The Force of Spirit

In July, 1960, Thomas Merton wrote to his friend Louis Massignon, the great Islamicist, to thank him for his work in creating a bridge between Muslims and Christians. Merton had recently had occasion to read Massignon's work on the tenth century Muslim mystic and martyr al-Hallaj and was moved by Massignon's deep engagement with Islam's mystical tradition, a tradition mostly unknown to Christians. Here, Merton believed, was a witness from the heart of the Muslim tradition that could awaken Christians to the mystical dimension of their own faith and to the possibility of genuine communion with their Muslim brothers and sisters. But such an awakening, if it were to have force and meaning, would have to transcend the realm of ideas and touch into the depths of the soul. This is where Merton found himself drawn by Massignon's compelling account of the "point vierge." He wrote: "Louis, one thing strikes me and moves me most of all. It is the idea of the 'point vierge, ou le désespoir accule le Coeur de l'excommunié' ['the virginal point, the center of the soul, where despair corners the heart of the outsider']. What a very fine analysis, and how true. We in our turn have to reach that same 'point vierge' in a kind of despair at the hypocrisy of our own world."

It is not easy to know precisely what kind of experience Merton is describing here. But it seems to be part of what it meant for him to reckon seriously with what he felt to be the "presence of darkness, the cloud of falsity and pretense, of confusion, of evasion, of desecration. . ." permeating our experience of the world. To open one's soul to this reality, to feel it and know it as part of one's own experience was, Merton felt, a necessary part of what it meant to stand in solidarity with those who were most bereft, most maligned and forgotten. It was, perhaps, a necessary part of what it meant to know God. This was not, for Merton or Massignon, an abstract ideal; it was the source of their most serious and sustained efforts at non-violent resistance. To open oneself to the "point vierge" in the depths of one's own soul was one of the primary means of experiencing and expressing the force of Spirit.

One of the deepest convictions of the Christian spiritual tradition is the idea that the Spirit should be discernible in the lives of persons and communities of faith, in the life of the world, and that its presence should be palpable. But too often the restrictive character of our language and categories prevent us from discerning the Spirit's presence in places other than those where we already expect to find it. Aloysius Pieris's remarkable essay on spirituality in Asia reveals what can happen when the veil is lifted and we open ourselves to the possibility of discovering the Spirit's presence even in places where God is ostensibly absent or unknown. This paradoxical notion, illuminated here by Pieris's skillful use of pneumatological categories, suggests a more expansive sense of Spirit, rooted in a feeling for life itself. It has the potential to open up new horizons for dialogue and communion within Asia's eclectic religious context and in so doing contribute concretely and directly to the work of peacemaking there.

Jeffrey McCurry's original and probing exploration of the Didache reminds us that there existed, from the earliest days of the Christian community, a strong vision of the Spirit as a healing, reconciling force. McCurry's thoughtful reexamination of this classic Christian text, in particular its attention to the question of whether a Christian should ever, under any circumstances, have an enemy, reveals just how seriously the early Christian community took this question. To live in the Spirit was to find oneself drawn into an imaginative space in which the very idea of having an enemy, of living out of a spirit of vengeance and retaliation, became impossible to comprehend.

If the force of Spirit can reconcile persons and communities...