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THOMAS MERTON, PEACEMAKER: MEDITATIONS ON MERTON, PEACEMAKING, AND THE SPIRITUAL LIFE John Dear Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2015 191 pages, paper, $20.00
John Dear opens this collection of reflective essays by guiding us to a place of great significance for him and for Thomas Merton, the subject of Dear's most recent meditation on religiously inspired peacemaking. As he anchors us in the sacred space of the Benedictine monastery of Christ in the Desert, "in a remote canyon in northern New Mexico," Dear observes, "The trek to the monastery is, for me, a good metaphor for the spiritual journey-a dangerous, cliff-hanging journey, full of promise, beauty, and hope" (1).
The urgency and potential of this journey continues to burn intensely for Dear, with whom most readers will be familiar for his lifelong dedication to peace activism and nonviolence. Perhaps best known for his work as a peace witness in many war zones, or his over 75 arrests for civil disobedience within the U.S., he has dedicated over thirty years of his life to peace activism and is the author of thirty books, having written extensively about nonviolence and religiously inspired peacemaking. In this recent book he turns to Thomas Merton's legacy as a "source of strength, hope, and light" for peacemaking in this challenging time (x). For Dear, Merton "embodies ...the creative, spiritual life of peace" (x), and in the essays that follow, Dear explores the many ways Merton embodied peace and nonviolence as a way to probe Dear's own understanding and commitments, from which we, as readers, learn much in the process.
As Dear reaches his initial destination in the opening pages, he lingers of the silence and the many vivid details of this space. "In that spirit I sit in the chapel and take it all in," he writes as he allows its beauty wash over him:
The silence. The solitude. The beauty. The crucifix. The red cliff. The peace. I begin to breathe again. It's as if I've been holding my breath for months, trying to breathe under water, thrashing to stay afloat in our culture of war. There in that stunning setting of red rock, adobe, and wooden beams, icons, and Mexican crosses, I feel healed, disarmed, refreshed. I remember how...