Michael W. Higgins: The View
The current turmoil roiling US society centred around protests over the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown has come as no surprise to civil rights activists, frontline social workers and engaged ministers of religion. Only the timing could not be predicted.
Although I work in one of the most affluent cities in the country (Fairfield, Connecticut), I live in Bridgeport — a city ravaged by a poverty in great measure defined by race. Fairfield and Bridgeport abut, but they are different worlds.
Missing from the political arena is a moral and prophetic voice comparable to Martin Luther King’s. Al Sharpton, although a populist leader with a long track record of assertive and media-savvy activism, has become the premier voice for the outraged protestors. The shadow of his financial skullduggery has yet to be exorcised. Bill Cosby, long a model of propriety and pride for the black community, is enmired in a quagmire of allegations no spin doctoring could possibly save.
Aware that it is always contentious to appropriate a voice that is not yours — ethnicity, gender, etc. — I think that America would profit considerably by revisiting the writings of the European-born but profoundly extraterritorial monk and poet, Thomas Merton.
Although privileged with an education at some of the better schools in France and in England, it was his years in New York that shaped his social conscience. In the Harlem of the 1930s he found a “huge, dark, steaming slum”, a furnace of hysteria, sexual disease, madness and drugs, and he came to see that Harlem was not much more than God’s idea of Hollywood.
Knowledge
The most terrible thing about it all for the African-American community is the sure knowledge that the culture of the whites is not worth the dirt of a Harlem gutter.
Merton’s friendships with Martin Luther King Jr., novelist James Baldwin and activist Eldridge Cleaver – whose autobiographical Soul on Ice paid homage to Merton – attest to the esteem and confidence he enjoyed amongst the leaders for racial justice.
Merton saw in the black children of Birmingham, Alabama — set upon by police dogs, hosed, and mocked by a white mob — the ugly intransigence of established prejudice made secure by statute and convention, at the same time as he saw in their unassailable courage a turning point in American morality.
These children “who walked calmly up to the police dogs that lunged at them with a fury capable of tearing their small bodies to pieces, were not only confronting the truth in an exalted moment of faith”. They were heroic heralds of a new dawning forged in pain. Theirs was a “providential hour”.
In essays, articles, poetry, letters and diaries, Merton furiously paved the way for mutual understanding between the races on the very cusp of an armageddon. He managed to win an enviable credibility doing so, not because of his seclusion in the hills of Kentucky as a Trappist monk and not because he was a “guilty bystander”, but rather precisely because of his deep and creative empathy with the life and plight of African Americans. “I happen to be able to understand something of the rejection and frustration of black people because I am first of all an orphan and second a Trappist.
“As an orphan, I know how inhuman and frustrating that can be — being treated as a thing and not as a person. As a Trappist, I can say that I lived for 25 years in a situation in which I had no human and civil rights whatsoever.”
Even allowing for Merton’s penchant for hyperbole and righteous indignation — the comparison of the historical condition of the African American with that of a vowed monk is a bit much — it nonetheless underscores his extraordinary capacity for empathy, his imaginative identification with the ‘other’, his encompassing vision of solidarity.
Merton’s cerebral analysis and radical openness could well spur the Hamlet-like President Barack Obama to a welcome boldness in a time of moral impasse.
