"Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth century French scholar famous for Democracy in America, wrote a less well-known book titled The Old Regime and the Revolution, arguing that the French Revolution happened long before it happened. The eruption that shattered French society at the end of the eighteenth century was the result of small seismic shifts that had been accumulating for decades deep underground. If people had paid attention to the tectonic instabilities caused by greed and injustice, and had responded wisely to the nervous needles on their inner seismographs, the "Reign of Terror" might have been avoided."
"The problem is not that we don't possess a capacity to know these things. If we didn't, we wouldn't have all the colloquialisms I just used! The problem is that the knowledge we need, like the seismic shifts that create eruptions, originates underground. It comes from a place within us deeper than our intellects, a place that poet William Stafford calls "a remote, important region in all who speak," a place sometimes called the inner teacher or the soul.
But rarely do we allow ourselves to go to that place. Instead, we fill our lives with noisy distractions, blocking our access to insights that might scare us but could also save us."
"A story about Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and writer, provides a case in point. In 1944, Merton entered the Abbey of Gethsemani, a walled monastery in the Kentucky woods, to live a life of silence and solitude. He had fled from the madness of a war-torn world just as American triumphalism was about to emerge - another form of national madness that may now, in the fall of 2008, have run its course for a while. For the next few years Merton pursued a "spirituality of flight," and in 1949 published a rather pious book called Seeds of Contemplation.
But as Merton went deeper within himself and touched the collective consciousness, he began to "read" the rumblings of injustice under the surface of a fat, happy and deluded white America. He listened, really listened, to African American music, especially jazz and the blues. He corresponded with discerning friends who served as "listening posts" in the larger world. He read poetry and literary classics as well as social criticism. He examined his own conscience as a privileged white American male. And, through contemplation and prayer, he went to a place where language and sound cannot take us, a place within ourselves and our world where truth has a chance to come clear and the norms of love and justice coincide.
Fifteen years later, in 1964, Merton published Seeds of Destruction in which he prophesied "the fire next time," a conflagration of the races rooted in white ignorance, indifference and injustice. The book lost him a lot of readers who had loved his earlier piousness. And he was taken to task, in print, by a well-known writer and urban activist who said, in effect, "How dare a cloistered monk, writing from behind gated walls in the Kentucky woods, pretend to know more about race in America than we who are out on the front lines extinguishing 'the fire next time'?"
Three years later, in 1967, Merton's critic wrote an open letter to Merton in The National Catholic Reporter, apologizing "for having put down Seeds of Destruction. With most of the summer of 1967 past, he said, we can now 'see that you were correct.' ...At the time[I published my criticism] you seemed to be trying to be a white James Baldwin. Now it seems to me that you were 'telling it as it is' and maybe 'as it will be.'" (The Hidden Ground of Love, p. 55.)
Neither Merton nor his critic would want us to withdraw from the action. But both would agree that activism ungrounded in contemplation can lead to ego-induced blindness, shutting down those soul-deep sources of knowing that open us to larger truth.
Merton thanked his critic in writing, then took his case one step further. White liberals, he wrote, would not be up to the task of healing a racially divided nation. We would need "a new politics in this country" in order to come anywhere near that goal. Maybe, just maybe, we are seeing the seeds of that new politics today — fifty years after Merton got it right, once again, from his "still point" out in the woods."
The excerpts above are from: Trusting our Deeper Knowing: On Cataclysms. Contemplation, and Circles of Trust by Parker J.Palmer
The moral of the above excerpt is that there is still time for Change to a new politics in Uganda!
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