (My mother, who was always so positive and accommodating, also had a ‘controlling’ aspect to her, which was harder to see.) Had it not been for the surgery and what ensued, though, she might have gone on for some years.

“Lorraine needs to figure out, as we all do, again and again, ‘what she wants to be when she grows up.’ (Of course, ‘up’ doesn't look so lofty at this point, but it is the next step in her journey.) She can either hang in there, call it quits, or simply place herself in God's hands -- free will persists till the end. The best you can do is to help her know that she has it.” -- Jim

April 9: Tough visit tonight. I got to the hospital at about 7:15 and Mom was sitting at the table with her head bowed down and her forehead touching the table. She seemed to be crying, but very quietly and without tears. I sat next to hear and she kept saying, “I want to go home. I want to go home.” I just sat and held her for awhile. Then I told her she really had to stay in the hospital because she had had a stroke and she needed special care, and we couldn’t take care of her.

Then she suddenly switched gears and sat up, looked straight at me and started talking in a very angry tone, all of it gibberish that I couldn’t understand. I finally understood that she was telling me not to come there anymore, to go on with my life the way it used to be.

I said, “Mom, I can’t do that. I love you and I want to come and see you.” That just made her angrier.

More gibberish.

Finally I tried to guess what she was saying. I said, “Would it be better if I didn’t come to see you every day?”

“Yeah.”

“Should I come every other day?”

“Yeah.”

I said, “Okay, Mom, I’m going to tell you how I feel. I’m afraid you’re lonely when you’re here all by yourself, so I come every day so you won’t be lonely.”

“Oh,” she said, and gestured in a way that suggested that she was fine, the hospital was nice, and not to worry about her.

I said, “So you’re okay here by yourself.”

“Yeah!”

“And it’s okay if I come every other day?”

“Yeah!”

Finally a breakthrough. We both started laughing after that. The nurse brought in some tea for both of us and a cheese sandwich for her, which she cut up in small squares. This is the way Dutch people eat their sandwiches sometimes -- cut up in pieces and eaten with a fork -- but for my mother it’s really strange. I asked her if she wanted a cheese sandwich, and she said, “No!” very firmly.

I told her about my trip to Amsterdam today, my meeting at the Anne Frank House, the new bag I had bought afterward, and about Cait’s visit to the midwife. I told her I would have to come back tomorrow because we’re meeting with the speech therapist to sing together. The speech therapist had asked me to come up with some songs Mom would know. I said, “Shall we sing ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart?’ and she liked that,” so we’ll try that tomorrow.

It felt as if a lot of steam had been released, and Mom was laughing when I left. But what a lot of work! -- Nancy

April 10: I went to the hospital earlier than usual today in order to take part in a session of speech therapy. While Mom was being dressed, the therapist and I talked how best to deal with Mom’s lack of motivation. The therapist’s strategy now is to focus on songs, because when you sing or recite, you use a different part of your brain. People who have trouble speaking often find that they can sing or recite quite well.

Aware this was the next step, I had brought a list of songs I thought we could sing together. We started with “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” As soon as I started singing it, Mom joined in. The therapist asked me to drop the last word in each line to see if Mom would supply it. She did amazingly well -- the words were a little mushy, and some were wrong, but she got through it all and even carried the tune. And she swayed back and forth as she sang! It was beautiful. Then we sang “Bicycle Built for Two” and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” and she managed to get through both of them. Then I reminded her that the day before the stroke, on Tuesday, I had taken her out in the wheelchair when the weather was cold. It was a typical March day, and Mom had recited this as we walked along:

The March wind doth blow, and we shall have snow,
And what will the robin do then, poor thing?
He’ll fly to the barn, and keep himself warm,
And hide his head under his wing.

When I recited it, she was able to supply many of the words.

The therapist gave me two lists of words in Dutch that are common pairs (salt and pepper, hot and cold, up and down), and asked me to translate them into English. She’ll use this with Mom in further sessions. I’m also asked to write down some American rhymes, sayings and expressions that Mom would know.

All this reminded me of a story in Oliver Sack’s The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, “The Ancient Mariner.” This was about a man who had total amnesia -- couldn’t remember a thing from one minute to the next. But when he went to church, he could recite the entire Mass from beginning to end. Someone also recently told me a story about Dutch immigrants in Australia. They learn English as a second language and do just fine, but when they get very old and have to go to nursing homes they tend to forget their second language and begin speaking Dutch again. So the Australian government has had to ship in Dutch nurses to work with these old people, because they can’t speak English anymore! -- Nancy

April 14, 2009: When Nancy went to visit yesterday, Lorraine was sound asleep, but when I dropped by this afternoon to bring over her the clothes Nancy had washed yesterday, I not only found her awake and sitting in a wheelchair at the table near her bed, but engaged in animated conversation -- using word-like sounds -- with her oldest doll, a sock doll made by her mother when Lorraine was four. I touched Lorraine lightly on the arm, which quite startled her. It took her a moment to realize who was there. Then she put her head on her elbow and laughed and laughed and laughed. She didn’t mind talking to her doll in the presence of the three other patients in the room, plus several visitors, but perhaps was embarrassed that I should witness it. I’m not sure. When the laughing stopped, I told her that at least her doll understands every word she says. Lorraine nodded her head in agreement. She remained in good spirits the rest of our time together but was dead set against eating the half cup of pudding that was in front of her or drinking any of the orange juice that was also there. Then she said “go.” I kissed her goodbye, put her clothing in her closet, picked up a bag of laundry to be washed, and was away. -- Jim

* * *

Photos of Lorraine and her paintings are in this folder:

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


* * *

We Will All Be Changed

I got back yesterday from a two-week lecture trip in British Columbia. Here is the text of a sermon on the Transfiguration that I gave in Vancouver the Sunday before last.

Jim

PS While in Canada, I kept a photo journal: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157614656929699/

* * *

[a sermon given 8 March 2009 at the Canadian Memorial Church & Center for Peace in Vancouver]

We Will All Be Changed: Reflections on the Transfiguration

by Jim Forest

[Mark 9:1-8]

As is usual in the shortest of Gospels, Christ’s Transfiguration is described by Mark with great economy — one prefatory verse with Jesus saying that some of those who were present would see the kingdom of God coming in power before they die, then seven verses on the Transfiguration. Not a wasted word, yet the importance of the event is not diminished. Both Matthew and Luke provide similar accounts of the same event.

In the Orthodox Church, to which my wife and I belong, a great deal of attention and reflection is focused on the Transfiguration. I doubt there is an Orthodox Church anywhere in the world in which you will fail to find a Transfiguration icon. The celebration has its own special day on the calendar, August 6. It’s one of the more important commemorations. There is a custom, dating from the early Church but with Jewish roots, of bringing grapes, dates, figs, wine and bread to the church that day for a special blessing after the Liturgy — then everyone shares in the food that was blessed. If grapes are not available locally, apples and other fruits are brought instead.

Here are a few examples of the Transfiguration icon. The first is modern, the others mainly Russian examples that dates from the 16th Century, but also one Coptic icon. While there are many variations of the Transfiguration icon, the basic elements are always the same. On either side of Jesus are the prophet Elijah and the law-giver Moses, the three standing on top of a mountain, and in the foreground the three apostles who are witnesses — John, James and Peter — each shown responding in a different way. In every version, there a suggestion of blinding light emerging from Christ. Some iconographers show this one way, some another. Occasionally black is used — one way of suggesting that the light is not the sort of light we’ve ever seen before. The Orthodox theological term is “uncreated light,” the light of divinity.

The challenge of iconography in general is to create an image that exists on the razor-thin border dividing “realistic” art from “abstract” art. In that sense, this oldest form of Christian art has become quite modern. It’s a tradition that inspired some of Chagall’s most well-known paintings in the last century — a world where lovers are no longer subject to gravity and where the rules of perspective are ignored or even tuned inside out.

Icons are intentionally two-dimensional. This helps the viewer realize that the event or person portrayed cannot be portrayed as in a snapshot. There is a conscious avoidance of any suggestion of motion — on the contrary, there is absolute stillness, profound silence and timelessness. What one “sees” in an icon is as much a mystical experience as it is an historical event.

In this instance, Jesus has allowed his three closest followers to have a revelation of the Kingdom of God even though they haven’t died. And what is the kingdom of God about which Christ has spoken so often throughout his ministry? It’s being permitted to see, even if only briefly, who Jesus Christ really is. Implied in the event is not only seeing Christ with eyes wide open, eyes freed for a time to see things more truly, but being made aware of own transfiguration and the transfiguration of all matter.

It’s a bit like the resurrection. In Christ’s resurrection, we see our own resurrection, just as the first light of dawn prefigures noon. It isn’t only Christ who is transfigured. We are intended to share in it. It isn’t only Christ who rises from death. We are intended to share in that as well.

Both the three Gospel accounts and all the Transfiguration icons are about the discovery that the “reality” we think we are seeing so completely day after day is actually only a faint, incomplete, fog-shrouded sketch of reality — reality that is seen, in St Paul’s phrase, “through a glass darkly.” No matter how acute our eyesight, in fact we are living most of our lives on the frontier of blindness. Like the disciples Peter, James and John, there is so much we don’t see, so much we don’t hear.

It’s a little like one of my favorite scenes in the film “E.T.” A visitor from a distant planet is in the kitchen along with mom and her two children. The kids are well aware of the presence of this extraterrestrial botanist — but not mom. There this very odd-looking visitor stands, right next to the refrigerator. Mom, her arms full of groceries, opens the refrigerator door and in the process knocks E.T. over — thud — but she is too preoccupied to notice. There is an amazing visitor in the house, odder than odd, but she doesn’t see what, as far as she is concerned, couldn’t possibly be there. What can’t be isn’t. E.T. is off her radar.

The principal theologians of the early Church saw in the Transfiguration a promise. In the words of St. Athanasius, “God became a human being so that we human beings might become God.” The Greek word is “theosis.” We could translate that as deification. We are intended to enter more and more deeply into the sacred, into holiness. We are called to participate in Christ’s divinity. It’s an astounding idea. We are not just window-shoppers who get to look though the plate glass and see Christ on the other side, close but untouchable. We are meant to cross what seems to be an uncrossable barrier — to rub the glass so thin it isn’t there any more. Through God’s grace and our God-given longing, the glass wall evaporates, sometimes slowly, sometimes in a flash. It’s what St. Paul means when he speaks of how “we will all be changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye.”

One of the most important texts in the Book of Genesis is the declaration that Adam and Eve, the fountainhead of the human race, were made in the image and likeness of God. Part of the way our transfiguration occurs is in our becoming more and more capable of seeing the image of God in other people, and not just in the attractive people, the people whose company we seek out, but in people we don’t especially like or even dislike, people whom we avoid, unattractive strangers, potentially dangerous people, people whom we might think of as our enemies.

Let me give you an example of what that conversion of vision looked like in the life of one person, Thomas Merton. You may have heard of him or even have read one or two of his books. You may even guess the story I am thinking of. It’s often called the Epiphany at Fourth and Walnut.

Fourth and Walnut is a busy intersection in downtown Louisville. It’s the spring of 1958. Here’s Thomas Merton, in the city on an errand, one of many people waiting for the light to change. He’s not in his monk’s robes — these would only be worn at the monastery where he has been living since 1941. He’s inconspicuously dressed in the black clothing of a Catholic priest. He appears to be no one special — in Louisville there are many Catholic priests — but probably a few people in the crowd would have recognized his name and perhaps have read his autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain. It’s a book in which Merton described growing up in a artistic, bohemian family, his eventual conversion to Christianity in its Catholic form, and finally his becoming a Trappist monk who left the world with a slam of the door.

Here’s what Merton has to say about what happened to him while waiting for the light to turn green:

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream….

“This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud…. It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake….

“There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun…. There are no strangers! … If only we could see each other [as we really are] all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other….

“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.

“I have no program for this seeing. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.”

Think about it. We all know what’s it’s like to be waiting for a light to change. Probably you’re not in the best of moods. You may even be irritated — you have places to go and things to do and not much time and the bloody light is red. It’s not a condition of mind that would seem to clear the way for a mystical experience. Yet somehow it was the right moment in Merton’s life for a transfiguration. It might have taken just ten or twenty seconds, maybe less. Time seemed to stop. He wasn’t standing in expectation of something special occurring that day. But then the fog suddenly lifted and he saw something he had never seen before. It’s wasn’t a pious thought or fantasy but an intense experience of God-illumined reality.

It’s a vision to long for. All these people, none of them known to you by name, none of them familiar, none of them out of the ordinary — and we see them as bearers of the image of God.

One of the phrases Merton uses in his description is that “it was like waking from a dream of separateness.” All the barriers that we imagine separate us from each other — gone.

It’s an experience not just of the other as a person known to God and beloved of God, but an experience of God. To see God’s image in another is to be aware that we are, here and now, in the presence of God.

Here’s how one of the monks of the early Church, St. Dorothea of Gaza, put it. “Be aware. The further we are from each other, the further we are from God. The closer we are to each other, the closer we are to God.”

In Merton’s case, while waiting for the light to turn green, he was freed from the illusion that, by virtue of his monastic vocation, he belonged a category of people — holy monks — who were dearer to God than those with more ordinary vocations.

What happened to Merton afterward was a great turning toward the world. Not that he was less a monk. Not at all. But Merton began to better understand that monastic life is not a life that exempts the monk from love of neighbor so that he can concentrate more single-heartedly on love of God. Merton was 44 that day. He was totally unaware that he had only ten years left before his death. 1968 would be his last year of life in this world.

What he did in that last decade of his life had a great deal to do with responding to his eye-opening moment at Fourth and Walnut. He began corresponding with a lot more people. One of them was Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement with its many houses of hospitality for street people. She was also editor of a newspaper that challenged its readers to live lives of hospitality with all that hospitality implies, a life built on seeing Christ in the least person. Merton began to see that all the preparations for nuclear war that had been going on since the end of World War II posed an issue which he, as a Christian writer, could not ignore.

The lead article in the October 1961 issue of The Catholic Worker was the first of a series of articles by Merton on the our duty as Christians to strive with all our power and intelligence, with all our faith, all our hope in Christ, and love for God and neighbor, “to do the one task which God has imposed upon us in the world today. That task is to work for the total abolition of war.”

In 1961, the Cold War being arctic cold, there were many people not at all pleased that Thomas Merton was writing about such matters — a monk criticizing his nation’s military policies, a monk protesting nuclear weapons, a monk condemning war. Who does he think he is? Write about the rosary, please, not about war. The consequences made the years that followed far from easy for Merton. Six months later, he was forbidden to publish a book he had written, Peace in the Post-Christian Era. It finally got into print just a few years ago, more than four decades after it was written.

Even so, when one door is locked, another opens, and one door leads to another. Merton’s peace work continued if much of it in a more intimate form. By the time Merton died, he had become one of the rare Catholics of the time who were in frequent contact with all sorts of people Catholics in those days — not to say Catholic monks — would ordinarily ignore and avoid: Protestant and Orthodox Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Moslems, believers and non-believers, even a fellow writer in Russia, Boris Pasternak.

Merton became one of the great letter writers. Happily, a great many of his letters are now available in books. Merton has died but not his voice. His letters are still being delivered to anyone who wishes to receive them.

The point here is not to single out Merton as one of those rare souls who gets to see something many of us can hardly imagine exists, but rather to stress the point that all of us are intended to see the world around us more clearly than we do, and that means seeing in others the presence of God no matter how thoroughly it may be hidden.

Consider ordinary moments on ordinary days and how much we look at the people around us through narrowed eyes.

You’re walking down a street and see a man in stained clothing sitting on the pavement, a paper coffee cup in front of him. As you pass by, he asks if you could contribute something toward his next meal. Though unshaven and in need of a shower, he’s young and muscular, apparently healthy and capable of working. You’ve just walked past a dozen help-wanted signs. What thoughts pass through your mind? What do you see? Who do you see? How do you respond?

As the sun is setting you notice several teenagers down the street, speaking abusively in voices that can be heard 50 yards away. They seem to be looking for trouble. What do you think and feel as you look at them? Do you continue on the same path or find an alternate route? What do you see? Who do you see? How do you respond?

You turn on the news and hear a report concerning the murder of a young woman. There’s a photo of her taken from her high school year book — a beautiful face and bright smile, a face full of life and promise. She reminds you of your own children. Based on information from witnesses, a drawing of a man seen running from the crime scene is shown along with a telephone number you should call if you have seen anyone resembling the suspect. You are warned not to approach him as he is regarded as armed and dangerous. The drawing lingers in your mind. What are your thoughts about the man being sought? When you look at his picture, what do you see? Who do you see? How do you respond?

It is in such ordinary moments that we need transfigured eyes — not only to see the ruined state of so many people around us, but that hidden person who, for all that has gone wrong in his or her life, is beloved by God but probably hasn’t been very fortunate in being loved and cared for by human beings.

Maybe this is something we need to pray for, even on a daily basis. Let me leave you with this brief prayer:

Lord, please give me transfigured eyes. Give me a readiness to see in others a little of what you see in them, so that I might respond in such a way that your love may be more evident, and that my fear will not get in the way of your love.

Amen.

* * *
photos of several Transfiguration icons are in this folder:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/741533/
* * *

A day with Erasmus of Rotterdam

One of the perks for being over 62 in Holland are the seven free train rides we ancient ones get each year to anywhere in the country. I've been enjoying this age-related reward for five years now, using it to see places and events I might otherwise have missed.

This past Thursday, I used one of these tickets to go to Rotterdam to see an exhibition at the Boijmans Museum about the most famous of all Rotterdamers: the scholar Erasmus (1466-1536). The focus was on the themes of greatest interest to him: church and faith, scholarship and education, war and peace.

A quotation that reveals something of Erasmus' character: "The sum and substance of our religion is peace and concord. This can hardly remain the case unless we define as few matters as possible and leave each individual's judgment free on many questions."

Enjoy arguments, he recommended, but don't let them become an occasion for breaking Christian unity -- we can learn in heaven who was right. It was advice ignored by many and resulted in the splintering of western Christianity in the 16th century. Erasmus was bitterly criticized by Protestants for his failure to join them, but was also condemned by his fellow Catholics for his criticisms of much that was in need of reform in the Catholic Church.

In a letter to a friend, explaining his own aversion to those who has broken from the Catholic Church, he wrote: "I have seen them return from hearing a sermon as if inspired by an evil spirit. The faces of all showed a curious wrath and ferocity."

Through his writings and wide-ranging correspondence with friends throughout Europe, he struggled to prevent war and restrain nationalism. As he wrote in one much-reprinted essay, The Complaint of Peace: “We must look for peace by purging the very sources of war -- false ambitions and evil desires. As long as individuals serve their own personal interests, the common good will suffer. Let them examine the self-evident fact that this world of ours us the fatherland of the entire human race.”

Photos I took of the exhibition are here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157613109469667/

Other photos taken the same day are in folder headed Museum Boijmans van Beuningen:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157613150068750/

I especially recommend looking at the seven panels of the works of mercy. This set was originally hung in the cathedral in Alkmaar, 100 meters from our house. In each panel, Christ (shown without a halo) is present but unrecognized. In the first panel, among a small crowd being given bread by a husband and wife, he looks directly toward the viewer. The paintings were damaged in the late 16th century, during the period of iconoclasm that occurred in the early period of the Reformation. A skillful restoration was carried out about thirty years ago by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Jim

* * *

a Christmas letter

December 17, 2008

This afternoon we went out to look for a Christmas tree. We always put this off until the last minute. Christmas creeps up on you so stealthily, after all, that you don’t even realize it’s here until it’s almost too late. And this is Holland, where the big holiday is Sinterklaas, the Feast of St. Nicholas, December 5th, which is a big-time Dutch gift-giving event that is preceded by hectic shopping. By the time Sinterklaas is over the shopkeepers are exhausted, so you don’t get the frantic Christmas rush to remind you that you’d better go out and buy that tree.

Since we don’t have a car, we usually shop for a tree at the stand run by a guy who sells flowers on one of the main shopping streets in Alkmaar, within walking distance of our house. Most of the time this guy has pretty decent trees up until the last few days before Christmas. But not today. Today the trees were all sorry pine specimens that I couldn’t bear to pay good money for. What to do? We didn’t feel like tramping all over town looking for something better. It would take too much time, which is why we put this off in the first place.

For years, Jim and I have been having this low-key dispute over real tree versus artificial. Jim has been pushing for artificial. He’s the one who ends up having to hack off bits of bark to fit the thing into the Christmas tree stand. Artificial trees actually look pretty good, is his argument, and once you have one you can use it over and over again. I’m one of those nostalgic people who thinks that a plastic Christmas tree is just about the worst thing you can consider. It represents everything that our modern world has come to stand for (vacuous falseness, etc.), and besides that, it doesn’t smell like a Christmas tree. It doesn’t smell like anything.

But looking at those pathetic conifers, and then glancing over at the big department store right across the sidewalk where there was a vast assortment of Christmas products just waiting to be bought, I suggested timidly that perhaps an artificial tree wouldn’t be such a bad idea. In ten minutes we were in the V & D Christmas department, deciding whether to get the 150 cm. or the 180 cm. model. It didn’t hurt that they were 50% off.

On the way home, Jim tried to soothe my conscience by explaining that this way no tree will be cut down to decorate our home, we won’t have to water it, and it will last until Russian Orthodox Christmas (January 7) without dropping any needles. So we set it up, covered it with lights, and decorated it with the charming little things we’ve been collecting for these 26 years, and I’ll be darned if it doesn’t look great. (Still doesn’t smell like a Christmas tree, though.)

The moral of the story is this: if you’re the sort of person who could never imagine living with an artificial Christmas tree, imagine it. It’s not so bad! Loosen up! Make room for change! Let it happen.

Life around our artificial Christmas tree is fine. All is well. Jim’s new kidney is taking good care of him, and my lone kidney is being a good sport (probably because its mate is never very far away).

The kids are all doing well. Dan has been nominated the Teacher of the Year at the University of Amsterdam, Wendy is working with Musicians Without Borders and has won a valuable prize to help continue the work they’re doing setting up a Rock Music School in Kosovo, Tom and Kylie are doing well at Nike in Hilversum, Cait and Bjorn were married in May and are now expecting their first baby, a girl, in late April, and Anne has switched schools and is very happy studying art at the Royal Art Academy in The Hague. Ben continues with his home-based business helping people with their computer problems while Amy continues to direct the New Jersey Environmental Federation.

My translation work is going very well.

Jim has had a very productive writing year, with the publication of The Road to Emmaus: Pilgrimage as a Way of Life and new revised editions of Praying with Icons and Living with Wisdom: a Biography of Thomas Merton. Also there was his latest children's book, Silent as a Stone: Mother Maria and the Trash Can Rescue.

My mother Lorraine is still living with us. At age 91 she’s still making beautiful paintings, and Jim has set up a special part of his Flickr site to show them off (www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157603780115420/).

We wish you all a blessed new year. It’s going to be challenging, but we’re not going to go into that except to say that you may end up having to switch to an artificial tree, or to make some kind of change you never thought you’d ever make in your wildest dreams. Be strong and keep on loving. You’re not alone.

Much love,

Nancy
(with Jim cheering from the side lines)

New! Improved!

The first copy of the revised edition of Living With Wisdom, my biography of Thomas Merton, arrived in a special delivery packet from Orbis earlier today.

It’s amazing how different a book is when it’s in print. I know the text backwards and forwards and have looked at several PDF files of the book at various stages of its design, including the final layout, yet the end result seems as surprising as a newborn child. (This “child,” however, looks quite a bit different than the last one of the same name — bigger by nearly 50 pages, with many more photos, a better cover, and ivory-colored rather than hospital-white paper.)

Living With Wisdom was first published in 1991 and has gone through at least ten printings since then. It never seemed dated to me, but when an invitation came from Robert Ellsberg, publisher of Orbis Books, to revise it, my positive response wasn’t long in coming. In the past eighteen years, much important Merton material that wasn’t available in 1991 has been released, including all of Merton’s journals plus volume-after-volume of his letters.

While I prefer recommending books by other authors to pushing my own, I can’t help saying I’m hugely pleased with what Orbis has done and hope it will reach many readers.

The official publication date in November 30, but I see the book is already available for pre-order from Amazon. Here’s the web page:

http://www.amazon.com/Living-Wisdom-Life-Thomas-Merton/dp/1570757542/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227627339&sr=1-1

Attached is an extract from the book’s preface, the title of which is “Meeting Merton.”

— Jim

* * *

In December 1961, Merton suggested that perhaps I would like to come to the monastery for a visit. There was never any question in my mind about accepting, but first there was an issue of The Catholic Worker to get ready for publication — I had recently become the paper’s managing editor — and also a night class in English Literature at Hunter College to complete. I put off the trip to Kentucky until the beginning of February 1962.

I had no money for such a journey. Volunteers at the Catholic Worker received room and board plus small change for minor expenses, subway rides and the like. I never dared ask even for a penny, preferring to sell The Catholic Worker on street corners in Greenwich Village, keeping a small portion of the proceeds for my incidental expenses (mainly bread, cheese, orange juice, beer and an occasional book), giving the rest to the community.

Confronted with a nearly empty wallet, I opted to travel by thumb. A companion on
the Catholic Worker staff, Bob Kaye, joined me. Before sunrise one cold winter morning, we loaded up on Italian bread still warm from the oven of the Spring Street bakery and set off.

The going was slow. I recall standing in nighttime sleet at the side of a highway somewhere in Pennsylvania watching cars and trucks rush past, many of them with colorful plastic statues of an open-armed Jesus of the Sacred Heart on the dashboard. Sadly, this image of divine hospitality seemed to have little influence on those at the wheel behind the statue. It took us two-and-a-half exhausting days to travel the thousand miles to the Abbey of Gethsemani.

Finally we reached the monastery. After the Guest Master, Father Francis, showed us our rooms, my first stop was the monastery church. There was a balcony in the church that was connected to the guest house. Surviving such a trip, I found thanksgiving came easily, but my prayer was cut short by the sound of distant laughter so intense and pervasive that I couldn’t resist looking for its source. I hadn’t expected laughter at a penitential Trappist monastery.

The origin, I discovered, was Bob Kaye’s room. As I opened the door the laughter was still going on, a kind of gale of joy. The major source was the red-faced man lying on the floor, wearing black and white robes and a broad leather belt, his knees in the air, hands clutching his belly. Though the monk was more well-fed than the broomstick thin, fast-chastened Trappist monk I had imagined, I realized instantly that the man on the floor laughing with such abandon must be Thomas Merton. His face reminded me of David Duncan’s photos of Pablo Picasso — a face similarly unfettered in its expressiveness, the eyes bright and quick and sure, suggesting some strange balance between wisdom and mischief. (Merton once remarked that he had the face of a “hillbilly who knows where the still is.”) And the inspiration for the laughter? It proved to be the intensely heady smell of feet that had been kept in shoes all the way from the Lower East Side to Gethsemani and were now out in the open air. If the Catholic Worker had manufactured a perfume, this would have been it.

After that week-long stay at Gethsemani, The Seven Storey Mountain became a new and different book. No wonder that Merton had twice mentioned the films of Charlie Chaplin in its pages. Not only did I become aware that Merton was someone capable of hurricanes of laughter, but I learned that he was far from the only Trappist who knew how to laugh, though no other monk seemed to exhibit this trait quite so readily and explosively as Merton.

The abbot, Dom James, though a most hospitable man, was not initially quite so positive about a visitation of ragged Catholic Workers. In those days most American men were tidily trimmed thanks to frequent haircuts, but, as far as Bob and I were concerned, haircuts were a massive waste of money. Merton apologetically explained that our shaggy hair did not please the abbot. If we were to stay on at the abbey, Dom James insisted we have haircuts. Merton hoped we wouldn’t object. No problem, we replied. On our second morning at the abbey, we took it in turns to sit in a chair in the basement room where the novices changed into their work clothes. (Merton in denims could have been taken for a New York City taxi driver.) The room also served as a barber shop. While the novices stood in a circle laughing, a good deal of hair fell to the concrete floor. Going from one extreme to the other, Bob and I were suddenly nearly as bald as Yul Brinner.

After the haircut Merton took me to the abbot’s office. I can no longer recall what the abbot and I talked about — perhaps about my conversion, or community life at the Catholic Worker — but I will never forget the solemn blessing Dom James gave me at the end of our conversation. I knelt on the floor near his desk while he gripped my skull with intensity and prayed over me. He had a steel grip. There was no doubt in my mind I had been seriously blessed. I have ever since had a warm spot in my heart for Dom James, a man who has occasionally been maligned by Merton biographers.

I recall another monk at the monastery who had much less sympathy for me and still less, it seemed, for Merton — or Father Louis, as Merton was known within the community. This was the abbey’s other noted author, Father Raymond Flanagan, whose books were well known to Catholics at the time, though they had never reached the broad audience Merton’s books had.

Merton and I were walking down a basement corridor that linked the guest house kitchen to the basement of the main monastery building. There was a point in the corridor where it made a leftward turn, and standing there, next to a large garbage container, was an older monk who was not so much reading as glaring at the latest Catholic Worker, which he held open at arm’s length as if the paper had an unpleasant smell. There was an article of Merton’s in it, one of his essays about the urgency of taking steps to prevent nuclear war. Father Raymond looked up, saw us coming his way, balled the paper up in his fist, hurled it into the garbage container, and strode away without a word, leaving a trail of smoke.

Once again, Merton’s response was laughter. Then he explained that Father Raymond had never had a high opinion of Merton’s writings and often denounced him at the community’s chapter meetings. “In the early days Father Raymond said I was too detached from the world, and now he thinks I’m not detached enough.” ( The tension between Merton and Father Raymond never abated. Just ten months before his death, Merton recorded in his journal a furious verbal assault by his brother monk, irate about Merton’s opposition to the war in Vietnam.)

During that visit I had my first glimpse of Merton’s openness to non-Catholics and, more striking, non-Christians. It happened the first evening I was there. There was a hurried knock on the door of my room in the guest house. Merton was standing there, but in a rush as he was late for Vespers. He wanted me to have the pile of papers in his hands, a collection of Jewish Hasidic stories that a rabbi had left with him a few days before. “Read these — these are great!” And off he hurried to Vespers without further explanation, leaving me with a collection of amazing tales of mystical rabbis in Poland generations before the Holocaust.

I recall another evening a day or two later when Merton was not in a hurry. He was in good time for Vespers and already had on the white woolen choir robe the monks wore during winter months while in church. It was an impressive garment, all the more so at close range. I reached out to feel it thickness and density. In a flash Merton slid out of it and placed it over my head. I was astonished at how heavy it was! Once again, Merton laughed. The robe met a practical need, he explained, as it was hardly warmer in the church than it was outside. Without it, the monks would freeze to death.

The guest master knew I was at the monastery at Merton’s invitation and thought I might be able to answer a question which puzzled him, and no doubt many of the monks. “How did Father Louis write all those books?”

I had no idea, no more than he, but I got a glimpse of an answer before my stay was over. A friend at the Catholic Worker had sent a letter to Merton in my care. He urged Merton to leave the monastery and do something “more relevant,” such as join a Catholic Worker community. (Over the years Merton received quite a few letters telling him that he was in the wrong place.) I was a little embarrassed to be delivering such a message.

What is most memorable to me about this particular letter was the experience of watching Merton the writer at work. He had a small office just outside the classroom where he taught the novices. On his desk was a large gray typewriter. He inserted a piece of monastery stationery and wrote a reply that seemed to issue from the typewriter at the speed of light. I had never seen anyone write so quickly, and doing it with four fingers. You will often see a stenographer type at such speed when copying a text, but even in a city news room one rarely sees actual writing at a similar pace.

I wish I had made a copy of his response. I recall Merton admitted that there was much to reform in monasteries and that monastic life was not a vocation to which God called many people, yet he gave an explanation of why he thought the monastic life was nonetheless an authentic Christian vocation and how crucial it was for him to remain faithful to what God had called him to. It was a very solid, carefully reasoned letter, filling one side of a sheet of paper, and was written in just a few minutes.

When I first met Merton, more than two years had passed since the Vatican’s denial of his request to move to another monastery where he might live in greater solitude. By the time of my visit, he was able to spend part of his time in a newly built cinderblock building that stood on the edge of the woods about a mile north of the monastery. It had initially been intended as a conference center where Merton could meet with non-Catholic visitors, but he saw it primarily as his hermitage. Merton had lit the first fire in the fireplace several months before, on December 2nd. There was a small bedroom behind the main room. Merton occasionally had permission to stay overnight, but it would not be until the summer of 1965, three years later, that it became his full-time home. At that point he became the first Trappist hermit in modern times.

When I came to visit, the hermitage already had a lived-in look. It was winter so there was no sitting on the porch. We sat inside, regularly adding wood to the blaze in the fireplace. There was a Japanese calendar on the wall with a Zen brush drawing for every month of the year and a black-on-black painting of the cross by Merton’s friend, Ad Reinhart. There was a bookcase and, next to it, a long table that served as a desk placed on the inside of the hermitage’s one large window offering a view of fields and hills. A large timber cross had been built on the lawn. On the table was a portable Swiss-made Hermes typewriter. Off to one side of the hermitage was an outhouse which Merton shared with a black snake, a harmless but impressive creature.

What Merton took the most pleasure in when he showed me the hermitage was a sheet of parchment-like paper tacked to the inside of the closet door in his bedroom — a colorful baroque document such as one finds in shops near the Vatican: a portrait of the pope at the top in an oval with a Latin text below and many decorative swirls. In this case it was made out to “the Hermit Thomas Merton” and was signed by Paul VI.

During that visit, the latest copy of Jubilee arrived. Jubilee was a monthly journal edited by Ed Rice, Merton’s godfather, with the collaboration of a small, committed staff of talented, underpaid colleagues, one of whom was Bob Lax. Merton was among the magazine’s advisors, cheerleaders and notable writers. In the years it existed, 1953 to 1967, Jubilee was unparalleled among religious magazines. There wasn’t a single issue that failed to be arresting — impressive photo features plus some of the most striking typography of the time. The content was wide ranging, with vivid glimpses of church life, portraits of houses of hospitality, profiles and interviews with remarkable people, and well-illustrated articles on liturgy, art and architecture. In that particular issue was a set of photos of life in an Orthodox monastery. One of the photos showed a heavily-bearded Athonite monk who looked older than Abraham. He was standing behind a long battered table in the refectory, while in the background was a huge fresco of the Last Judgement. The monk’s head was bowed slightly. His eyes seemed to contain the cosmos. There was a remarkable vulnerability in his face. “Look at him,” Merton said. “This guy has been kissed by God!”

My visited ended abruptly. A telegram came from New York with the news that President Kennedy had announced the resumption of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, thus another escalation of the Cold War and yet another indication that nuclear war might occur in the coming years. Anticipating such a decision, I was part of a group of New Yorkers who had planned to take part in an act of civil disobedience, a sit-in at the entrance to the Manhattan office of the Atomic Energy Commission, the federal agency responsible for making and testing nuclear weapons. The abbey provided money for our return to New York by bus rather than thumb. Not many days later, now with a slight stubble of hair, I was in a New York City jail known locally as “The Tombs.”

* * *