Non-violence Vs. Key Assassination

Review of Soul Force vs. Assassin from Sojourners on Gandhi. From Books and Culture an interview with the reviewer about the author of the book Jim Douglass and the influence of Thomas Merton.

Merton wrote his Raids on the Unspeakable in the midst of the turmoil of the ’60s. He was corresponding with friends around the world about the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the threat of nuclear disaster. He’d become a spiritual counselor to activists (including Jim Douglass). And yet, at the same time, Merton’s superiors forbade him to write on political issues. In a fascinating way, this forced him to explore the spiritual dynamics of activism.

So, the notion of the “Unspeakable” emerges as a way of naming what can’t be spoken—those powers that lurk in the silence, defying description and so paralyzing us all the more. Raids on the Unspeakable reads like an apocalypse. It’s a prose poem, really. Out of context, it almost seems crazy. But it is a prayer at the heart of the world’s dark night. In the midst of it, Merton names a bedrock truth: “Christian hope begins where every other truth stands frozen stiff before the power of the Unspeakable.”

Everyone knows that Gandhi was assassinated. Most people assume, as with many modern political assassinations, that this was the result of one deranged individual. But what if, forty years before he was finally killed, Gandhi met the mastermind behind his assassination at a debate in London—a debate about whether the best way for India to gain independence was violent assassination or nonviolent truth-force? What if Gandhi lived his whole life knowing that he would face an assassin and that the truth of his entire philosophy would be tested by his response? What if when he prayed to die with the name of God on his lips he meant that to be a prayer of grace for his assassin? These are the questions that Jim’s telling of the story raises. His point isn’t to re-write history. As best as I can tell, his facts do not contradict the facts in the conventional history. But they do highlight a truth at the heart of Gandhi’s story that’s hard to see if you don’t consider these details of his life. They make it a particularly challenging story for the “war on terrorism,” in which overt assassination has become a standard tool of American foreign policy.

Also in Books and Culture a nice review of the Review of the Reformed Journal. One of the tidbits out of it is that they’re going to be posting the full historical content of the Reformed Journal online.