#jim forest

[carfleo]

Voices for Peace V4P_poster_5bfixed

[dramoor]

“It is Christ whom we follow, who led no armies, founded no empires, killed no one, and called peacemakers the ‘blessed children of God.’  The cross is a symbol of self-giving love, not of military conquest.”

~Jim Forest, Orthodox Peace Fellowship

(Image via Orthodox breath)

[acityhermit]

"A Candle In Front of the Icon of the Saviour": Archbishop Anastasios

“A Candle In Front of the Icon of the Saviour”: Archbishop Anastasios

  Indifference to missions is a denial of Orthodoxy and a denial of Christ.   “As a young person I had been moved by stories of Father Damian, a Catholic priest who served lepers in Hawaii, and also Albert Schweitzer. I asked myself whatever happened to our missionary tradition in the Orthodox Church? Where were the Orthodox missionaries? What are we doing to share our faith with others? What are…

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[gospelofthekingdom]

Merton wrote of the irony of the American government promoting “Pray for Peace” as a slogan (for years it was used for canceling postage stamps) while spending a “fabulous amount of money, planning, energy, anxiety and care” on the production of weapons of mass annihilation. “It does not even seem to enter our minds,” Merton wrote, “that there might be some incongruity in praying to the God of peace, the God who told us to love one another as He had loved us, who warned us that they who took the sword would perish by it, and at the same time annihilate not thousands but millions of civilians and soldiers, women and children without discrimination.” “Only love, he wrote, “can exorcise the fear which is at the root of war.”

-Jim Forest, The Root of War is Fear: Thomas Merton's Advice to Peacemakers

[gospelofthekingdom]

That last sentence became for me one of the most important insights that I ever received from Merton: “In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.” I know it by heart and recite it often. It sums up incarnation theology. Words and slogans and theories are not nearly as important as how we see and relate to one another--the relationships we build--and not only with friends but with adversaries. In the context of peace work, it suggests getting to know, as best we can, the people and cultures being targeted by our weapons.

-Jim Forest, The Root of War is Fear, p. 198

[gospelofthekingdom]

"I felt like a man in Germany in the 1930s trying to explain why Jews ought not to be sent to the concentration camps. It all seems so utterly clear. You do not murder. You do not kill the innocent. You do not treat people like blemishes on the landscape, or communities as parcels of real estate, or nations as squares on a chessboard. Yet no group seems more distant from these facts than American (and Catholic) Americans. I have all but given up talking to Catholic audiences about Christ; I simply talk about justice, raw basic justice. I think I’ve come to understand why natural law made its way into our Church. It was simply an attempt to ask us to be, if not holy, then just. At least that.

How is it that we have become so insensitive to human life, to the wonders of this world we live in, to the mystery within us and around us.”

Jim Forest, in a letter to Thomas Merton the evoked the infamous “Letter to a Young Activist” from Thomas Merton to Jim.

p. 191

[gospelofthekingdom]

Merton reminded us of the life of Franz Jäagerstätter, a name familiar to several of the retreatants but generally unknown at the time. Jägerstätter was an Austrian Catholic farmer, husband, father, and church sexton who, for his refusal to serve in the army of the Third Reich, was beheaded in Berlin on August 9, 1943. Despite his modest education, Jägerstätter had seen with amazing clarity what was going on around him, spoken out clearly and without fear to both neighbors and strangers about the hell Hitler’s movement was creating, and finally--ignoring the advice of his bishop to take the military oath--paid for his obedience to conscience with his life.

Why, Merton asked, does Christianity produce so many who fight in manifestly unjust wars and so few, like Jägerstätter, who say no? “If the Church,” said Merton, “could make its teachings alive to the laity, future Franz Jägerstätters would no longer give their witness in solitude but would be the Church as a whole reasserting the primacy of the spiritual.”

Jim Forest, The Root of War is Fear, p. 119.

A great question, right?

[gospelofthekingdom]

“By what right do we protest?” It wasn’t a question I had ever before considered. I was born into a family in which protest was a normal activity—protest against injustice, protest against war, protest against racism, protest against cruelty. While not by nature a person drawn to protest, as a young adult I found myself seeing protest as an unfortunate necessity. I could not watch preparations for war and fail to raise an opposing voice or refuse to participate in actions of protest and resistance. To protest was an unpleasant duty, period.

In raising the “by what right” question, [Thomas] Merton forced us to consider that protest, if it is to have any hope of constructive impact on others, has to be undertaken not only with great care but with a genuine sympathy and compassion for those who don’t understand or who object to one’s protest, who feel threatened and angered by it, who even regard the protester as a traitor. After all, what protest at its best aims at is not just to make a dissenting noise but to help others think freshly about our social order and the direction we are going. The protester needs to remember that no one is converted by anger, self-righteousness, contempt, or hatred. One has to use the hammer of protest carefully. Protest can backfire, harden people in their opposition, bring out the worst in the other. Sometimes this may be necessary—consider the confrontations that occurred in Selma just a few months earlier in which police and others brutally attacked non-violent demonstrators simply wanting to exercise their constitutional right to vote. If it is to be transformative, protest needs to be animated by love, not love in the sentimental sense but in the sober biblical sense of the word. Hence Christ’s insistence on love of enemies. “Until we love our enemies,” Merton said, “we’re not yet Christians.”

“The grace to protest,” Merton wrote in his notes for the retreat, “is a special gift of God requiring fidelity and purity of heart.” Far from seeing an opponent merely as an obstacle, one wishes for him or her “a better situation in which oppression no longer exists.”

Thomas Merton Jim Forest, The Root of War is Fear, p. 117