Pursuing the Spiritual Roots of Protest: Merton, Berrigan, Yoder, and Muste at the Gethsemani Abbey Peacemakers Retreat

by Gordon Oyer

In the fall of 1964, Trappist monk Thomas Merton prepared to host an unprecedented gathering of peace activists. "About all we have is a great need for roots," he observed, "but to know this is already something." His remark anticipated their agenda--a search for spiritual roots to nurture sound motives for "protest." This event's originality lay in the varied religious commitments present. Convened in an era of well-kept faith boundaries, members of Catholic (lay and clergy), mainline Protestant, historic peace church, and Unitarian traditions participated. Ages also varied, ranging from twenty-three to seventy-nine. Several among the fourteen who gathered are well known today among faith-based peace advocates: the Berrigan brothers, Jim Forest, Tom Cornell, John Howard Yoder, A. J. Muste, and Merton himself. During their three days together, insights and wisdom from these traditions would intersect and nourish each other. By the time they parted, their effort had set down solid roots and modeled interreligious collaboration for peace work that would blossom in coming decades. Here for the first time, the details of those vital discussions have been reconstructed and made accessible to again inspire and challenge followers of Christ to confront the powers and injustices of today. "If Thomas Merton held a retreat in the '60s on the spiritual roots of protest--attended by Daniel Berrigan, John Howard Yoder, A. J. Muste, and ten more great Christian peacemakers--would you want to be there? Gordon Oyer's exhaustively researched, inspiring story of just such a legendary retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani feels like faith on trial at the edge of the end of the world. Read it and see." --Jim Douglass, author, JFK and the Unspeakable "A meticulously researched account of a historical event whose ramifications are as apposite today as when they were first discussed, perhaps more so. The prophetic voices and the witness of the retreat participants are brought to life in Oyer's engaging narrative, echoing from the Gethsemani woods down through the ages, still struggling to be heard against the techno-babble, the inertia felt by so many, and the ever more sophisticated war machine of our world today." --Paul M. Pearson, Director, Thomas Merton Center "Three powerful faith traditions . . . converged for the first time at that legendary1964 retreat hosted by Merton. . . . Any of us who seek today to bear public witness to the gospel, justice, and political imagination are truly 'children' of that conversation a half century ago. . . . We are walking in their footsteps. Oyer has gifted us with a magnificent chronicle of the contemporary spiritual roots of protest." --Ched Myers, Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries Gordon Oyer is an administrator with the University of Illinois system and has an MA in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the past editor of Illinois Mennonite Heritage Quarterly, has served on different regional Mennonite historical committees, and is the author of various articles on Mennonite history.

Genres: Spirituality, Theology, Social Justice

298 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2014

Reviews

[Edward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fourteen men met for three days in November, l964 with Thomas Merton’s at his Gethsemane Trappist monastery in Kentucky. They were Catholic priests and Protestant ministers as well as laymen. Their purpose was to better determine how to be peace makers, through protest against a society which largely ignored such efforts. Oyley’s book is an account of that meeting, and its long term influence.

Thomas Merton raised an essential question, “By what right do we protest?” The reason for this question was for each person to look i. nto himself and decide why he was protesting, putting himself in opposition to societal institutions around him.

Merton warned against protest based only on human griping, and not linked to a deeper spirituality that cared about all humanity living and surviving. “Protest”, then, came to mean voices raised against the forces that deny a spirituality grounded in faith-based activism, one that lis inspired by taking the Biblical teachings and actions of Christ seriosly. Much could learned from human beings who are at the margins of society, the ones that Christ called the “blessed.”

But even at that early date, one general danger was recognized, that of a exclusively rational society that in its development of technology paid little respect to human individuals, to the qualities of compassion and interconnectedness that make us human. One good thing that mirrored this concern and emerged from the conference was a sense of friendship, that individuals with different religious outlooks could talk to one another in a spirit of friendship and tolerance.

Sixty years ago the protest was centered around an anti-war attitude, especially one concerned about nuclear annihilation. A consensus seemed to emerge that protest would take the form of personal moral convictions that would concentrate on consciousness-raising in the public, rather than on political reforms. In the case of the Berrigan brothers, this meant directly confronting and challenging existing institutions, and above all, everyone agreed on an absolute rejection of violence to bring about change.

Of course, it has been sixty years since this conference and concerns today would have shifted to the threat of global warming, genetic modifications the dangers of artificial intelligence as well as ongoing concerns about economic imbalance and a state of reliance on ever more sophisticated weapons of war and destruction

Too much of human hope for the future, many participants believed, relied on the idolization of western technology. Hope, intangible and often resulting in unexpected results, would be personified by those who pushed back against a society obsessed with self-centered rationality. Pushing back, or protesting, could take many forms from the blunt activism of the Berrigan brothers, to simply being informed and speaking out.

[Gerry]

I started reading this book on August 6, 2023, the 78th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and finished it on August 9, the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Everyone is talking about Russia’s positioning of nuclear weapons in Belarus as proof of the futility of the logic of deterrence. But Thomas Merton was saying the same thing back in 1964, the year China tested its first atomic bomb, and his view was affirmed by the participants in this November 1964 retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. A host of luminaries: A.J. Muste, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, John Yoder… Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin only prevented from attending due to the need to prepare for the upcoming Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony. This book makes you think: We should have come so much farther by now. How far do we still have to go?

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting look at a retreat of peace activists from 1964, what they discussed, and what they brought into the movement from the retreat.

[Craig Bergland · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was just alright for me. The reconstruction of the retreat was very good, but the decision to have for people rehash the issues of the retreat from a contemporary perspective struck me as an unnecessary and ill advised attempt to pad the length of the book. I would have been more interested in reading the opinions of four Merton scholars on aspects of the retreat and its place among the larger body of Merton's work.

[Pgregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

I visited the Gethsemani Abbey with author Oyer, which helped make this spectacularly researched book more vivid. That he was able to compile the thoughts and comments of this collection of important peace activists of the 1960s signifies a remarkable accomplishment. We're still working on answers to a crumbling world and Pursuing the Spiritual Roots of Protest helps encourage and inspire hope toward a better world.