Words of Wisdom

LETTERS FROM TOM: A SELECTION OF LETTERS FROM FATHER THOMAS MERTON, MONK OF GETHSEMANI, TO W.H. FERRY, 1961-1968

Chosen and edited by W.H. Ferry '32 Fort Hill Press, 1983. 73 pp.

Thomas Merton was quite a guy. Born in 1915 of an American mother and a New Zealander father, he grew up in France, went to private school in England, dropped out of Cambridge, and finally took his B. A. from Columbia. By that time, having studied with Mark Van Doren and written the beginnings of a novel, he was in a good position to enter the New York literary scene of the late 1930s. Then he surprised everyone by converting to Catholicism he had received little religious instruction up to that time and joining a monastic order shortly thereafter.

His literary friends thought that one of the greatest young writers of their time had been lost for good, but Merton had yet more surprises up his long by this time Cistercian sleeve. In the interval between entering the Abbey of Gethsamani in Kentucky in 1941 and his death in 1968, he managed to publish no fewer than 14 major books, including poetry, a novel, translations, essays, scholarship, and an autobiography. His writing covered topics ranging from contemplative prayer, Buddhism, and the poetry of Chuang Tzu, to most of the important current events of his time.

He also wrote letters, thousands of them (three or four hefty volumes are being readied for publication) to a remarkable variety of people. Especially during the 1960s, when his writing on violence and non-violence spoke so clearly to our national and international situations, everyone who was anyone, it seemed, corresponded with Thomas Merton: priest and peace activist Daniel Berrigan, folksinger Joan Baez, novelist Henry Miller, Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz (currently Montgomery Fellow), the revered Brazilian Bishop Dom Helder Camara, philosopher Jacques Maritain and Zen pundit D.T. Suzuki, to name the few alluded to in this volume of letters to Dartmouth alumnus W.H. Ferry. Ping Ferry, as he is known to just about everyone, has spent most of his life working on the problem of the nuclear arms race. He began corresponding with Merton when he was a Vice-President and Fellow of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions back in 1961 and has collected some gems of their correspondence.

Just the few letters in this slim volume reveal what a gifted and extraordinarily prescient writer Thomas Merton was. One finds Merton discoursing quite astutely, even brilliantly, on all the topics of the day: nuclear war, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and surprisingly, Central America. He is at his best in puncturing the arguments of certain Catholic theologians who defended nuclear war on the basis of "just war" theory. His firm grip of the history of theology combines with his puckish good humor in a number of letters to show exactly how absurd it was to defend nuclear war on any moral grounds whatsoever. With even more data now in on the nuclear winter that will result in the event of even a 'small' nuclear war, one wishes that Merton were still alive to press his arguments further.

For all the difficult and controversial subjects of these letters, an air of good humor and hopefulness pervades them all. Merton lived in hope and wrote with inspiring clarity on the problem of despair in the face of our seemingly unsolvable problems:

Certainly the greatest danger today is to assume that we have to accept society and its ills as a divinely given and final reality to anything according to deeper standards. That way, we just let "society" push us along, and we forget that we are society. That if we do not strive to build and guide society according to reason and to conscious principles, then it will lead us and sink us by the power of our own unconscious forces, with a little help from the devil.

His is the voice of the profoundest conscience, urging us to put our Spaceship Earth in order before it is too late. Ping Ferry has done us a great favor by assembling these fragments of wisdom entrusted to his care.

Richard Allen Hyde

A limited number of copies of Letters from Tom are available from the editorat Box 657, Scarsdale NY10583 for $5.00made payable to WESTPAC.

Richard Hyde is the Associate Chaplain of the College and a lecturer ineducation.