Thomas Merton's Secular Journal

“The tragedy is, if we fight Hitler, we will become like him, too, we will turn into something just as dirty as he is. If we are going to beat him, we will have to.” The perceptive words of Thomas Merton have an authenticity and freshness which recommend them as food for thought and inspiration years after they were written. This enduring value can be seen especially in his Secular Journal, a private record he kept between October, 1939 and November, 1941, concluding just one month before he entered the Trappist monastery. In the Journal (copyright 1959 by Madonna House; Image Books edition published 1969), Merton comments on all the things which affected him while he lived in Greenwich Village, traveled to Cuba, taught at St. Bonaventure’s, and developed a deep interest in the work of Friendship House in Harlem.

What is of particular interest to many today, more than thirty years after the last Journal entry, is Merton’s reflection on the early stages of World War II. In this review we shall focus on several excerpts—rather brief, written “informally, colloquially, and in haste,” as the author himself notes in his preface. We find Merton grappling with many of the same questions which have been raised in our time by the Vietnam War; and more importantly we can learn something from this monk-prophet about the Christian meaning of true peace, the need to recognize our guilt, and the healing which can come only through such recognition and forgiveness.

In recent years many of us have gone through the hard process of “demythologizing” the political rhetoric which the U.S. government has offered concerning our involvement in S.E. Asia and elsewhere. We have found it impossible to remain content with the various, and changing, justifications for the massive violence perpetrated by the U.S. military against a small, poor country. We have seen that it was the U.S. which first interfered with “free elections” in Vietnam, when in 1956 it became obvious to Eisenhower, Dulles, and others that the elections which had been authorized by the Geneva Convention of 1954 would result in a resounding victory for Ho Chi Minh over our puppet Diem. The Pentagon Papers have brought out the callousness and duplicity of the U.S. government throughout the years of our neocolonialist involvement in Indochina. And the constantly increasing annihilation of the civilian population, not only in Vietnam but in Cambodia and Laos as well (summarized in the statement of an American officer that “it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it”), has finally prompted the American Catholic bishops to conclude that the war does not meet the classic requirement of proportionality.

Perhaps during the '30s Thomas Merton went through a similar process of disillusionment with official rhetoric. In 1940 he had no illusions concerning what was at stake in the gathering war:

And if we go into the war, it will be first of all to defend our investments, our business, our money. In certain terms it may be useful to defend all these things, and expedient to protect our business so that everybody may have jobs, but if anybody holds up American business as a shining example of justice, or American politics as a shining example of honesty and purity, that is really quite a joke! (p.97)

The accuracy of Merton’s analysis of the origins of World War II is not in question here. What is relevant in 1971 (and will be increasingly useful for efforts throughout the Third World) is Merton’s no-nonsense recognition of the economic facts of political life. Our industrial system (along with that of our junior partner, Japan) has had increasing need over the last three decades (though this began much earlier) for foreign markets in which to sell and expanding national product, for sources of raw materials, and for investment opportunities. This hard fact of economic life (documented in such works as Carl Oglesby’s Containment and Change, Gabriel Kolko’s The Roots of American Foreign Policy, John Gerassi’s The Great Fear in Latin America and Latin American Radicalism, etc., etc.), combined with an ever-increasing integration of the corporate university-military complex at home (cf. such works as Domhoff’s Who Rules America?, The Higher Circles and Lundberg’s The Rich and the Super-Rich, etc.), provides ample material for an analysis of US foreign policy which is much more satisfying than an approach on the purely political (ideological) level Merton’s statement in 1940 shows that he was way ahead of us in this kind of realism!

But the Vietnam War has raised many personal, practical questions in addition to the larger political-economic ones. Many Americans have come to recognize the forces of greed and exploitation at the root of national policy, but still they are conscripted into service, directly through the draft, indirectly through the payment of taxes. The latter presents itself as a very real tentacle of the military monster, reaching out to enlist citizens beyond draft age. Thousands have refused to pay the telephone surtax, and growing numbers are refusing to pay income tax to a government which devotes over half its total budget to military expenditures while continuing to neglect the pressing social needs in the homeland. At least two such tax resisters are currently in federal prison because they felt that it was just as immoral to pay for the bullets as to shoot them. Many others, however, are exploring the possibilities of voluntary poverty—as a life-style which promises to be more human and really more fulfilling than that of American consumerism and competitiveness, and as a legal method of avoiding payment of taxes. Living under the taxable income level obviously requires some degree of asceticism in life-style and for many people a major transformation of their value system; but increasing changes are quite possible and actually may enhance the quality of human life.

Thus the evangelical counsel of poverty, heretofore practiced almost exclusively by members of religious orders (often more in theory than in reality) and radical Christian communities like that of the Catholic Worker movement, now recommends itself as a moral necessity due to historical conditions. Merton perceived very clearly the “relevance” of the virtue of voluntary poverty in 1940:

Wherever you have oil tanks, or factories, or railroads or any of the comforts of home and manifestations of progress, in this century, you are sure to get bombers, sooner or later.

Therefore, if I don’t pretend, like other people, to understand the war, I do know this much: that the knowledge of what is going on only makes it seem desperately important to be voluntarily poor, to get rid of all possessions this instant. I am scared, sometimes, to own anything, even a name, let alone coin, or shares in the oil, the munitions, the airplane factories. I am scared to take a proprietary interest in anything, for fear that my love of what I own may be killing somebody somewhere. (p. 105)

(There is an echo here of President Johnson’s notorious summary of the meaning and purpose of American military might: “There are 200 million of us in a world of 3 billion. They want what we’ve got, and we’re not going to give it to them.” We conveniently excludes, of course, the 30 million Americans who live below the poverty line.)

Religious orders and other Church institutions, as well as individual Christians, would do well to take these words of Merton to heart. Are our “shares in the oil, the munitions, the airplane factories killing somebody somewhere”? Indeed, can there be any involvement in the corporate system of America (whose 6 per cent of the world’s population control 52 per cent of the wealth and resources) which does not leave blood on our hands? Perhaps genuine evangelical renewal, having eluded us in our tinkering with institutional furniture, lies in the direction of these hard questions.

As we Americans attempt to deal with the question of our own national evil and personal guilt with respect to the genocide we have committed in S.E. Asia, racism at home and abroad, our continuing neglect and pacification of the poor, and other pressing issues we might draw from the experience and reflections of our Christian brothers and sisters in post-war Germany. Helmut Gollwitzer, professor of theology at the Free University in West Berlin and a pastor who takes his preaching seriously, has been speaking, healing and challenging words of Christian wisdom to his fellow countrymen since the end of the Nazi era. In a lecture at Stuttgart in 1952, he invited Christians to be a “creative minority” in the midst of self-righteousness:

God in Christ is a God of mercy. Christians are therefore men of mercy and this in a twofold sense: they are men who know that they themselves are in need of forgiveness, and men who are ready to forgive. Has forgiveness anything to do with politics? A very great deal! We can see that in our own situation. The question of forgiveness is inseparable from the much discussed question of guilt, that still produces in many of us a violent reaction …

The evil that was done by our side and in the name of the German people must not be excused or minimized, but must be a reason for us to ask the other nations—particularly Israel—for forgiveness … But this is important not only because of our relations with the other nations, but also for our own sake. Our attitude to the question of guilt shows whether we have heard the voice of God speaking through what we have been through. He has humbled us. Have we learned humility? Have at least we Christians in Germany learned humility as Germans? Have we accepted in our hearts what our brethren confessed in the name of the Protestant Church in Germany before the representatives of the universal Church in the so-called Stuttgart Confession in 1945? “Before I was afflicted I went astray: but now I have kept thy word” (Ps. 119.67). Only by letting oneself be humbled does one learn from experience: he alone draws the right conclusion from disaster. He is not so much concerned about the misdeeds of others as about what evil he himself has done, what he has himself contributed to his own calamity, so that he can learn from it a lesson for the future (Helmut Gollwitzer, The Demands of Freedom, N.Y., Harper & Row, 1965, pp. 70-71).

The full reality of the past must be brought into the searching light of consciousness if the present is to be free to create a new and more human future. The Christian attitude toward the sins of yesterday is one of healing for the sake of tomorrow:

Without God men do their utmost to forget the evil they themselves have done and to remember only the guilt of others. Christians must adopt the diametrically opposite attitude: we must try to forget the crimes of the others and keep in mind the frightful things that have been done in the name of and by members of our nation. Instead of forgetting them we should seek forgiveness for them. Only so can we hope that such things will not happen again. (Ibid., p. 71)

With respect to Vietnam in particular, we Americans today must “keep in mind the frightful things that have been done in the name of and by members of our nation.” In this way we can hope to begin the personal and structural transformation of America which alone may prevent such counter-revolutionary genocide from happening again. Will we learn, and change? Will we admit, or even recognize the possibility, that the U.S. has been the chief aggressor, the perpetrator of an “unjust war”? Will we be big enough (i.e., humble enough) to make a confession like that of our Christian brethren in Germany after World War II: “Before I was afflicted I went astray: but now I have kept thy word”?, Or must the moment of our truth and our humanity wait until that apocalyptic day when the nation is thoroughly afflicted, when the “chickens finally come home to roost”? Must the lesson wait for the disaster?

As long as the proposition that America is always right remains a question of self- justification, in defiance of the essential liberating message of the gospel, we remain psychologically and spiritually incapable of recognizing the truth and undergoing metanoia (personal transformation of heart and mind). What is our nationalistic, self-righteousness but a manifestation of un-Christian belief in “justification by works”? Have we entangled our whole self-image irretrievably in the image of the nation of the “American Way of Life,” of the so-called “Free World”?

Now that it is becoming clear that our nation is not unique in the history of civilizations, that the “New Jerusalem” and promised land of our ancestors is not very different from the other Babylons throughout the mixed story of human ventures, will we have the common sense and the distinctively Christian wisdom to admit that we are indeed “like the rest of men,” sinners (i.e., exploiters, oppressors, manipulators, perpetrators and purveyors of violence, etc.) who can stand straight and righteous only by virtue of the utterly gratuitous gift of mercy and forgiveness?

Perhaps Merton’s prayer for peace—that all men “may recognize each one his own great guilt, because we are all guilty of this war, in a way”—will be realized when we can begin to say with the prisoner Paul, in this particular time of our humiliation as a nation:

Because of Christ I have come to consider all these advantages that I had as disadvantages. Not only that, but I believe nothing can happen that will outweigh the supreme advantage of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For him I have accepted the loss of everything, and I look on everything as so much rubbish if only I can have Christ and be given a place in him. I am no longer trying for perfection by my own efforts, the perfection that comes from the Law, but I want only the perfection that comes through faith in Christ, and is from God and based on faith (Philippians 3:7-10).