American Gospel

“All creatures are rooted in mystery and therefore deserve our reverence.”

– Brother David Steindl-Rast

“Tenderness is the highest form of spiritual maturity.”

– Father Greg Boyle

“Mercy within mercy within mercy.”

– Thomas Merton

As the well-known family pastor of our secretary of war publicly asks God to kill a young rising American politician; as our president wages war on Iran to liberate its people and then, without noting the inconsistency, threatens to wipe out the entirety of its civilization; as the secretary of war says of Iran, “We’re punching them while they’re down,” and as he prays to God to help America’s troops bring “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”; as two of the president’s sons make money off the war against Iran and as one of those sons is congratulated for his industry on national television; as an advisor of the previous president admits that, had his administration won, they were planning for a war against Iran, preparing via “war games” and “practice runs”; as a prominent Democratic senator taunts our president by saying he “always chickens out” when it comes to military action; as writers remind us that the last administration waged proxy wars and that the Democratic presidential candidate who ran against our current president chided our current president for a foreign policy insufficiently tough on Iran; as the California governor and presumptive Democratic presidential candidate says of his new stance toward the current administration: “We’re fighting fire with fire, and we’re gonna punch these sons of bitches in the mouth”; as a well-known Democratic television personality jokes about the president’s imminent death; as a man with a shotgun, a handgun, and knives sprints through a Washington D.C. hotel to find and kill the president inside that hotel but is foiled; as the aggressive punditry on both the Right and Left act outraged and alarmed by this attempted aggression; as humanity’s basest, shadowiest, grisliest tendencies step forward in our current administration and try to palm themselves off as virtues (“Evil, be thou my Good”); as we watch our war-hooked, band-of-looters economy, whose ravening is our ravening (more gasoline, more iPhones, more smart ovens, more A.I. data centers, more energy drinks, more cruise ship vacation packages), rove and pillage our finite Earth; as we continue to blame the political other for what is collective rot and continue to accept or ignore what one historian has called “a catastrophic self-destructive mode”—as all of these things happen, in the hurtling scumble of this moment, one might hear Bob Dylan sing: “It’s getting dark, too dark to see.” As all of these things happen, one might hear Allen Ginsberg speak to us of “Moloch“:

Moloch the loveless! …

Moloch the vast stone of war! …

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! … Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! …

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! …

Moloch whose love is endless oil! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! … Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! …

Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!

Where is the light in all this dark? Where are the stars? What are our coordinates? Which way through? And where is the heart? My God, how can we return to the heart?

For a long time I have felt that of all of us Americans, Thomas Merton comes the closest. Not Thomas Jefferson, not Martin Luther King Jr., not Dorothy Day or Frederick Douglass, not Thoreau or Emerson or Whitman or Dickinson or Black Elk or the late Joanna Macy (great as they all were): no, Thomas Merton. Somehow the Catholic monk-priest of Kentucky comes closest to the inmost word, somehow brought us nearest the living quick, somehow showed us the most basic of truths, somehow spoke what might be considered, silly and embarrassing and dubious and intellectually gauche as such a notion might be, the American Gospel.

I first heard about this monk-priest through my priest-uncle when I was twelve, sitting in the pews of a church that has since burned down. Uncle Jack—who as a young seminarian hitchhiked up the coast to visit photographer Edward Weston at Weston’s house on Wildcat Hill in Carmel, California; who later rode around our town on a motorcycle wearing his black getup and white clerical collar; and who asked me at the end of his life, even as he could no longer chew food, to smuggle into the hospital one last earthly cheeseburger—spoke to us decades ago of Merton’s famous book The Seven Storey Mountain. For a long time I have felt that the great author of that book—the monk-priest of Kentucky who openly loved the wisdom of the Islamic and Buddhist traditions, in addition to his own Judeo-Christian one—most movingly shared what we, all of us, should perhaps attempt to live into should we care to keep this republic.

And what did Thomas Merton—worldly and monastic, mystical and political, orthodox and spiritually incorrect, rascally and grave, who lived much of his life in silence in a monastery in remote Kentucky—say? This is what he said:

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…. 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…. I have the immense joy of being [hu]man, a member of a race in which God … became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now [that] I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun…. Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.

Of all our many American words, of the too-many American words, of the words in our books, newspapers, journals, magazines, broadsides, lectures, speeches, prayers, and songs, I can think of none as thawing, none that so effectively shatter the reliably frozen sea of my heart, none that so deftly return me.

These are words that touch the rim of the mystery. These are words that mere reason has no sway over. These are words that renounce the ego’s habit of fear and calculation. These are words that disturb the complacency of settled ideas. These are words that dig down to the foundations. These are words of mothers looking upon their babies sucking at their breasts; the words of people on their deathbeds when the life-long bindings of the story-self suddenly lift; the words of people who’ve finally hit rock bottom and discover there, curiously, a raw sweet unaccustomed light; the words of devout renegade American monks who’ve left their rural monasteries to poke around the city for the afternoon; the words of you and me.

“Everyone,” said Plato in Cratylus, “should expend his chief thought and attention on the consideration of his first principles: are they or are they not rightly laid down?—and when he has sifted them, all the rest will follow.”

Are we expending our chief thought and attention thus?

Are our first principles as Americans, as humans, as creatures, sifted and rightly laid down?

Thomas Merton, come back. We need your vision now. Help us graduate from the terror of appearing ridiculous. Bring down your axe on the frozen sea of our hearts. Thomas Merton, unwarp our sight and help us see true again—see family members, neighbors, strangers, political others, national enemies; see flies, sparrows, stars, thunderstorms, blossoming dogwood trees, and oaks at sunrise. Scrape these scales from our eyes. Help wake us from the gripping iron dream—the dream of our spurious isolation, of our disconnection, of our separateness. Help us to know each other, all creatures, as God does, unabducted by judgments, stories, and parsings. Help us see each other’s secret mysterious beauty (no one excepted) shining like the sun.

Image Credit: Ansel Adams