Abstract
Across ten exhaustively researched and deftly narrated chapters, Gordon Oyer illuminates Merton’s witness to peacebuilding, racial justice, and ecological sensitivity through his correspondence with Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, Vincent Harding, Rachel Carson, and others. For O., the center that grounds Merton in his response to the social crises of the 1960s was his commitment to the person, Merton’s “root metaphor” (6) for our shared humanity and the theological basis for defending the image of God in others. With roots in the Greek Fathers, Scotus, and contemporaries like Maritain and Mounier, a personalist thread that found expression at Vatican II, Merton deployed this metaphor to challenge his readers, and himself, “to see the person . . . and I must see the person in Christ, in the Spirit” (40).
While Merton self-identified with “the Christian non-violent left” (34), O. underscores the tensions and sometimes open rifts that Merton navigated in his solidarity with key figures in the peace movement. Just as friends “were ramping up their antiwar activism” (23) in the mid-1960s, Merton was seeking greater solitude, yearning to write less, and worried that the rhetoric and tactics of resistance movements were becoming ever-more desperate, undisciplined, and untethered to the dignity of the activists themselves and the communities they sought to defend.
Hope “is a greater scandal than we think,” Merton wrote to Day in 1960. To invoke hope sixty years later, O. cautions, in a world infected with a “virus of mendacity,” bears many risks (15). “We may laud material or technological measures of increased wealth, life span, comfort. But seen in geological time, we resemble miners celebrating overtime pay while ignoring the canaries that litter the mine shaft floor. Our sense of loss and grief, whether for our biosphere or our democratic aspirations, grows” (14).
With this study, following his award-winning The Spiritual Roots of Protest, detailing a 1964 peace conference at the Abbey of Gethsemani, O. has emerged as a leading interpreter of Merton’s thought and a prophetic Christian thinker in his own right. His narrative voice sings, and, where apt, stings. I cannot recommend Signs of Hope more highly.