The Gate of Heaven is everywhere

Thomas Merton had an epiphany on the corner of 4th and Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky, about March 18, 1958.

What especially struck me was the head of the gnome at the base of the plaque. How very Mertonesque!

I visited there once, but didn't have my camera. 

Two good friends, who were he in Honduras in December, just passed there and sent me a photo. I love it. Who cannot laugh seeing the gnome at this sacred spot. 

But there's even more. A woman passed by asking help for forty cents to pay for her bus fare.

"The Gate of Heaven is everywhere."

Here's the text of Merton's encounter in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, pp. 141-142

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.

Advent: disarmament and waking from the dream of separateness

Isaiah 2:1-5

Romans 13: 11-14

Notes in English for a homily I will share tonight at the Vigil Mass of the First Sunday of Advent in Dolores, Copán, Honduras, inspired by Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, in a year filled with death.

This year the municipality of Honduras has experienced at least six violent deaths: the killing of the mayor, the woman and her two children killed in a murder by arson in San Antonio Dolores, the couple who were killed by machetes in their home in Pasquingual.

It has not been a year of peace, but the prophet Isaiah gives us a vision of peace - on the Lord's mountain: 

“they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks… they shall not train again for war.”

How far is this vision from our reality? But what shall we do?

In the poor neighborhood of Philadelphia, where Shane Clairborne lives with a Christian community, they witnessed the killing of a nineteen year old in the block where Shane lives. Their response was inspired by this passage of Isaiah and they began a campaign to turn weapons into gardening tools, making shovels out of AK-47s. The movement has spread throughout the world.

This is an important first step in a world where weapons abound. This is a first step.

There is a need for nations to pound their weapons into instruments of peace, starting nuclear weapons of mass destruction. In fact, on October 27 this year, the United Nations voted to launch negotiations for a treaty abolishing nuclear weapons. Both France and the United States worked behind the scenes to oppose the move, and together with other nations including Great Britain, and Russia opposed it.

But what even a treaty is not enough.

As Dorothy Day wrote in the September 1938 Catholic Worker, we need “a disarmament of the heart”:

Today the whole world is in the midst of a revolution. We are living through it now – all of us. History will record this time as a time of world revolution. And frankly, we are calling for Saints…. We must prepare now for martyrdom — otherwise we will not be ready. Who of us if … attacked now would not react quickly and humanly against such attack? Would we love our brother [or sister] who strikes us? Of all at The Catholic Worker how many would not instinctively defend [themselves] with any forceful means in [their] power? We must prepare. We must prepare now. There must be a disarmament of the heart.

How can we do this?

I think St. Paul has much to teach us in this regard. Writing to the Romans, living in the heart of a violent and oppressive empire, he urged them to a heart-felt conversion:

Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and lust, not in rivalry and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ…

This is how we can begin disarmament.

But this disarmament, this conversion, takes place when we wake up. As Paul wrote, 

“it is the hour now for you to awake from sleep.”

Perhaps the first step to wake up is what happened to Thomas Merton on the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky, where, as he put it in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, he woke from a dream of separateness:

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….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! …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….

When he begin to see the presence of God in others, when we realize that we are all one and responsible for each other, then we can begin the conversion, the disarmament of the heart that will open us to welcome the disarmed world that God promised to Isaiah and to us who worship the Prince of Peace.

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.

The last day of November

Today we ended November in Plan Grande with the novenario of José Arnaldo Sánchez. There was a Mass in the afternoon and this evening many gathered in the house of his widow and children for the rosary.

I had gone to the velorio on the night after his death and the funeral Mass the next day. I had a visitor and so it was good for him to see part of the daily life of people here.

Arnaldo died as the result of an accident. I think he was examining a car when it tolled over on him.  After several days in the regional hospital he died.

I most remember him for the day he helped me to start my car when the battery was low. But I know his wife who is one of the village’s catechist and he was the brother of several of the men I know here, including the grandfather of my confirmation godson.

Funerals are times for prayer, but they are also social events, times for people to get together. People gather to pray in the house during the velorio, the wake. and for nine days until the novenario, the ninth day.

Padre German dropped by for the prayer during the velorio and for the funeral Mass. At the novenario, the people prayed the rosary and asked me to say a few words. I ended my short words with the Canticle of Simeon and the closing prayers of Night Prayer.

Then coffee, tamales, and chop suey were served to all – included the groups (mostly men) who were standing outside and nearby in the road. People will probably stay several hours to comfort the family.

At the novenario, as at the velorio, a five year old kid – Elmer Noé – attached himself to me. His father lives in a nearby town and he is the nephew of the widow. He also teaches in a nearby school.

Elmer Noé is a very affectionate kid who held my hand and sat on my lap for a while. He also held the hand of his great-grandmother who was seated in front of me.

He also is a sharp kid, knowing the prayers and songs. He even led the first decade of the rosary during the novenario.

He is not the only sharp kid I met today. After Mass, I heard someone playing the drums. I looked over and saw it was the 18 month old son of one of the musicians. What surprised me was how good he was and how much he enjoyed playing the drums – especially the cymbal. I encouraged his father to keep up the good work with him so that the child can develop his musical talents.

Between Mass and the novenario I had some time to work and eat dinner. My neighbor Gloria came by to ask a few questions about the coming meeting of communion ministers and to invite me to say a few words at the novenario.

As she left I noticed the sky in the west – a beautiful rose color, between the clouds and the mountains as the sun was setting.

It was a blessing to see the beauty, a sign of God’s presence here.

I recalled the sunset in my words at the wake, noting that God worked and shone in the life of Arnaldo – and this can be seen in his family.

All this is a reminder to me of the importance of being aware, with eyes open, to the many mysterious ways God shows his presence among us.

Sunday morning I shared another sign of God's loving presence among us as twenty-nine entered the catechumenate at morning Mass in Dulce Nombre. If they persevere, they will be baptized at the Easter Vigil.

The rite is simple - a welcome at the church door, a signing of the catechumens with a cross by their sponsors, and the handing of a bible to them. What always moves me is when the sponsors kneel before the catechumens to sign their feet with the Cross.

I spent some time with the catechumens that morning; I asked them to share what touched them during the rite. I then encouraged them to recall the significance of their sponsors kneeling before them. They are children of God; they are made in the image of God. The sponsors are kneeling before a sign of the presence of God, just as they might kneel before Christ present in the Eucharist in a tabernacle.

This message is important for so many of the people who are treated like dirt, as if they were worth nothing. They need to hear that they are children of God, of infinite worth. To have a sponsor kneel before them can be a moment of revelation - of God's infinite love for them.

As I write these words I think of Thomas Merton's famous revelation at Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, which can be found in his journals as well as in  Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.

   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....   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....

Would that we would open ourselves to worship the God present within all of us - made in God's image.