It is an attempt to elevate man...to a level consonant with his dignity as a son of God...

liberated from the powers that keep him in subjection, the old dark gods of war, lust, power, and greed. In such a context, political action itself is a kind of spiritual action, an expression of spiritual responsibility Thomas Merton A person who realizes the particular evil of his time and finds that it overwhelms him, dives deep in his own heart for inspiration, and when he gets it he presents it to others Mohandas Gandhi What is the role of the spiritual person in the realm of social justice? How can the spiritual person offer the truth of God and His mercy and His relationship as the way to create real and meaningful solutions to the inequalities and injustices that burden our humanity? One can clearly argue that the spiritualist who is attempting to wholeheartedly give their life to the service of God certainly has one of the most essential roles. The most selfish thing one can do is to keep one's love and faith in God within themselves, and not give this to others who are in desperately in need. It certainly follows from this that there is a clear relationship between the realm of the spiritual and the realm of social justice. The issues of ecological abuse, economic inequality, political and power abuses, war, torture, prejudice, etc have left a stain on our collective humanity because of a spiritual vacuum within the heart of our civilization. Real and meaningful solutions to these issues will only come from an intersection between the powerful motivation and personal power of the activist with the deep spiritual foundation of wisdom given to us by the traditions based in the discovery and realization of love of God. This intersection between spirituality and social justice is especially lucid through the work and thought of author/poet/mystic/monk Thomas Merton, particularly in his landmark book Confessions Of A Guilty Bystander. Merton's piercing and prophetic observations of the state of our contemporary civilization sears a sharp focus upon the crossroads of our collective human situation, rife with potentialities both empowering and frightening, and how the subsequent role and voice of the committed spiritual activist is completely essential to restoring and affirming the natural, spiritual birthright of our existence on this Planet Earth. In this essay we will attempt to explore the meaning of this intersection through select passages of Merton's work from "Confessions", based in the themes of...as well as select passages from the classic Eastern wisdom text the Bhagavad-Gita, a book Merton was personally inspired by in the later period of his life. ** The Calling Within And The Forces Within Merton's own prophetic voice and his understanding of the prophetic calling are strong, firm, and uncompromising. Against the faceless gaze of the impersonal tyranny which threatens to strangle our deep, inner freedom, Merton's words are scathing and honest. In the force of Merton's language, we encounter him as someone who has transmuted his heart into a weapon of compassion, and we see and hear him as someone who is not neglecting his responsibility as a committed spiritual activist,

He writes: We are living in the greatest revolution in history-a huge spontaneous upheaval of the entire human race...a deep elemental boiling over of all the inner contradictions that have ever been in man, a revelation of the chaotic forces inside everybody. This is not something we have chosen, nor is it something we are free to avoid. This revolution is a profound spiritual crisis of the whole world, manifested largely in desperation, cynicism, violence, conflict, self-contradiction, ambivalence, fear and hope, doubt and belief, creation and destructiveness, progress and regression, obsessive attachments to images, idols, slogans, programs that only dull the general anguish for a moment until it bursts out everywhere in a still more acute and terrifying form.1 To a great extent, when we commit ourselves to the spiritual path, we also willingly call these forces to the surface within ourselves. We enter into battle against our inner hypocrisy, against all the polarities that strangle our very being and whose monstrous face we want to simply avoid. We live in a hypocritical collective society, wearing many masks to conceal our true face. There is little else more courageous than to expose, explore, and defeat this hypocrisy, and this inner battle is an essential one to conquer if we are going to also understand and conquer our many external battles. We cling to the surface glean of an illusory well-being that convinces us and others that we do not stand on the brink of dissolution. It is very much that we are treading water on the surface of our being, ignoring the giant man-eating sharks swimming just below the surface. Our dogged optimism is thin, as Merton writes: Our sickness is the sickness of disordered love, of the self-love that realizes itself simultaneously to be self-hate and instantly becomes a source of universal, indiscriminate destructiveness. This is the other side of the coin that was current in the nineteenth century: the belief in indefinite progress, in the supreme goodness of man and of all his appetites. What passes for optimism, even Christian optimism, is the indefectible hope that eighteenth and nineteenth century attitudes can continue valid, can be kept valid just by the determination to smile, even though the whole world may fall to pieces. Our smiles are symptoms of our sickness.2 Turning towards a living spiritual discipline is a clear indictment of this status-quo. For under all the masks that we wear is the person we actually are, and this is the person who is able to dance and able to live and able to love without being weighed down by a damning confusion of who I am, what I can do, and what I represent. Within a spiritual discipline, we not only get the methodology to free our potential for actual and eternal happiness, but we earn the right to share these methods with everyone else, everyone who is equally in need of a solid, forthright, and honest truth with which to understand their essence. Here is a tremendous opportunity to understand the real power of the revolutionary impulse, to look at the struggle for justice as something beyond even the material sphere itself, as an issue that dives down into our soul.
1Merton, Thomas, Confessions Of A Guilty Bystander, pp 66-67, Image Books, 1968 2 Merton, pp 67-68

The great gift and the great weapon a spiritual activist has in this inevitable struggle is the inner strength of wisdom one receives from the teachers and guides in one's life who have fought this battle and won, and also from the mystical inner guidance of God, described in this verse from the Bhagavad-Gita: But those who always worship Me with exclusive devotion, meditating on My transcendental form-to them I carry what they lack, and I preserve what they have.3 It may be a cliche or a medieval impulse to term those impulses and those entities that we battle in the spheres of spirituality and social justice as demoniac. If one examines closely the Sixteenth Chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita, we see that this term means much more than goat-horns and horror stories. In fact, we find an indictment not only of greedy bankers and totalitarian dictators, but also of the demons inside us which keep us much closer to that same darkness that blinds this world that we would like to know. Some examples: Pride, arrogance, conceit, anger, harshness and ignorance -- these qualities belong to those of demoniac nature, O son of Prtha.4 Those who are demoniac do not know what is to be done and what is not to be done. Neither cleanliness nor proper behavior nor truth is found in them.5 Following such conclusions, the demoniac, who are lost to themselves and who have no intelligence, engage in unbeneficial, horrible works meant to destroy the world.6 They believe that to gratify the senses is the prime necessity of human civilization. Thus until the end of life their anxiety is immeasurable. Bound by a network of hundreds of thousands of desires and absorbed in lust and anger, they secure money by illegal means for sense gratification.7 There are three gates leading to this hell -- lust, anger and greed. Every sane man should give these up, for they lead to the degradation of the soul.8 These three gates of lust, anger, and greed are easily placed around those considered as the perpetrators of the crime. If we hear a senator grilling Goldman Sachs bigwigs or historians defining the place of a Stalin or a Nixon, it doesn't take a lot of deliberation or meditation to join along in the condemnation that the Gita has laid out above. What does take more of our courage and our heart to do is to point that finger at ourselves. The polarities of our hyper-competitive state of being impart that even if we consider ourselves on the progressive side of history, we forget to examine our own motives before striking out to remove the fatcats and the tyrants. This invariably leads to the meet the new boss, same as the old boss syndrome.
3 A.C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Bhagavad-Gita As It Is, pp.409, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 2008 4 Prabhupada, 628 5 Prabhupada, 629 6 Prabhupada, 632 7 Prabhupada, 634 8 Prabhupada, 640

If we want to avoid creating, on the large scale, totalitarianism out of idealism, or on the small scale, to simply keep our promises to a friend, spouse, or colleague that we will change our ways for the better, we have to spark and sustain a revolution within our own hearts first. We have to rise up against the forces of hypocrisy within us that will strangle any external expressions of our idealism, and we must fight these forces with the power of a meaningful spiritual discipline of joy and understanding. This is where the intersection of spirituality and social justice has its strongest and most practical bonds, for it is the depth of a genuine spiritual science practically applied in one's life under the guidance of learned and loving practitioners that positions one in the best way to face the faceless gaze with a look of conviction, a warm smile bearing real substance, and a determined action that truly and clearly takes down injustice. ** Spirit Not Commodity The strength of Merton's prophetic voice was particularly potent is his ruthless observations of what mass media, mass industry, and mass technology were doing to the human spirit, leading us to a potential abyss of Orwellian visions come alight to destroy our privacy, our integrity, and our worth as individuals. Speaking from the platform of the 1960's, his observations, concerns, and calling out reach to us even sharper today, as we look towards a Blade Runner future that looms like a whirlpool before us, inexorably sucking us in. He writes: The Greeks believes that when a man had too much power for his own good the gods ruined him by helping him increase his power at the expense of wisdom, prudence, temperance, and humanity until it led automatically to his own destruction. What I am saying is, then, that it does us no good to make fantastic progress if we do not know how to live with it, if we cannot make good use of it, and if, in fact our technology becomes nothing more than an expensive and complicated way of cultural disintegration...The fact remains that we have created for ourselves a culture which is not yet livable for mankind as a whole.9 This immersion in the glittering silicon progress becomes a drowning of our spirit when the flickering of the TV and computer screen replaces the connection to our conscience, and when the voices from these screens become unquestioning authorities in our life beyond philosophical and moral reproach. One question essentially sticks out: Is our technological age, an age of human progress beyond apparent limit, even the limitation of sacrifice and obligation to God, actually creating a better present and a better future? Are we actually progressing, or is this a terrible illusion? Merton is not hopeful of this progress if the forces of material science and technology are allowed to rule without careful consideration of their consequences, or without any link to the spiritual realities and obligations of selfless love and care. He writes: The central problem of the modern world is the complete emancipation and autonomy of the
9 Merton, 73

technological mind at a time when unlimited possibilities lie open to it and all the resources seem to be at hand. Indeed, the mere fact of questioning this emancipation, this autonomy, is the number-one blasphemy, the unforgivable sin in the eyes of modern man, whose faith begins with this: science can do everything, science must be permitted to do everything it likes, science is infallible and impeccable, all that is done by science is right. The consequence of this is that technology and science are now responsible to no power and submit to no control other than their own...Technology has its own ethic of expediency and efficiency. What can be done efficiently must be done in the most efficient way-even if what is done happens, for example, to be genocide or the devastation of a country by total war.10 This struggle between forces of power blind to ethics going against the spiritual way of life, of a developed humanity steeped in compassion and the depth of awareness, goes to the very heart of our individual and collective existences. If our society is geared to the mass forces of blind power and profit, buttressed by the increasing paradoxical sense of control/anarchy that comes from the misuse of science and technology, then we are only geared to our lower nature, to our lust, greed, and envy. We will remain senseless in all senses to our spiritual heritage, what to speak of the realm of ethics which comes from that heritage. We are fully dynamic spiritual individuals, capable of the highest and deepest love with each other and with God. If we choose to give ourselves without compulsion and contemplation to this inhuman and impersonal machine of power and profit, we become like that machine, like unfeeling and incomprehensible animals running only on a perverted instinct. We have chosen to become numbers, commodities, products, anything else but who we actually are, anything else but our natural, spiritual being. From this, we suffer in unspeakable ways, bringing this pain deep into our own existence and into the existence of all other sentient life. Merton writes: It is by means of technology that man the person, the subject of qualified and perfectible freedom, become quantified, that is, becomes part of a mass-mass man-whose only function is to enter anonymously into the processes of production and consumption. He becomes one side an implement, a 'hand', or better, a 'bio-physical link' between machines: on the other side he is a mouth, a digestive system and an anus, something through which pass the products of his technological world, leaving a transient and meaningless sense of enjoyment. The effect of a totally emancipated technology is the regression of man to a climate of moral infancy, in total dependence not on 'mother nature'...but on the pseudonature of technology, which has replaced nature by a closed system of mechanisms with no purpose but that of keeping themselves going.11 The basic problem is that our character is stained on a very fundamental level at the base of our being. This stain is, as mentioned above, our deep inner hypocrisy and selfishness. The rise of technology is, in many ways, reflecting this stain out into our external world. Somehow, by our unyielding and often merciless intelligence, we have discovered how these mystic powers can be best used to shape our way of life, but because we have largely lost our sense of responsibility towards our self and towards each
10 Merton, 75 11 Merton. 77

other, we use these powers to create a situation largely intolerable towards the cultivation of our deeper spiritual reality. From his vantage point in the early 1960's, before our time of instant thought transmission and criticism via 24/7 news cycles and all-pervading social networking and observation, Merton's prophetic voice rings out to us to understand our stain, to understand our sickness, and to do something about it. He writes: The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes of all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless we see we cannot think.12 He continues: Nothing can take the place of thoughts. If we do not think, we cannot act freely. If we do not act freely, we are at the mercy of forces which we never understand, forces which are arbitrary, destructive, blind, fatal to us and to our world. If we do not use our minds to think with, we are heading for extinction, like the dinosaur: for the massive physical strength of the dinosaur became useless, purposeless. It led to his destruction. Our intellectual power can likewise become useless, purposeless. When it does, it will serve only to destroy us. It will devise instruments for our destruction, and will inexorably proceed to use them...It has already devised them.13 The committed spiritual activist thus deeply understands the imperative need to purge and purify the consciousness and the space in which our consciousness interacts. Through this cleansing, the truth, the actual spiritual truth, can shine through, can be visible again. When this torchlight of actual knowledge shines through, the darkness born of ignorance has no place to stand. We may take to the streets to protest and to even give our lives against the corporate, industrial, and military structures representing and implementing the interests of this cold, impersonal machine. We may consider ourselves as no longer a blind follower of this machine, of possessing an individual integrity that refuses to be crushed under tank wheels and wireless radiation. Despite this conviction, we need to look at the actual, bigger picture. Do we actually succeed in what we set out to do, in the revolutions we attempt to create? Do we actually overthrow what we set out to overthrow? Do we even understand what success is? Do we know what it takes to set one apart from the impersonal flow towards an actualization of being? What the committed spiritual activist can offer in this arena is an understanding of our self and our predicament that transcends the cold, impersonal machine within us, a machine that runs on the oil of selfish greed. Within us instead is a greater and more bold power, the power of God nourished and nurtured by our faith put into action, into expression, and into an undeniable reality. ** Faith And Freedom Our perception of faith must move beyond the nebulous in order for it to provide us with the necessary
12 Merton, 77 13 Merton, 79

strength to fight the negative forces within and without. The call for change in our environment requires the best positive engagement to create the best positive result, and to get this result, we need a tangible and active faith in our lives to constantly renew and restore the essential engine of our revolutionary spirit. Our faith is our freedom, and our faith is the cause of our freedom. Our faith keeps our integrity whole and frees us from being controlled: Merton writes: To defend one's faith is to defend one's freedom...Freedom from what, and for what? Freedom from control that is not in some way immanent and personal, a power of love. Religious belief in this higher sense is then always a liberation from control by what is less than man, or entirely exterior to man. He who receives the grace of this kind of religious illumination is given a freedom and an experience which leave him no longer fully and completely subject to the forces of nature, to his own bodily and emotional needs, to the merely external and human dictates of society, the tyranny of dictatorships. This is to say that his attitude to life is independent of the power inevitably exercised over him, exteriorly, by natural forces, by the trials and accidents of life, by the pressures of a not always rational collectivity.14 If we try to play the power games of the elites without understanding the potential power we carry within ourselves, and how this power is already corrupted and what we must do to purify that corruption, we will never get a grasp upon our freedom. The very ideal and multifaceted reality of our freedom has its full origins in our genuine spirituality. These two aspects of our being cannot be disconnected in any way. Merton writes: Freedom from domination, freedom to live one's own spiritual life, freedom to seek the highest truth...the ability to say one's own 'yes' and one's own 'no' and not merely to echo the 'yes' and the 'no' of state, party, corporation, army, or system. This is inseparable from authentic religion. It is one of the deepest and most fundamental needs of man, perhaps the deepest and most crucial need of the human person as such: for without recognizing the challenge of this need no man can truly be a person, and therefore without it he cannot fully be a man either.15 The struggle for our individual and collective freedom stands as the highest aspiration of humanity. We cannot fulfill the meaning of this struggle unless we take it into the spiritual sphere. We must heed the voices of wisdom from those who have transcended their material bonds, who have found their actual freedom, for it is in their perspective that we will actually be able to free ourselves. And what is this freedom? It includes the aspiration for justice in the spheres of the social and the political, but it is more than this. It is an internal emancipation from our lower nature, from our lust, anger, and greed, as well from our envy and confusion, and our impersonalism. This internal liberation creates and sustains a real revolution, for it is a revolution of the heart, and once the heart is free, then the external obstacles of injustice and inequality become much less difficult to remove and overcome.
14 Merton, 88-89 15 Merton, 91

The true revolutionary spirit of the heart must be a humble spirit. Real humility builds enduring character, and this is a character that must stand tall to create real change in our collective environment. This humble character is not afraid to submit itself to a higher source of strength, and it is not afraid to admit that it doesn't have all the answers, and that it must be dependent on something more than itself. Merton writes: But it is essential above all to understand that the basic principle of spiritual freedom, all freedom from what is less than man, means first of all submission to what is more than man. And this submission begins with the recognition of our own limitation.16 The two greatest figures in the fight for justice and freedom in our time, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and Mohandas Gandhi, were not afraid to be humble before God, and to pray, beg, and plead for His mercy, for His help, for His direct assistance in their awesome tasks and responsibilities. If we want to imbibe their example in our own struggle, we cannot be afraid to seek something more out of our own hearts and our own relationship with God. This is where we will find our actual faith, and our actual freedom, and our ability to bring out this freedom to those who have yet to or who are unable to claim it. ** The Humanity of The Enemy In the personal example of Thomas Merton, we find the example of how a humble and free character allows one to step into a special and deeper perspective on the nature of the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. The drive for social justice can fail because it becomes a battle of us against them, because we separate ourselves and elevate ourselves against those whom we consider monstrous, demonic, and evil. When we first attempt to remove these negative aspects from within ourselves, there is a subtle but conscious effect. We can begin, if we have the sincerity, to see that we are not so far removed from our so-called opponents, that we share many of the defects in our own hearts and characters, and that we share the same humanity, the same spiritual essence. This is a deep and learned realization, and which is very difficult to incorporate into our struggle for freedom when passions have been inflamed and when lives have been needlessly and ruthlessly lost. But Merton, like all committed practitioners faithful in the work of God, are able to bring this vision into their calling. One may protest that this is a dangerous and unfair viewpoint in which to work out issues that cause very tangible and very tragic suffering, but the deeper courage needed to see the humanity of the oppressor can create an opportunity for a solution that is more enduring, and at the very least, can prevent us from falling into the trap of becoming the oppressor once the tables have been turned. In Thomas Merton On Mysticism, an excellent and insightful examination of Merton's spiritual development and philosophy, author Raymond Bailey writes of the essence of Merton's vision of social justice: Merton's approach to social problems was a simple one; so is the Bible's. Merton's analysis is marked by a beautiful naivete that tends to ignore the complexity of social and political structures. It is this complexity behind which whole generations hide and explain away their apathy.

16 Merton, 92

Did not the prophet declare the requirements of God in the simple words 'do justice...love kindness and walk humbly with your God?' Merton took these works and the example of Jesus seriously and implored the rest of the world to do the same. Merton could speak a word of judgment because he was willing to stand under judgment. He identified with the oppressors and repented of his part in the system that seemed to him so indifferent to human needs. At the same time, he bore in himself the suffering of the victims and empathized with their frustration and bitterness. The real heart of the problem as he perceived it lay in the fact that the offenders were as much, or more, the victims of their greed, hate, and cruelty as the offended. Repentance meant more than a confessional formula; it meant for him remorse and sacrifice in the hope of reconciliation.17 To create a tangible reconciliation, we must learn how to separate the sin from the sinner. The Gita describes that our actual personal reality is as spirit soul, a manifestation of the spiritual energy of God. We become entangled in the lower material energies by a desire to lord over these energies, and we identify with these lower energies at the expense of our actual spiritual nature. The challenge we face in deepening our perspective and our approach to the issues of social justice is to see both the oppressor and the oppressed on their actual spiritual level. The root of the pain that causes this oppression can only be addressed at the level of the soul. Judgment upon material considerations such as the color of one's skin or the content of one's politics only creates a vicious feedback loop. The committed spiritualist lives his/her life trying to pick out the essence of God's presence in everything they see, do, or speak, and this extends in the most profound fashion to those who live farthest from the presence of God, to those most in need of God's love. Merton is quick to point out that as a whole, our choice as a collective society has been to move away from the protection of the Lord's guidance, leaving us vulnerable and even willing to let the oppressor do his business. If we then want to strike back against the oppressor without the hand of God by our side, we find that we have to use his brute tactics of force to do so, and we use these tactics in a way that is not effective, and which by their influence, is terribly damaging to our physical, mental, and spiritual psyche. He writes: Gandhi pointed out very wisely that our feeling of helplessness in the presence of injustice and aggression arises from 'our deliberate dismissal of God from our common affairs'. Those who relinquish God as the center of our moral orbit lose all direction and by that very fact lose and betray their manhood. They become blindly dependent on circumstances, and upon those who are astute enough or powerful enough to use every circumstance for their own end. Those who renounce God immediately become victims of the nearest brute that is a little more powerful than they. They have to live in submission to this gangster, and pay him dearly for his safety. It doesn't matter much whether the 'power' thus exercised is physical or moral, whether it is a matter of force or money or cleverness. Those who renounce God have to fall back on force when they get sick of their state of dependence on men. Yet force alone can never deliver them completely.18
17 Bailey, Raymond, Thomas Merton On Mysticism, Image Books, 1987, p.232 18 Merton, 120

We have to meet the oppressor face-to-face. We have no choice. He sits in the halls of power and he sits in the realm of our heart. How we communicate with him will define whether we become like him or whether we can help him, and ourselves, transcend to the higher plane of spiritual freedom. To do this, we must understand the real value and the real power of ahimsa, of the non-violent reaction. In our material reality, the presence of violence swirls around us in a chaotic vortex. It is the very substance of the fabric of reality, a constant dance of regeneration and degeneration, of one living entity being food for another. A total ahimsa is impossible in our material reality. Just one breath that we alone take, or one glass of water that we alone drink, has the potential to harm millions and millions of tiny but nevertheless living entities. The energy demands of our body in terms of nutrients and vitamins that come from our foodstuffs mean that other living and once-living bodily systems must be used to fulfill those demands. For the living spiritualist, the practice of ahimsa means a conscious and concerted effort (ala a vegan/vegetarian diet) to limit the harm that needs to be done to keep body and soul together. Violence itself transcends the material sphere. If we allowing people to live their lives in a void of feeling and understanding which prevents them from activating their spiritual birthright of an eternal existence full of knowledge and bliss, we are committing the deepest act of violence. A.C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the foremost contemporary scholar and acarya (teacher) of the Vedic culture of the Gita concurs in his own translation of the Gita. He writes: Nonviolence is generally taken to mean not killing or destroying the body, but actually nonviolence means not to put others into distress. People in general are trapped by ignorance in the material concept of life, and they perpetually suffer material pains. So unless one elevates people to spiritual knowledge, one is practicing violence. One should try his best to distribute real knowledge to the people, so that they may become enlightened and leave this material entanglement. That is nonviolence.19 At the core of ahimsa is this substance of spiritual love, which seeks to rehabilitate rather than to reprimand, to redeem rather to condemn. It means caring for the oppressor's loss as well as the the loss of the oppressed. It means seeing a deeper and bigger picture that attempts to correct and restore the foundation of our collective spiritual humanity, rather than just poking at a specific leak in the roof. Merton writes: The tactic of nonviolence is a tactic of love that seeks the salvation and redemption of the opponent, not his castigation, humiliation, and defeat. A pretended nonviolence that seeks to defeat and humiliate the adversary by spiritual instead of physical attack is little more than a confession of weakness. True nonviolence is totally different from this, and much more difficult. It strives to operate without hatred, without hostility, and without resentment. It works without aggression, taking the side of the good that it is able to find already present in the adversary. This may be easy to talk about in theory. It is not easy to practice, especially when the adversary is aroused to a bitter and violent defense of an injustice which he believes to be just. We must therefore be careful how we talk about our opponents, and still more careful how we regulate our differences with our collaborators.20
19 Prabhupada, 539-540 20 Merton, 86-87

It is precisely this change in the nature of our dialogue and perception that is most revolutionary in our concept of revolutionary change. The aim to create a more just, more sustainable, and more equitable world must also include the uplifting of those who are against these very ideals. To leave them and to leave their own spiritual suffering by the wayside is returning their violence with an equally damning violence of our own. The deeper spiritual perspective of social justice will allow us to create a truly transcendent atmosphere where a sense of forgiveness, alongside the deserved justice and punishment the oppressor deserves and needs, can actually reverse the tide of our potential disintegration and destruction. ** Our relativistic spheres of morality can prevent us from understanding the dichotomies that lie within the ground of our being. Our good intentions can go astray when they are mixed with the unclean and immature viewpoint in which we base them in. The ranting preacher in the Union Square subway in New York City or the Hezbollah suicide bomber in Tel Aviv may think they are on the right side of history, the right side of divine reality, but one with a thorough understanding set in the depths of the bonafide spiritual sciences will see the clear deficiencies in each approach. Our good intentions to create a more just reality certainly are not likely to fall into these extremities, but our impact may end up being just as void. How do we know we are getting the message across in the proper way? How do we even know we have the right message? We get one idea from the results of our application, in seeing what hits people hearts and minds. Even then, we may not let go of our misconceived ideas. Our intentions lay bare on the altar of our being, and we worship them without the slightest understanding of what they actually represent, and how we represent them. We need an inner guidance, best represented in a spiritual authority or personality interacting with us, to examine exactly what we mean and what we mean by it. Any genuine, time-tested, experience-tested spiritual discipline will give us this acute opportunity for examination. The only question that remains is our desire to do so and our courage to make the commitment. Are we able to examine our intentions for what they are and what they create in a constant, discerning, and piercing manner. Merton writes: One must face the fact that 'good intentions' are only as good as long as they are faithfully reexamined in the light of new knowledge, and in the light of their fruits. More and more we see how in reality the 'good,' 'kind,' 'humane,' and 'loving' intention bears fruit in real evil, cruelty, inhumanity, and hate. The experience of each day makes this more and more clear. The ethic of subjective 'good intentions' has been judged and found wanting. We must refocus on the objective results of our decisions!21 This means we must learn the art of mature and exacting responsibility. This was the key motivation for my own choice to live as a monk in the bhakti-yoga tradition of the Vedas. My initial experiences with devotees of this tradition showed me a deeper potential to life itself, and to the potential power of my own ability to help exact and create a solution to the suffering I saw all around me. The discovery
21 Merton, 113-114

of the depth of this experience continues on a daily basis for me, and it begins with an increasing sense of my own developing and maturing responsibility to care for myself so that I may learn to really care for others. This care must be entirely motivated to bring myself and others closer to the love of God. Otherwise, if it remains simply in the material realms of the political, moral, economical, and altruistic it will create only a temporary relief, much like blowing air on a burn only removes the pain for a short while. The pain is our disconnection from God, which has thrown our application of reality into a whirlpool. Responsibility is inherently a moral consideration, and moral considerations are inherently concerns originating from the loving will of God in our lives. The realm of social justice must take a step forward to meet once again the objective moral realm of God to fulfill its real purposes and desires. Merton writes: There is an objective moral good, a good which corresponds to the real value of being, which brings out and confirms the inner significance of our life when we obey its norms. Such an act integrates us into the whole living movement and development of the cosmos, it brings us into harmony with all the rest of the world, it situates us into our place, it helps us fulfill our task and to participate fruitfully in the whole world's work and its history. In a word, it is an act of obedience to God.22 Where our striving for justice fails is in the lack of inner integration of our being to the will and the love of God. We become reliant on our dull, imperfect senses, on our illusory, textbook concepts of history, on our own muddled subjectivity to solve problems quite beyond us. We cannot look to the speculations of our society's so-called pundits and scholars to show us the brighter path. We have to look towards the source of morality, the source of goodness, the source of justice Himself, God Himself. We hold tight to God's will and love, and we can become steady to fight today for what we truly believe in. Merton writes: In times like ours, it is more than ever necessary for the individual to train himself, or be trained, according to objective norms of good, and learn to distinguish these from the purely pragmatic norms current in his society...We cannot trust our society to tell us the difference. Everything is confused, and the men of our time blindly follow now God and now Satan, blown this way and that by every changing wind of urgency and opportunity, judging only by what seem to them to be the immediate consequences. We must recover our inner faith not only in God but in the good, in reality, and in the power of the good to take care of itself and us as well, if only we attend to it, observe, listen, choose, and obey.23 If we are looking for a lynchpin to unify ourselves in the face of an immense, weaponized, and demonic evil that is strangling our humanity, we cannot ignore our unity in God, and we cannot ignore the protection and empowerment that He is constantly giving us. This is a tremendous challenge to find this unity, for even amidst the sincere seekers of justice and truth, too often sectarian concerns of religious, political, and social concerns drive a deep wedge that is very difficuly to remove from the
22 Merton, 119 23 Merton, 119

consciousness. How can love of God bring it all together? For one thing, love of God belongs to no group in particular but to each and everyone of us. The core of our being, the core of our soul, revels and thrives in the love of God. Everyone has this ability, and there are many applications to bring it out to our conscious, waking awareness. Only if we dive deeply into our particular application, transcending all sense of distance and separation from our real self, from the real selves of others, and from God do we find this unity. Not only that, but we also find the ability to help others understand this ultimate unity in the love of God. The love of God has the power to overcome all evils, to correct all injustices. To find the love of God in ourselves and to give it to others, freeing us totally on the spiritual and material platforms, is the greatest act of social justice. ** Merton writes of the essential foundation of self-realization: Since I am a man, my destiny depends on my human behavior: that is to say upon my decisions. I must first of all appreciate this fact, and weigh the risks and difficulties it entails. I must therefore know myself, and know both the good and the evil that are in me. It will not do to know only one and not the other...I must then be able to love the life God has given me, living it fully and fruitfully, and making good use even of the evil that is in it. Why should I love an ideal good in such a way that my life becomes more deeply embedded in misery and evil? If I can understand something of myself and something of others, I can begin to share with them the work of building the foundations for spiritual unity. But first we must work together at dissipating the more absurd fictions which make unity impossible.24 For many, God is identified as part of the problem, as an agent of the oppressor. For these people, the evolution of human society means to move past the idea of a God who watches over all, over whom we must serve out of obligation and out of love. Social justice remains solely an earthly concern, devoid of the supernatural presence. It depends solely on human endeavor, human wit, human emotion, and human ability, but to the committed spiritual activist this hope on mere humanity itself is a pipe-dream. Humanity without a sense and connection to God's presence is not a fully capable or realized humanity. Its revolutions, even if they temporarily succeed, will then only dissolve back into the systems, structures, and injustices that the revolutionaries originally fought against. I may still find myself rooting on green-shirted protesters in Iran of black-shirted anarchists smashing Burger King windows at the latest meeting of the World Bank, but a deeper calling comes through my conditioning. Standing as someone who is trying to reconcile my spirituality with my yearning for justice I feel as an outsider yet again looking in. Can I convince others of God's place in this discussion? Can I help to show them He is the real friend and the one who empowers the oppressed, rather than the lord and overseer of the oppressor? A great courage and resolve is needed to remain firm to God's message in the realm of social justice, to
24 Merton, 95

not be convinced and swept up in actions devoid of any supernatural motivation. One has to remain in a sense above the fray, while not becoming aloof. Merton comments: People are constantly trying to use you to help them create the particular illusions by which they live. This is particularly true of the collective illusions which sometimes are accepted as ideologies. You must renounce and sacrifice the approval that is only a bribe enlisting your support of a collective illusion. You must not allow yourself to be represented as someone in whom a few of the favorite daydreams of the public have come true. You must be willing, if necessary, to become a disturbing and therefore an undesired person, one who is not wanted because he upsets the general dream. But be careful that you do not do this in the service of some other dream that is only a little less general and therefore seems to you to be more real because it is more exclusive!25 The spiritual activist committed to social justice must use his most developed and sincere intelligence to tread a careful path: first, to understand and imbibe the presence of God's desire for his/her life and to act constantly upon that desire, then, to apply that desire in the fields of justice without letting it become diluted into mere politics, and finally to learn the art of disturbance as mentioned above. This art of disturbance requires a tender balance, between being forceful enough to shed the light and message of God through in the realm of justice with enough strength to convince others, even the doubtful, of the need for God's presence, and at the same time being tender enough, astute enough, not to completely alienate the intended audience and also any potential new recruits to the cause. This mixture is so potent, and it allows the committed spiritual activist to bridge gaps in a way that make history. We can look to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr as one of the most clear examples of someone who came as close as possible to perfecting this art of disturbance, but we shouldn't feel that his lofty example can't be emulated in our own way, in our own lives, and in our own particular set of circumstances. Even if we try to ignore the potency of God and His love, we will have to acknowledge His absence, even unconsciously, in our failure to reflect it in our duties of justice and compassion. We cannot complete our own humanity, and any attempt to restore the humanity of others, without the touch of the kingdom of God, and this kingdom is so wonderful, life-affirming, and redemptive that it lays bare the faults and emptiness of the kingdom we call our attempted civilization. It is our duty and our struggle to make this contrast unavoidable to look at. ** As mentioned before here and in the main themes of Merton's own writing and thought, our society lacks a careful, non-jealous, and non-envious love, a love linked to God that even includes the oppressor. The careful balance a spiritualist must strike between allowing proper and lawful justice for the oppressor, without losing sight of his inner spiritual core and the need to compassionately address the obstacles blocking that core, is of a magnitude of the highest maturity. When we see someone we label as an enemy, we are actually seeing ourselves. We are actually the seeing worst part of our own nature personified, and we become so repulsed that we dehumanize that other person and prepare to destroy him/her without a trace, as if missiles and concentration camps are
25 Merton, 97

the only and most effective solution. In that other person who so viscerally represents our worst nature is an incredible opportunity to unveil and experience the deeper truth of God. Their personage, and their loathsome expressions, and our reactions to it, present to us a test of our own spiritual advancement, realization of that advancement, and capability to apply that realization, The gift of God's truth and love is at stake in this exchange. Merton writes: If we really sought truth we would begin slowly and laboriously to divest ourselves one by one of all our coverings of fiction and delusion: or at least we would desire to do so, for mere willing cannot enable us to effect it. On the contrary, the one who can best point out our error, and help us to see it, is the adversary whom we wish to destroy. This is perhaps why we wish to destroy him. So, too, we can help him to see his error, and that is why he wants to destroy us. So while we are perfectly willing to tell our adversary he is wrong, we will never be able to do so effectively until we can ourselves appreciate where he is right. And we can never accept his judgment on our errors until he gives evidence that he really appreciates our own peculiar truth. Love, love only, love of our deluded fellow man as he actually is, in his delusion and in his sin: this alone can open the door to truth. As long as we do not have this love, as long as this love is not active and effective in our lives (for words and good wishes will never suffice) we have no real access to the truth. At least not to moral truth.26 As I read of the way the Native predecessors of this American land were coldly and quickly eliminated by the conquerors of European fortune and so-called piety, a grain of hate drew into my heart and began to flower and flourish. A clear demarcation line began to come into focus as I explored deeper into my unjust history. From Columbus to Cortez, from Stalin to Nixon, I could not but feel a hatred I had never experienced before in my life, a hatred largely born out of a incredulous incomprehension of these personalities and their deeds. How could someone be so hateful themselves, and not expect those who see through them clearly to return that hate in equal if not deeper fervor? I sit in this chamber of my heart now, looking around at these past perceptions in a new light of Mertonian and Vedic wisdom. These men, my enemies, are showing me something of myself. They are teaching me a lesson about myself, and I must listen. My deepening sense of personal integrity is forcing me to re-examine all my relationships, most acutely the ones that challenge, in the light of a new obligation, an obligation to earn the deeper love of God, absorb it into my being, and be able to give to others without hesitation and discrimination. A monk's life, even in New York City, is one where a taste of solitude can bear wonderful fruits. Here a different definition of solitude must be offered than what may originally come to mind, although this original definition is also a valid part of the larger, deeper definition. For solitude is something much more than hiding away and stepping back. It is essentially the effort to see ourselves totally, to make the painful effort to confront the hateful, lower aspects of our nature. Solitude means to be with ourselves fully and without distraction, to learn who we actually are, to become complete in ourselves and in our spiritual relationships, with God and with our fellow seekers
26 Merton, 68-69

on the path. The fruits of this inner journey must be shared. If they are kept in the cellar of our heart, they will mold and rot, and have no benefit. Merton writes: Solitude has its own special work: a deepening of awareness that the world needs. A struggle against alienation. True solitude is deeply aware of the world's needs. It does not hold the world at arm's length.27 Immersion in the solitary spirit allows us the necessary detachment and renunciation to process the needs and progression of our own spiritual being, but as the Gita describes, real renunciation fructifies in a spirit of action, of making work the gift of our realizations. Consider this verse: The steadily devoted soul attains unadulterated peace because he offers the result of all activities to Me; whereas a person who is not in union with the Divine, who is greedy for the fruits of his labor, becomes entangled.28 One of the key lessons of the Gita is to saturate one's work in this necessary mood of detachment. What we become detached from is known as the ahankara, or false ego. This false sense of our reality and our own self is the house of our delusions and our unhealthy habits, the abode of all those tics, illusions, and failures to communicate which tend to derail all of our personal and collective hopes for justice and peace. The elegant solution of the Gita, as spoken by Krishna, the personification of the Divine, to is to dovetail the intentions and the results of our actions towards His pleasure and His will. God is the source of love and of all justice and mercy, and by directing the energy of our work for love and justice towards this source, we call down upon us the element of divinity missing from our all-too-human struggle. We detach from our sense that we alone can reverse the tides of the diabolic in this world and attach to the need for the help and guidance of God, who believe it or not, cares and is invested just as much as we are, if not more, in uplifting the downtrodden. Through this work, through this action, we learn the eternal and affirming art of bringing out the spirit of justice to correct the imbalances that offend our sense of decency and being. Speaking from a Christian perspective easily seen in a universal light, Merton writes about the practical combination of spirit and social justice: Christian social action is first of all action that discovers religion in politics, religion in work, religion in social programs for better wages, Social Security, etc...In a word, if we really understood the meaning of Christianity in social life we would see it as part of the redemptive work of Christ, liberating man from misery, squalor, subhuman living conditions, economic or political slavery, ignorance, alienation.29 Elaborating further on the spiritual essence of social action, Merton writes:
27 Merton, 19 28 Prabhupada, 29 Merton, 82

It is an attempt to elevate man, whether professedly Christian or not, to a level consonant with his dignity as a son of God...liberated from the powers that keep him in subjection, the old dark gods of war, lust, power, and greed. In such a context, political action itself is a kind of spiritual action, an expression of spiritual responsibility.30 ** Merton writes of three main considerations holding up this bridge of spirit and social action: First, emphasis on the human as distinct from the merely collective, the technological. Affirmation of man and not of the process of production. Saving man from becoming a cog in an enormous machine, a mere utensil for production. Liberation of man from the tyranny of the faceless mass in which he is submerged without thoughts, desires, or judgments of his own, a creature without will or without light.31 The deeper freedom we speak of and yearn for must first be cultivated on this initial platform. It is this welcoming shelter, a place where one can feel and think and be, that must be offered before anything else. It is the warmth of a community that draws the seeker and the lost soul in further, earning their trust and helping them to understand how to listen, and how to decide, and how to live and love from the core of their heart. Merton continues: Second, emphasis on the personal-for if we merely respect man's nature, and we must respect that nature, we still do not go far enough...To respect the personal aspect in man is to respect his solitude, his right to think for himself, his need to learn this, his need for love and acceptance by other persons like himself. 32 There is the fight for the forces and ideas shaping our reality and society, and there is the fight for the heart of the individual human. Both struggles cannot be torn asunder from each other. If our religion, or our action, forgets and ignores the dilemmas of the individual hearts at stake, there will be no lasting and meaningful accomplishment. It is like cleaning the cage of the bird without caring for the bird itself. Merton concludes: Third, emphasis on wisdom and love-a sapiential view of society is less activistic, more contemplative; it enables men and institutions to see life in its wholeness, with stability and purpose...This is the view which prevailed in the ancient traditional cultures that lasted for centuries because they were rooted in the patterns of the cosmos itself, and enabled man to live according to the light of wisdom immanent in the world and in the society of which he formed a part. Here we have concrete instructions and a focus as to how the spiritual angle can provide an essential
30 Merton, 82 31 Merton, 82 32 Merton, 82

shift on consciousness in the realm of social action. What is being asked is to take a step back in order to take a step forward, a renouncing of the over-ardent subversive endeavor that may end up leaving more pain and suffering than was there in the first place. The energy that replaces this is grounded in wisdom and meditation, in a deeper perspective that guides our motivations and actions towards the love of God. Merton speaks more clearly upon this misuse of our potential and energy: The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.33 The wisdom of the Gita tells us that our endeavor must be done with the intention to please and serve God. When He is pleased, then He will personally offer His grace to our efforts, and what we accomplish could very well end up being beyond what we set out to do, in the most positive sense. We can perform the most difficult, essential task of removing the deeply, rooted pain in our own hearts and in others, a pain of separation and forgetfulness of God that is the source of all misery and of all injustice Krishna speaks three verses in the Gita that crystallize this ideal. Work done as a sacrifice for Visnu (God) has to be performed; otherwise work causes bondage in this material world. Therefore, O son of Kunti, perform your prescribed duties for His satisfaction, and in that way you will always remain free from bondage.34 Therefore, O Arjuna, surrendering all your works unto Me, with full knowledge of Me, without desires for profit, with no claims to proprietorship, and free from lethargy, fight.35 Those persons who execute their duties according to My injunctions and who follow this teaching faithfully, without envy, become free from the bondage of fruitive actions.36 Our natural being as souls feels such great pain against the strictures of bondage that we find in our society. The foundation of that bondage is our propensity to attempt to deny the presence of God in our lives. Envious of His position we are powerless against the forces of nature that bombard us. We are overcome simultaneously with illusions of our own grandeur alongside a crippling lethargy that leaves us and our actions deluded and impotent. The law of God is the law of love, and we may find it very difficult to understand how to translate this love of God into the realms of social justice. There is an ignorance, sometimes a willing ignorance, to ignore the spiritual potential in the question of the solution. It may seem old-fashioned. It may seem
33 34 35 36 Merton, 86 Prabhupada Prabhupada Prabhupada

mythological. It may seem like a pipe-dream, but to those who have experienced it and who have felt the hand of God guiding them through their efforts to practically help others in this world, it is an undeniable reality. With so much else failing to staunch the tide of the collapse of our humanity, the last and best resort is to turn back towards the source of our very being and the reservoir of the most powerful love, God Himself. It is there, in His presence, that we will find the peace and the justice we are giving our lives for.

olove love love! what are compassion and mercy? 90 to speak with courage 92-93 only a personal 9798 the christian society, simple living 94 law of love 121-122, top of 123 the good news end of 128 the great way 199

individualism Bailey 152-153 , 66 bonhoeffer (even "good" ethics hide the evil underneath)-in