The Root of War is Fear: Thomas Merton’s advice to peacemakers
JIM FOREST
Thomas Merton wrote: “There is only one winner in war./The winner is war itself./ Not truth, not justice, not liberty, not morality./ These are the vanquished.”
In this masterful account of Merton’s writings and actions on peace, Jim Forest reminds us that there are currently 66 wars in progress around the world. Although most of Merton’s reflections on peacemaking come from the 1960s, when the US was becoming increasingly embroiled in the war in the Vietnam, Forest shows that the force and power of Merton’s analysis and witness remain as relevant as ever.
What is less appreciated is the extent to which Merton’s commitment to peace-building grew out of his monastic prayer life. His engagement with the wider world was rooted in the daily routine of his life as a monk at the Trappist monastery of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, which he had entered as a novice in 1941. Speaking in Asia just before his death in 1968, he described the vocation of the monk as “prophetic” – he compared it to sitting on the edge of the world and looking critically at its ways and its values, not in an arrogant or condescending way but with the distance and serenity that comes from the discipline of the monastic life.
