April 2, 2025

Dear friends, Blessings of Christ’s peace! 

     I’m writing this at the Abbey of Gethsemani near Louisville, Kentucky where I’m staying for a few days of rest and prayer between two weeks of talks. I’ve been coming here regularly for nearly forty years, and have known many of the monks over the years. It is good to stop what we are doing, visit a monastery, and re-center ourselves in their ongoing prayer and the presence of the God of peace.

     Gethsemani was Thomas Merton’s monastery, so I find myself reading Merton while I’m here, and I’m astonished once again by his fresh, breath-taking insights, spirit, and wisdom. Since Pope Francis has called this year to be a “Holy Year of Hope,” I’ve invited my friend Gordon Oyer, author of Signs of Hope: Thomas Merton’s Letters on Peace, Race, and Ecology to reflect on Merton’s seeds and signs of hope to help us out of our despair into the light of the risen Christ. I hope it will encourage us all to stand up, speak out, and resist the rising authoritarianism and white supremacy.

     Gordon will speak on Merton’s hope-making insights and how they apply to our own dark times of permanent war, the nuclear threat, racism, fascism, and climate change. Merton, he suggests, dug deep to understand and locate the underlying forces that feed the systemic violence erupting on its surface. In doing so he identified trends in his time that have evolved and expanded in our own.