Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Exercise of the Prophetic

The Watchmen and the Witnesses: Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Exercise of the Prophetic

M. Shawn Copeland Where there is no prophecy, the people perish. Proverbs 29:18 Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the people of Israel; so hear the word I speak and give them warning from me. Ezekiel 33:6 The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls. Simon and Garfunkel “The Sounds of Silence” Neither Thomas Merton nor Martin Luther King, Jr. would have considered himself a prophet; surely, each man would have rejected this designation. Yet, each man so attuned himself to the Word of God as to recover and to exercise the biblical vocation of prophecy – to serve as a “watchman,” to scrutinize the “signs of the times,” to witness to God’s care for the anguish of the world, to contribute to healing our “body of broken bones”1 in light of a vision of “beloved community.”2 Scholar of the Hebrew Bible Walter Brueggemann writes that biblical prophecy “always confronts us with a basic question: ‘Is history really

1. Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1949) 53; cf. Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1961) 70. 2. Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Current Crisis in Race Relations,” in Joseph Melvin Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1986) 87 (subsequent references will be cited as “King, Testament” parenthetically in the text). The phrase “beloved community” also appears in a leaflet explaining the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, This Is SCLC. Here we read: “The ultimate aim of SCLC is to foster and create the ‘beloved community’ in America where brotherhood is a reality. It rejects any doctrine of black supremacy for this merely substitutes one kind of tyranny for another. . . . Our ultimate goal is genuine intergroup and interpersonal living – integration. Only through nonviolence can reconciliation and the creation of the beloved community be effected” in This Is SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference, rev. ed. [1964?]; rept. in Francis L. Broderick and August Meier, eds., Negro Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century [Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965] 272-73).

156 Copeland The Watchmen and the Witnesses 157 the moment when we must face up to God’? And the answer we give and live is our choosing of life or death.”3 Quite likely, neither Merton nor King put this question to himself literally. But given the way in which each man lived out and lived out of the baptismal vocation of a Christian, each man answered the question through decisions, choices and actions that affirmed life in the here-and-now. Further, each man put this question to the church and to the nation and each challenged both church and nation to respond in authentically just and life-affirming ways. Merton and King raised their voices in response to the divine demand of conscience to speak a new vision to church and nation – a vision grounded in faith in God and faith in America’s spiritual and political potential. Like the prophets of old, Merton and King lived at a certain remove or distance from the very world they observed – Merton within the cho- sen boundaries of a cloister, King within the legally imposed boundaries of segregation. Yet each man embraced the critical marginality of these positions in order to transgress those very boundaries in exercise of the prophetic. King and Merton spoke out for life and for humanity’s humanness; Merton and King spoke against militarism and war, racism and poverty. They announced a vision of the healing of the broken bones of our body politic unto beloved community. This essay begins with a sketch of biblical prophecy, next presents a rough outline of the lives of King and Merton, and finally explores their exercise of the prophetic, a pronouncement of a social vision for the nation and an announcement of the church’s responsibility to the nation in fulfillment of that vision. Prophecy The etymology of the Hebrew word “navi’ implies “to bubble forth,” “to utter” or to proclaim, “to call” upon the Lord God and “to be called by” the Lord God. “Navi’ is translated in the Greek as prophetes, that is, “fore-speaker, interpreter.”4 Seers, prophets and ecstatics were part of the fabric of the religio-cultural-social world of the Ancient Near East. The peoples of that thought-world believed it possible to discern the will of the deity not only through interpretation of omens or dreams or signs, but also through prophecy. “For where there is no prophecy, the people perish.”5 The earliest nevi’im of ancient Israel may have been visionaries or

3. Walter Brueggemann, Tradition for Crisis: A Study of Hosea (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1968) 144. 4. George Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) 3; subsequent references will be cited as “Shulman” parenthetically in the text. 5. Proverbs 29:18 (NRSV translation). 158 The Merton Annual 30 (2017)

“itinerant holy men and women who were revered for their special powers and who could be consulted for a variety of private inquiries, from locating lost property (1 Samuel 9:1-10) to learning whether a sick child would live or die (1 Kings 14:1-18).”6 Authentic or true prophets took the measure of the public and social, private and personal conduct of kings, rulers and the privileged and powerful, particularly in their relations with the poor and powerless. Prophecy made its deepest impress on the life of ancient Israel in the period preceding and during the Babylonian exile.7 During the time of the monarchy, the priests, the people and the prophets were divided in their discernment of the proper and right response to the geo-political, religious, cultural and social situation. Some prophets – we might call them “court prophets” – vigorously insisted that the Lord God supported the monarchy unconditionally. On the other hand, other prophets, those now considered canonical, insisted just as vigorously that the Lord God was displeased with the behavior of the kings, the priests and the people as they clung to power, prestige and expectation of victory in face of the rising power of the Babylonians.8 Each type of prophet claimed to speak God’s word, each cursed the others, and each accused the others of speaking falsely. Such a state of affairs left the people uncertain, and uncertainty, Schulman points out, “leads to the colloquial belief that prophecy means making predictions, whose truth retroactively verifies a speaker’s authority” (Shulman 4). Martin Buber argues that to be a prophet “means to set the audience, to whom the words are addressed, before the choice and decision.” Thus, an authentic or “true prophet does not announce an immutable decree [but] speaks into the power of the decision lying in the moment [in a way] dependent on question and alternative [and] call and

6. Marc Zvi Brettler, “Nevi’im: Introduction,” in The Jewish Study Bible, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) 459. 7. At least four developments in the historical formation of ancient Israel may account for the “bubbling up” of the nevi’im: (a) growing cultic and cultural syncretism; (b) Israel’s rise to political prominence, achieved not only through military prowess, but also through shrewd alliances; (c) monarchical centralization, increasing urbanization and burdensome taxation that weakened the peasant class; and finally (d) the rise of Assyria as a major threat to Israel’s security. 8. The death of King Solomon in 922 BCE provoked a crisis that split Israel into two kingdoms. Around 750, Amos and Hosea appeared and preached to the Northern Kingdom, while Micah and Isaiah preached to the Southern Kingdom or Kingdom of Judah. These prophets read “the signs of their times” – interpreted international matters and events, critiqued lax religious practices and railed against social injustice. The prophetic career of Jeremiah, son of the priest Hilkiah, spanned the decline of Assyria through the Babylonian occupation and domination of Judah to its destruction in 586 and the Exile. Copeland The Watchmen and the Witnesses 159 response.”9 “The future,” Buber concludes, “is not something already fixed in this present hour, it is dependent upon real decision, that is to say the decision in which [human persons] take part in this hour” (Buber 3). The prophets are messengers who announce truths their audiences fervently seek to avoid or to deny. Prophets do not so much address error in understanding, but a scotoma or blind spot on understanding – when kings or priests or the people persist in deliberate repression of questions or knowledge through willful ignorance or egoism or unexamined loyalty or corrupt alliances.10 The prophets, as James Muilenburg contends, “proclaim the divine Lordship over time and event, to point to God’s future and the establishment of his righteous rule in the earth. [They bear] a message from the Invisible One Enthroned. They were sent to speak for the Speaking One, whose Word would accomplish its purpose.”11 The prophets are witnesses. They testify to what they see and read in the signs of the times in light of the Word that God gives them to speak. The prophets take their stand beside those most excluded and marginal- ized in society. And since “bearing witness makes present what has been absent – the poor and God – biblical prophets testify against injustice and idolatry” (Shulman 5). The prophets are watchmen who see, grasp, name and warn of im- pending danger in order to avert it. The prophet’s pronouncement pre- supposes the capacity and willingness on the part of the community or people to turn away from injustice and idolatry and to turn toward God and to accept and obey the Divine will. This “turning” of mind and heart and living on the part of the community or people reflects a positive and complete decision through which the people acknowledge the pained heart of God, reject their former misdeeds and sin and reconstitute themselves as God’s own people. As messengers, witnesses and watchmen, the prophets fulfill a public function and mediate between a community or a people and powerful ex- ternal or internal realities they do not understand or control, yet to which they are bound. Rather, the prophets “seek to redeem the community” and hence “prophecy is a performance to incite audiences to self-reflection and action” (Shulman 6). 9. Martin Buber, The Prophetic Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1949) 2-3; subsequent references will be cited as “Buber” parenthetically in the text. 10. Jesuit philosopher-theologian Bernard Lonergan proposes the analogy between individual/intellectual bias and a physical blind spot in his Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957), The Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997) 21-227. 11. James Muilenburg, The Way of Israel: Biblical Faith and Ethics (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961) 75. 160 The Merton Annual 30 (2017)

Transgressing Boundaries By the close of the nineteenth century, most Southern states had codified, legalized and enforced regulations that segregated blacks from whites. The noted southern historian C. Vann Woodward observed that by the 1950s, these boundary regulations or “Jim Crow” laws and/or customs had created and sanctioned “a racial ostracism that extended to churches and schools, to housing and jobs, to eating and drinking . . . all forms of public transportation, to sports and recreation, to hospitals, orphanages, prisons, and asylums, and ultimately to funeral homes, morgues, and cemeteries.” This condition of segregation was held to be a “final settle- ment,” a “permanent system” beyond alteration or change.12 And John Hope Franklin, dean of historians of the African-American experience, concluded his study of legalized segregation in the United States with these words: The law had created two worlds; so separate that communication between them was almost impossible . . . . The wall of segregation had become so formidable, so impenetrable, apparently, that the entire weight of the American tradition of equality and all the strength of the American constitutional system had to be brought to bear in order to make even the slightest crack in it.13 Indeed, segregation shaped all race relations in the United States, whether in private or in public, in the south and in the north from 1896 through the late 1960s. Martin Luther King, Jr. grew up behind the boundary wall of racial segregation. Despite a relatively comfortable childhood in Atlanta, Geor- gia, as the son of a respected and prominent Baptist minister, King also felt the bitter sting of racial ostracism and exclusion: rejection by a six- year old white playmate, witnessing his father belittled by a police officer and insulted by a shoe salesman, being forced to stand in the aisle of a bus for ninety miles so that whites might sit.14 King acknowledged that he wrestled long and hard with the question, “How can I love a race of people who hate me?” (King, Autobiography 18-19). Only after he entered

12. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974) 7. 13. John Hope Franklin, “History of Racial Segregation in the United States,” in August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, eds., The Black Community in Modern America, vol. 2, The Making of Black America (New York: Atheneum, 1969) 12-13. 14. Clayborne Carson, ed., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 1998) 2, 10; subsequent references will be cited as “King, Autobiography” parenthetically in the text. Copeland The Watchmen and the Witnesses 161 college, spent summers outside the segregated south, and participated in interracial groups did King begin to “conquer [his] anti-white feeling,”15 but he never gave up his “resentment toward the system of segregation and felt it a grave injustice” (King, Autobiography 7). On the other side of the boundary wall of racial segregation, white Americans settled themselves. In 1941, Thomas Merton traded life behind that racial wall for another and altogether radical way of life. He entered the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, the Trappists, a religious community which traces its roots to the very beginning of Western Christian monasticism in the sixth century.16 If Merton began his contemplative life with an arrogant attitude toward “the world,” as Sandra Schneiders suggests,17 “the young novice of The Seven Storey Mountain [eventually would be] replaced by a monk deeply in love with the world.”18 Merton’s transformation crystalized in the late 1950s, in the now well-known “epiphany” in March 1958 at the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville. Of the experience, Merton wrote: 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. . . . [W]e are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest. . . . It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes . . . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate.19 By the time of Merton’s epiphanic experience, the Montgomery Bus Boycott had become a legend: for 381 days in heat and cold, sun and rain, despite harassment by police, intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan, jeopardized jobs, hastily contrived ordinances to prohibit organized taxi

15. Cited in James H. Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991) 26; subsequent references will be cited as “Cone” parenthetically in the text. 16. Lawrence Cunningham, “Introduction,” in Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master – The Essential Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1983) 21. 17. Sandra Schneiders, “Religious Life: The Dialectic between Marginality and Transformation,” Spirituality Today 40 (Winter 1988) 29. 18. Sheila Briggs, “The Spiritual Body Politic,” Spirituality Today 40 (Winter 1988) 42. 19. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966) 140-41; subsequent references will be cited as “CGB” parenthetically in the text. 162 The Merton Annual 30 (2017) transportation of boycotters, even bombings of homes and churches, black people of all ages refused to ride buses – mostly they walked. On November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Alabama’s state and local laws enforcing segregation on buses to be unconstitutional. Some fifty thousand black people under the leadership of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had maintained their solidarity and brought down segregation in the key city of the Old Confederacy – the site where Jefferson Davis was made president of the secessionist states. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King had arrived in Mont- gomery, Alabama scarcely two years earlier, in 1954. There King took up the pastorate of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. But the life King had anticipated for himself and his family changed dramatically on De- cember 1, 1955, when Mrs. Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat on a bus to a white male passenger.20 Her arrest galvanized Montgomery’s black residents, and a cross section of the community met to think through the situation and to develop a response.21 As a newcomer, King should not even have been considered to head the proposed organization, but the current leadership of the black community was “divided, contentious and apprehensive.”22 Unanimously, the planning group chose the twenty-six- year-old King to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). “The action,” he mused later, “had caught me unawares. It had happened so quickly that I did not even have time to think it through.”23 King had been “tracked down by the Zeitgeist – the spirit of the time.”24 As the days, weeks and months of the boycott wore on, in addition to his regular pastoral duties and the completion of his dissertation, King faced increasingly complicated responsibilities. He also was deeply frightened by serious threats against his life and the lives of his family. In Strength to Love, King recalls that one night, after an especially disturbing

20. There were several such “bus incidents” in Montgomery prior to 1955. One involved a fifteen-year-old high school student, Claudette Colvin, who was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. The Colvin incident did not result in a bus boycott; rather a committee of black citizens approached the manager of the bus company and the City Commission to request more courteous treatment and clarification of the seating policy. 21. King, Stride toward Freedom (Testament 425). The group included clerics, physicians, schoolteachers, lawyers, businessmen, Pullman car porters, postal workers and union advocates. 22. David Levering Lewis, “Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Promise of Nonviolent Populism,” in John Hope Franklin and August Meier, eds., Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982) 278. 23. King, Stride toward Freedom (Testament 432). 24. King, Stride toward Freedom (Testament 424). Copeland The Watchmen and the Witnesses 163 harassing telephone call, he could not sleep. Restless, he got out of bed and began to walk the floor. He tells us: Finally, I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing to be a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had almost gone, I determined to take my problem to God. My head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. “I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.” At that moment I experienced the pres- ence of the Divine as I had never before experienced him. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet reassurance of an inner voice, saying, “Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth. God will be at your side forever.” Almost at once my fears began to pass from me. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to go to face anything. The outer situation remained the same, but God had given me inner calm.25 King understood that fidelity to his vocation required complete trust in God – in God’s love, ability and desire – to sustain him in “inner peace,” in denouncing the injustice of segregation and in finding and nurturing possibilities of human communion.26 Merton likewise came to recognize that his solitude was not for himself alone; rather it was the “task of the monk to speak out of his silence and solitude,”27 to be a “witness” (CGB 160) to the recovery and possibilities of human communion. The Social Mission of the Church On King’s account, the Christian church was called to a social mission rooted in its prophetic task and fidelity to the preaching of Jesus.28 The

25. King, Strength to Love (Testament 509). 26. King, Strength to Love (Testament 508). 27. Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995) 171; subsequent references will be cited as “Raboteau” parenthetically in the text. 28. During the Montgomery bus boycott, except for a few white moderates, including theologian Will D. Campbell, most white clergy remained unmoved against King’s repeated appeals. Northern white churches were a bit more sympathetic to the civil rights movement after King’s 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” The National Council of Churches (NCC) urged its 31 constituent member denominations to initiate “nationwide demonstrations against racial discrimination.” The General Board of the NCC stated: 164 The Merton Annual 30 (2017)

“projection of a social gospel” was the only “true witness of a Christian life” in a segregated and oppressive America.29 He understood segregation as a double contradiction of the nation’s democratic principles and its religious heritage; thus, segregation betrayed the nation’s best and most noble ideals of liberty and justice. But King maintained that the religious contradiction of segregation was the worst. The church had a moral obligation to condemn segregation and to work for its elimination. “If we are to remain true to the gospel of Jesus Christ,” King thundered, “we cannot rest until segregation and discrimination are banished from every area of American life.”30 More- over, he once declared, “any religion which professes to be concerned about the souls of men [sic] and is not concerned about the social and economic conditions that scar the soul is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried.”31 This was a question of authentic discipleship: can the church speak a relevant word about God in the revolutionary situation of ideological crisis, massive human suffering and existential despair, while ignoring the radical call to follow the way of the cross?32 Only active and engaged commitment to realization of the “beloved community” could resurrect such a religion. King condemned as “do-nothing religion” any religion that would profess concern for the

“Words and declarations are no longer useful in this struggle unless accompanied by sacrifice and commitment” (cited in Cone 142). In 1959, Archbishop Philip M. Hannan, Roman Catholic bishop of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, desegregated archdiocesan schools. In 1963, Archbishop Lawrence Sheehan banned racial and social discrimination in Catholic schools, churches and organizations in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. In the nineteenth century, during the period of enslavement, many Christian churches, including Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists, split over the question of slavery. Only within the last few decades have the Presbyterians (north and south) reunited. Although such a split was not the case with the Roman Catholic Church, the Church still purchased the culture and customs of racism and, in both the north and south, participated in segregation. For some statements against discrimination and racism from a Catholic perspective, see the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB), “Discrimination and the Christian Conscience” (1958); the Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes (1965); the NCCB “Brothers and Sisters to Us” (1979); the Pontifical Commission Iustitia et Pax, “The Church and Racism: Towards a More Fraternal Society” (1988). For an analysis of recent Catholic teaching on racism, see Bryan N. Massingale, “James Cone and Recent Catholic Episcopal Teaching on Racism,” Theological Studies 61.4 (December 2000) 700-30. 29. King, “The Playboy Interview” (Testament 354). 30. King, “The Current Crisis in Race Relations” (Testament 89). 31. King, Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper & Row, 1958) 91. 32. Luther D. Ivory, Toward a Theology of Radical Involvement: The Theological Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995) 174; subsequent references will be cited as “Ivory” parenthetically in the text. Copeland The Watchmen and the Witnesses 165 souls of human beings and fail “to be concerned by social conditions that corrupt and economic conditions that cripple the soul.”33 The Christian Church’s social mission required that it take as its “primary goal the de- velopment of the beloved community” and agape its regulating ideal.34 Merton’s Seeds of Destruction appeared roughly midway through the tumultuous decade of the 1960s. In his author’s note, Merton reiterated his thinking about the relation of his monastic vocation and the tumultuous social situation: The [monk’s] adversary is not time, not history, but the evil will and the accumulated inheritance of past untruth and past sin. This evil the monk must see. He must even denounce it, if others fail to do so. What is the meaning of this “denunciation”? Is it to be regarded as a political act in the sense of an expressed determination to influence politics? Perhaps indirectly so. I speak not only as a monk but also as a responsible citizen of a very powerful nation. However, it is not my intention to imply that a state which is, and should be, secular, has to be guided by the perspectives of an eschatological Church. But I do intend to say at what point I and Christians who think as I do become morally obligated to dissent.35 And Merton was insistent about the social mission of Christianity in history: Christianity cannot reject history. It cannot be a denial of time. Christianity is centered on an historical event which has changed the meaning of history. The freedom of the Christian contemplative is not freedom from time, but freedom in time. It is the freedom to go out and meet God in the inscrutable mystery of His will here and now, in this precise moment in which He asks man’s cooperation in shaping the course of history according to the demands of divine truth, mercy and fidelity. (SD xiv) The church, then, must enter into history bearing the message of the truth and freedom of Christ for the “salvation of man in and through history, through temporal decisions made for love of Christ, the Redeemer and Lord of History” (SD 10).

33. King, “What Is Man?” in Strength to Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1963)108- 109; subsequent references will be cited as “Strength” parenthetically in the text. 34. John J. Ansbro, Martin Luther King, Jr. – The Making of a Mind (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1982) 187. 35. Thomas Merton, Seeds of Destruction (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964) xv; subsequent references will be cited as “SD” parenthetically in the text. 166 The Merton Annual 30 (2017)

From his Trappist hermitage, Merton compellingly interpreted what was happening in his church and in his country; indeed, he took it as a duty in conscience “to try to make [his] fellow whites stop doing the things they do and see the problem in a different light” (SD 306). Perceptively, Merton wrote: The purpose of non-violent protest, in its deepest and most spiritual dimensions is then to awaken the conscience of the white man to the awful reality of his injustice and of his sin, so that he will be able to see that the Negro problem is really a White problem: that the cancer of injustice and hate which is eating white society and is only partly manifested in racial segregation with all its consequences, is rooted in the heart of the white man himself. (SD 45-46) In the summer of 1963, Merton wrote his “Letters to a White Liberal” (SD 3-71), which comprised the first of the three parts of Seeds of Destruction. In it, Merton questioned and analyzed social injustices, especially racism in the wake of the September 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in which Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair were killed. An edited version of “Letters to a White Liberal” was published in the December is- sue of Ramparts and as a pamphlet under the title, The Black Revolution.36 Like King, Merton understood the civil rights movement not merely as a political struggle, but “a spiritual and religious one” (SD 68). “How” he asks in Seeds of Destruction, “do we treat this other Christ, this person, who happens to be black?” (SD 17). Christians, Protestant and Catholic, who refuse to ride beside blacks on public transportation, to eat at the same lunch counters, to use the same public facilities; who refuse to at- tend schools with blacks, to worship in the same congregations as blacks, to receive sacramental communion with blacks, are acting against Christ himself. Actions such as these coalesce as implicitly schismatic and as “rending the unity of the Body of Christ” (SD 18). In a scathing theological critique of lynching Merton argued, it would not be easy for a Christian “to mutilate another man, string him up on a tree and shoot him full of holes if he believed that what he did to that man was done to Christ.” He continues, “On the contrary, he must somehow imagine that he is doing this to the devil – to prevent the devil doing it to him. But in thinking such thoughts, a Christian has spiritually apostatized from Christianity” (SD 17). It is not too much to say that for Merton racism is apostasy: to lynch, shoot, torture, maim, murder blacks is to lynch, shoot, torture, maim and

36. See Ramparts 2.3 (Christmas 1963) 4-23; contracts were issued to publish this in Italian, Spanish, Catalan and French. Copeland The Watchmen and the Witnesses 167 murder Christ himself. Through such actions, we insult, disparage and mock the unity of the Body of Christ. Merton spoke directly to Catholics about relations between whites and blacks: A genuinely Catholic approach to the Negro would assume not only that the White and the Negro are essentially equal in dignity . . . but also that they are brothers in the fullest sense of the word. This means to say that a genuinely Catholic attitude in matters of race is one which concretely accepts and fully recognizes the fact that different races and cultures are correlative. They mutually complete one another. (SD 61) The power and cogency of Merton’s personal and public witness continues to challenge us all, especially those of us who are Catholics. The current cultural and political climate, so riven with contempt, resentment and violence toward all and any who are poor, dark, non-American “others” requires something much more of us – an authentic solidarity through which we realize our confession of faith in the concrete. King understood and interpreted the doctrine of the imago dei in light of both the Hebrew and Christian traditions of understanding the human being as “an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth.” This innate worth referred to in the phrase the image of God is uni- versally shared in equal portions by all men [sic]. There is no graded scale of essential worth; there is no divine right of one race which differs from the divine right of another. Every human being has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the Creator.37 Segregation betrayed the sacredness of the human person; it rendered human beings as means rather than ends, and reduced them to objects. Drawing on the work of Martin Buber, King charged that segregation “substitutes an ‘I-it’ relationship for the ‘I-Thou’ relationship.”38 Human beings were made for relationship, for communion with one another; segregation violated the conditions for the possibility of relationship, of communion. Indeed, Merton echoed this position from the perspective of false integration: To assume the superiority of the white race and of European-American culture as axiomatic, and to proceed from there to “integrate” all other

37. King, “The Ethical Demands for Integration” (Testament 118-19). 38. King, “The Ethical Demands for Integration” (Testament 119). 168 The Merton Annual 30 (2017)

races and cultures by a purely one-sided operation is a pure travesty of Catholic unity in truth. In fact, this fake Catholicism, this parody of unity which is no unity at all but a one-sided and arbitrary attempt to reduce others to a condition of identity with ourselves, is one of the most disastrous of misconceptions. (SD 62-63) Over and over, King repeated that segregation was moral evil, a sin. “Racial segregation,” he declared, “is a blatant denial of the unity we have in Christ. Segregation is a tragic evil which is utterly un-Christian.” Moreover, he explained, segregation “inevitably made for inequality [and] segregation scars the soul of both the segregator and the segregated,” and “it ends up depersonalizing the segregated” (cited in Cone 37). King maintained that segregation and its twin, discrimination, not only insulted God who was the ultimate foundation, creator and giver of human dignity and human rights; they insulted God’s image and glory enfleshed in God’s human creation. In concert with King’s position, Merton reminded whites that blacks were not “simply asking to be ‘accepted into’ the white man’s society, and eventually ‘absorbed by it’” (SD 57). Such attitudes, Merton stated, merely revealed just how tightly whites clung to the notion of white superiority. With commanding irony, Merton argued, “It is simply taken for granted that, since the white man is superior, the Negro wants to become a white man. And we, liberals and Christians that we are, advance gener- ously, with open arms, to embrace our little black brother and welcome him into white society” (SD 58). Do not expect blacks to be grateful for such attitudes, Merton warned: not only are blacks not grateful, they are not impressed by such falsity. Indeed, with these attitudes and actions, whites do “the gravest harm to Christian truth” (SD 58). King and Merton recognized and understood the concrete and social impact of sin in society. In one sermon, King refigured our collective human enmeshment in sin and evil in light of the parable of the prodigal son. Like the prodigal, human beings have “strayed to the far countries of secularism, materialism, [sexual immorality], and racial injustice. [Our] journey has brought a moral and spiritual famine in Western civilization. But it is not too late to return home.”39 Like the prophets of old, King mediated God’s urgent plea to America, the divine call to metanoia, to conversion: In the far country of segregation and discrimination, you have op- pressed nineteen million of your Negro brothers, binding them eco- nomically and driving them into the ghetto, and you have stripped 39. King, “What Is Man?” (Strength 112). Copeland The Watchmen and the Witnesses 169

them of self-respect and self-dignity, making them feel that they are nobodies. Return to your true home of democracy, brotherhood, and fatherhood in God, and I will take you in and give you a new op- portunity to be a truly great nation.40 Still, King’s social concern and compassion were never limited to the plight of blacks or even to that of the poor and unemployed in the United States. To borrow an expression from theologian Luther Ivory, both Mer- ton and King “have bequeathed the nation and the global village both a hard challenge and a subversive hope” in consistent concrete commitment to interracial and intercultural concern and cooperation with grace for the common human good (Ivory 174-75). King’s 1967 “Christmas Sermon on Peace” discloses the expansiveness of his social horizon, as he raised his voice to denounce wars around the globe, violence, militarism, economic exploitation, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and challenged all men and women of good will to find food, clothing and shelter for “the millions of God’s children” around the world. King stated plainly: “It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality” (Testament 254). Conclusion Nearly fifty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the untimely death of Thomas Merton, their prophetic challenge to Christianity – Catholic and Protestant – as lived in this nation, and to the nation itself, still warrants our attention. King’s authentic dream of social transformation rooted in personal and communal sacrifice, in conversion of mind and heart and living has been repackaged, trivialized, shrunk and marketed back to us as simple economic inclusion that overlooks sorely needed and thoroughgoing change of the whole of the cultural and social matrix that is the United States. Authentic integration has been mocked and scorned, and segregation, now economic and political, and therefore racial, is the tenor of our time. “The dream or the nightmare?” theologian James Cone asks. The very necessity of the Black Lives Matter Movement stands as a tragic response to this question. Merton and King never met face-to-face, but historian Albert Rabo- teau remarks that at the time of King’s assassination, plans were under way for him to make a retreat with Merton at Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey (see Raboteau 166). Two days after King’s death, on April 6, 1968,

40. King, “What Is Man?” (Strength 112). 170 The Merton Annual 30 (2017)

Merton noted in his journal: So the murder of M. L. King . . . . finally confirmed all the appre- hensions – the feeling that 1968 is a beast of a year. That the things are finally, inexorably, spelling themselves out. Why? Are things happening because people in desperation want them to happen? Or do they have to happen? Is the human race self-destructive? Is the Christian message of love a pitiful delusion? Or must one just “love” in an impossible situation? And what sense can possibly be made by an authoritarian Church that comes out 100 years late with its official pronouncements?41 The lives of Merton and King converge in the exercise of the prophetic during the modern struggle for civil rights and against racism, for the common good against poverty, and for peace against militarism. Merton read our human condition as a body of broken bones; King sought to reset those bones through a praxis of redemptive love. Merton and King refused to adjust themselves to the evils of the time – discrimination, segregation, religious bigotry, militarism and violence.42 They were messengers, witnesses and watchmen – this Baptist minister and Catholic monk – mediating God’s word, testifying to the purifying power of love, reading the signs of the time and declaring what they saw and denouncing social injustice as sin. This Catholic monk and Baptist minister understood that the deepest telos or authentic end of social justice and social transformation was neither desegregation nor integration, but the achievement of beloved community, as a foretaste of the eschatological realization of the mystical body of Christ. And that foretaste could be reached only through agape, through active and intentional Christian love.

41. Thomas Merton, The Other Side of the Mountain: The End of the Journey. Journals, vol. 7: 1967-1968, ed. Patrick Hart (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1998) 78. 42. King, Commencement Address, Lincoln University, June 6, 1961, cited in John J. Ansbro, Nonviolent Strategies and Tactics for Social Change (London: Madison Books, 2000) 166.