IN A TIME OF CONTINUOUS WAR-CRISIS CONGRESS—RETURN TO MERTON’S CALL TO PRAYER, Part 2

"Lord, that I may see" - Mk 10:51 {from last week's Gospel}

And that the blind may no longer be led by the blind.

 

ow on the day before our national elections---the second half of Thomas Merton’s long plaintive prayer to Congress and the President in 1962.

Prayer for Peace {part 2}

Open our eyes, dissipate confusions, teach us to understand ourselves and our adversary!  Let us never forget that sins against the law of love are punished by loss of faith, and those without faith stop at no crime to achieve their ends!  Help us to use our science for peace and plenty, not for war and destruction.  Show us how to use atomic power to bless our children’s children, not to blight them.

Save us from the compulsion to follow our adversaries in all that we most hate, confirming them in their hatred and suspicion of us.  Resolve our inner contradictions, which now grow beyond belief and beyond bearing.  They are at once a torment and a blessing: for if you had not left us the light of conscience, we would not have to endure them.

Teach us to be long-suffering in anguish and insecurity.  Teach us to wait and trust.  Grant light, grant strength and patience to all who work for peace—to this Congress, our President, our military forces, and our adversaries.  Grant us prudence in proportion to our power, wisdom in proportion to our science, humaneness in proportion to our wealth and might.  And bless our earnest will to help all races and peoples to travel, in friendship with us, along the road to justice, liberty and lasting peace:

But grant us above all to see that our ways are not necessarily your ways, that we cannot fully penetrate the mystery of your designs and that the very storm of power now raging on this earth reveals your hidden will and your inscrutable decision.

Grant us to see your face in the lightning of this cosmic storm.  O God of holiness, merciful to all:  grant us to seek peace where it is truly found!

In your will, O God, is our peace!      Amen

 Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

And more from Merton--a good resolution for us all to take in our own ways, in this time of election:

 "It is my intention to make my entire life a rejection of and protest against the crimes and injustices of war and political tyranny which threaten to destroy the whole human race and the world with it. By my monastic life and vows I am saying NO to all the concentration camps, the aerial bombardments, the staged political trials, the judicial murders, the racial injustices, the economic tyrannies, and the whole socioeconomic apparatus which seems geared for nothing but global destruction in spite of all its fair words in favor of peace."
— From "Honorable Reader"

 Merton and the Dali Lama {from St. Anthony Messenger website}

 

 

 


Illumination and botanical by Kathy Brahney



Congratulations Kurt Hauglie!
Our journalist hero Kurt Hauglie, working quietly from his post at the Mining Gazette in Northern Michigan today struck a blow for freedom of good information. The day before our national election, his story, “Film Remembers 1913 Massacre in Michigan,” appears in AP syndication in newspapers from Port Huron’s Times Herald to the Houston Chronicle. Through the lens of this film’s release he gives us a glimpse--of persistent filmmakers, haves and have-nots, boom and bust, solidarity vs. profiteers, past and present. A timely reminder. Please read at the links below, and thank you, Kurt.

http://www.chron.com/news/article/Film-remembers-1913-Massacre-in-northern-Michigan-4007515.php#photo-3688669

http://www.themorningsun.com/article/20121105/ENTERTAINMENT05/121109864/film-remembers-1913-massacre-in-northern-michigan