Merton and Jim Forest

 

    Jim Forest recently died.  Our world is poorer for this loss.  Obviously, all human beings die and the world loses a little something each time.  And of course, countless babies are born around the globe and who knows the roles in life each of them will play.  I don’t claim there is a baby somewhere who will replace Jim Forest and do his work.  No one will do it quite like he did.  We all have our own calling and, surely, many will be called to work for peace, as Jim did.  I think the future and welfare of our planet hinges on all the peacemakers in our world ultimately being successful. 

            I met Jim Forest a couple times.  I did not know him personally, but I “knew” him in the way so many of us “know” people whose lives and work we admire and support.  Only a few months ago, Jim Forest appeared on a program the Merton society has been sponsoring.  As usual, he was refreshing and challenging in his message, just as we hoped he would be.  Even though he clearly was aging and knew he was sick, he put his heart into his words as if it were the first time he spoke to an audience.  I am grateful.

            Jim Forest was good friends with Thomas Merton, another saint whom I “know,” but never met.  Merton died in 1968 a long way from his monastic home at Gethsemani abbey in Kentucky.  Even though he was a monk in a contemplative order, Merton was still involved in peace work.  He had become famous and was someone the young Jim Forest wanted to met.  Forest had become involved in some anti-war activity in the 60s in the middle of the Vietnam conflict.  At a young age, he had become managing editor of The Catholic Worker alongside the famous Dorothy Day in New York City.  He had begun to consider a monastic calling and wrote in 1966 to Merton about it.

            Merton replied in a rather long letter to the young man in New York.  Merton counseled him, “Do not depend on the hope of results.”  This sounds like good advice for all times, especially if you are involved in the kind of work where results can be mixed or where you could expect no immediate results.  I think about my own work with college-aged young people.  There may be no immediate results.  In fact, I am likely to be long gone before the full impact of whatever I do can be seen.

            Merton’s response to Forest reminds me of the old quip that in some work, like peace work, our call is to be obedient, not successful.  Merton clearly had this kind of thing in mind when we read his further words to the younger Jim Forest.  “When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no results at all.” 

            When some people get this kind of advice, they may well give up that work.  Why try?  Some of us have to try these kinds of things precisely because there is a call.  It is, as Merton notes, an apostolic work.  No one goes into something like working for peace simply because it is a job. If it is a calling such as this, then the calling shapes our hopes.  Unlike the business world, apostolic work is not necessarily driven by strategy and planning in the traditional sense. 

            Again, Merton’s words put it very effectively.  He says, “The real hope…is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see."  I appreciate the possibility of putting hope in God.  I also realize for many people, this is an absurd statement.  If I don’t believe in God, putting hope in a God who does not exist is crazy.  But for those of us who believe, hope in God is part of the faith process.  I think to have faith is at the same time an act of hope. 

            Merton’s letter to Forest was published by Robert Ellsberg with the title, “Letter to a Young Activist.”  According to Ellsberg, who has been in the publishing world for decades, this has “amazingly, the most oft-reprinted text of anything Merton ever wrote.”  Merton wrote many things that have been important to me and this letter to Forest is just one among many.  I also was involved some in the late 60s in working against the war.  My involvement was nothing like Jim Forest’s activity, but it was what I could do at the time. 

            Since the 60s, I have realized there is so much peacemaking that is needed---sometimes in our day-to-day life.  Peacemaking is not merely something done in the context of war.  We can only think about the countless conflicts in the lives around us and in our communities and country.  These are like little wars.  As long as there is a winner-loser mentality, things likely won’t get better.

            Most of the enemies we have actually are people we know---family members, people in the other political party and so forth.  I like Ellsberg’s take on this.  He talks about strangers rather than enemies.  We might grow up in a family and assume we know them, but they may also be strangers in some ways.  It is in this sense, we can fully appreciate Jim Forest’s effective work.  Ellsberg puts it creatively: “If peacemaking, ideally, involves making friends of enemies, for Jim it also meant making friends of strangers.”

            I can go to work tomorrow and be a peacemaker.  There are many strangers in my life.  Can I find a way to befriend them?  That is peacemaking---at least, that’s the way Thomas Merton and Jim Forest did it.  They are now dead.  It is up to us!