Chaplain’s Corner with 12 Baskets Chaplain Hill Brown
“You will answer: ‘Waiting is not inertia. To be quiet and bide one’s time is to resist. Passive resistance is a form of action.’
That is true when one is waiting for something, and knows that he is waiting. That is true when one is resisting, and knows why, and to what end, he is resisting, and whom he must resist. Unless our waiting implies knowledge and action, we will find ourselves waiting for our own destruction and nothing more. …Are we waiting for anything? Do we stand for anything? Do we know what we want?”
Letter to An Innocent Bystander (1961) by Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton was a trappist monk, theologian, and prolific writer. For over 20 years, Merton lived at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Bardstown, Kentucky. When I first encountered Merton’s work in my early 20s I dismissed it out of hand. What could a cloistered intellectual teach me about resisting systemic oppression in the world? I didn’t need to read about solitude and contemplation. I needed to fight back and I was convinced I knew how!
But a year or so ago I found myself in a used bookstore reading the blurb on the back of a well-worn copy of Raids on the Unspeakable, a collection of Merton’s prose from the 60s. The blurb mentions that these pieces by Merton showcased his move to a “direct, deeply engaged, often militant concern for the critical situation of man [sic] in the world.”
This “militant concern” was something I knew. Last summer a Christian denomination asked me to read Project 2025 for mentions of substance use and then write something about my findings for their website. On the first page of Project 2025; inflation, the escalating overdose crisis, and the visibility of queer and trans people are named as three of the most pressing dangers facing the United States. Of those perceived threats, only substance use gets a second mention on page one. This felt like very bad news for homeless folks using drugs in the US, a country already devastated by decades of a racist, classist drug war.
When I sat down with Merton’s work, it wasn’t solely that I was finally hanging up my stubbornness about reading a contemplative writer. My worry had overwhelmed me. I found myself engaged in less activism and organizing than I had been in years. My waiting was aimless, stuck. I was in need of different questions and clearer guidance. I wasn’t sure what my approach should be to this fully arrived facism.
Merton’s words in Letter to an Innocent Bystander, a piece reprinted in Raids on the Unspeakable, call us away from an unconscious or overwhelmed waiting and into deeper understanding and greater, riskier action. To stand by and simply wait for a different reality as people on the street, folks using drugs, queer and trans people, and people living at those intersections are targeted by federal policy and local ordinances is destructive to our collective humanity.
We may need different guides or ways of knowing and discerning we once dismissed to shake off the inertia and imagine what we really want. May you find that wisdom and share it! Right now we will certainly need one another to actively refuse the forces that isolate, harm, and destroy. What a joy it will be to resist the forces of death and destruction together!
With Spirit and Solidarity,
Hill Brown, Chaplain
