Washing dishes: in memory of Jim Forest and Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peacemaker, teacher of contemplation, passed on in Hue, Vietnam, January 22, 2022. 

Jim Forest, Orthodox peacemaker, writer, husband and father, fell asleep in the Lord on January 13, 2022.

I met Jim Forest any number of times, including once when he gave a lecture in Ames, Iowa. The last time I saw him was in 2006, when I was a guest of his wife Nancy and him the November before I left for Honduras. 

In the Forest kitchen in Alkmaar, Netherlands.

I heard Thich Nhat Hanh speak a number of times.

When I lived in New York City, I read a short booklet of Jim Forest which detailed an experience that he had with Nhat Hanh when he was staying with him in Paris. To me, it speaks of the spirituality they shared – and which can teach us how to live. 

I will quote from Jim’s Eyes of Compassion: Learning from Thich Nhat Hanh.

An animated discussion was going on in the main room just out of earshot, but I had been given the task that evening of doing the washing up. The pots, pans, and rice bowls seemed to reach half way to the ceiling in that closet-sized kitchen. I felt really annoyed. Stuck with an infinity of dirty dishes, I was missing the main event. 

Somehow Nhat Hanh picked up on my irritation. Suddenly he was standing next to me. “Jim,” he asked, “why are you washing the dishes?” I knew I was suddenly facing one of those very tricky Zen questions. Saying it was my turn wasn't adequate. I tried to think of a good Zen answer, but all I could come up with was, “You should wash the dishes to get them clean.” “No,” said Nhat Hanh. “You should wash the dishes to wash the dishes.” I've been mulling over that answer ever since—more than four decades of mulling. I'm still in the dark. But what he said next was instantly helpful: “You should wash each dish as if it were the baby Jesus.”

I often enjoyed washing dishes. 

I remember Christmas time meals at the home of Uncle Ed and Aunt Bernie, when I was in college. After the meal, I took over the kitchen sink and washed all the dishes.

Living in New York City for grad school in the early 1970s, washing dishes was a way to get warm in cold apartments.

Later when my parents and I went for a meal after Christmas with Uncle George, Aunt Mary, and my cousins, I remember washing dishes with my cousin Mary.

When I lived in Ames, I loved to send people home after a big meal I had prepared. I turned up the music and washed the dishes.

I’m not as enamored of washing dishes these days – no hot water and sometimes no water. But there are still times when it is a joy to wash the dishes. 

Therefore, this story of Nhat Hanh and Jim opens me up to the mystery of Life – being present to every moment and recognizing that when we wash dishes it’s as if we are bathing the baby Jesus and we should wash them with the same love and tenderness.

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I also wrote about this here and here. 

Jim Forest wrote a response to the blog note, recalling Dorothy Day. 

A quote from Dorothy Day that rings the same bells: “Paper work, cleaning the house, cooking the meals, dealing with the innumerable visitors who come all through the day, answering the phone, keeping patience and acting intelligently, which is to find some meaning in all these encounters—these things too are the work of peace, and often seem like a very little way.”

Fear, Thomas Merton, and William Willimon

Last night I finished two books just before going to sleep. I recommend them both.

I usually read a few books at a time but this time these two books provided me with a lot to think about. And they both concern “fear”.

Jim Forest’s The Root of War Is Fear: Thomas Merton's advice to peacemakers was published this week and, getting it on Kindle, I devoured it in four days. 

Thomas Merton has been a significant person in my life.

Merton's collection of quotes from Gandhi in Gandhi on Non-Violence played a major role in helping me in the late 1960s discern how to respond to war and peace. I was against the war in Viet Nam, but Gandhi’s explanation of the courage that is needed for the nonviolence of the strong spurred me to a commitment to active nonviolence.

Merton's collection of quotes on the Desert Fathers, The Wisdom of the Desert, opened up for me another aspect of living with God – especially the Zen-like quips and deeds of those who left for the desert – in part to offer an alternative to a Christianity allied with the Empire.

The collection of essays Raids on the Unspeakable sustains and challenges me even now. Here he wrote on the Eichmann trial, inspired by Hannah Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial. His essay, “The Time of the End Is the Time of No Room,” has provided me with a Christmas meditation almost every year. The opening essay, “Rain and the Rhinoceros,” pulls together an ancient Christian writer, the existentialist dramatist Ionesco, rain, and war.

But the essay “The Root of War Is Fear” is one of his most important writings for me. It is full of great wisdom and a challenge for all of us.

Jim Forest, a personal friend, takes the title of his work from this essay but goes well beyond Merton’s challenges expressed there. Jim, who has written a great biography of Merton, Living with Wisdom, with fantastic photos – as well as one of Dorothy Day,  All Is Grace – gives an overview of Merton’s life, with great insights gleaned from Jim’s visits and correspondence with Merton.  

The book is filled with extensive quotations from Merton, most often situated in their context by Jim’s marvelous prose. The full text of the letter from Jim that provoked the Merton letter known in its abbreviated form as “Letter to a Young Activist” is included, together with the full text of Merton’s response – which reveals a wisdom and a sensitivity that are badly needed today. An unpublished satirical letter of Merton’s, in the style of Jonathan Swift, from Marco J. Frisbee, is included as an appendix.

I will return to this book in the next few months, savoring the wisdom of Merton.

The other book I finished last night was William Willimon’s Fear of the Other: No Fear in Love is the work of a Methodist theologian and bishop responding to the current site of fear in the United States (and around the globe).

I ran across Willimon’s writing many years ago and am probably one of the few Catholics who read and really liked the 1989 book he co-wrote with Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens. I was also impressed by other writings, especially in relation to higher education. I thus persuaded the planning committee of the Catholic Campus Ministry Association to invite him to one of their national conventions.

In Fear of the Other, Willimon offers a vision of faith, centered in Jesus Christ, who comes forward to us and changes our way of being. As he writes, “God is shown, in Christ, to be pure will toward embrace.”

And thus, “I take the step toward [the Other] and open my arms, not primarily because of my enlightened redefinition of the Other but rather because of Jesus’s redefinition of me.”

Again, it is a book full of gems that challenge us, especially in his reinterpretation of the story of the Good Samaritan. I will not write here what he suggests, lest I spoil the impact it had on me – and may have on most US church-goers.

These two books are very different but they have both helped me begin to understand why I do not experience a lot of fear, even though there is violence around us here in Honduras. Maybe it’s because I’m trying to take seriously the challenge of Merton and Willimon.

Willimon writes:

         We are commissioned to the active, searching, seeking, embracing love of the Other.

And, as Merton wrote to Jim Forest:

All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God's love.