Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

Homer's Epic Poems, Classical Christian Tradition & Spiritual Formation - Ron S. Dart

Augustine, Lewis/Inklings, Myth & Hermes the Trickster - Ron Dart

"Herakleitos, Aeschylus & the Jewish Zeus" - Ron Dart

P.S. It is interesting that Herakleitos was from Ephesus and the notion of the "Logos" was front and centre to Herakleitos -- and then St. John and Mary the mother of Jesus settled in Ephesus. John begins his major book with the "Logos." There is, therefore, an obvious link between Herakleitos and John, with "Logos" as the core and hub for both of them. Even T.S. Eliot begins the "Four Quartets" with 2 aphorisms from Herakleitos. 

Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, and Thomas Merton - Ron Dart

Part I

Joy and woe are woven fine
A clothing for the soul divine…
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.

—William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”

The year 2020 signals both the sixtieth year since Boris Pasternak died and the one hundred thirtieth year since he was born (1890-1960). There is much to the literary and political life in the midst of Stalinist Russia that Pasternak endured and wrote about, but this two-part article will focus on Pasternak himself, his epic novel, Doctor Zhivago, and Thomas Merton.                                

In the 1980s I was on staff with Amnesty International and for a time was chairperson of Group 1 Amnesty International in Canada. When Amnesty International began in 1961, the organization had adopted a variety of Prisoners of Conscience (POC) and one of the women highlighted in Persecution 1961 was Olga Ivinskaya (1912-1995). Ivinskaya has been seen by many as the Larissa (Lara) character in Doctor Zhivago, just as Ivinskaya’s daughter, Irina, can be seen as Larissa’s daughter, Katya. The fact that Olga Ivinskaya played a significant role in getting Doctor Zhivago published in English in 1958 meant she was suspect by the Russian State and the KGB. When Pasternak died in 1960, Ivinskaya was arrested and given an eight-year prison sentence and her daughter a shorter sentence. Irina was released from prison in 1962 and Olga in 1964. It was not until 1988 that Gorbachev rehabilitated Ivinskaya’s reputation.

The ongoing relationship between the novel Doctor Zhivago and reality has been told from various angles, including Olga Ivinskaya’s own book, A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak (1978), and in a more updated version, Lara: The Untold Love Story and the Inspiration for Doctor Zhivago by Anna Pasternak (2017). Moscow has Ears Everywhere: New Investigations on Pasternak and Ivinskaya by Paolo Mancosu (2019) is another treatment of the subject. There are decided points of convergence and overlap between Doctor Zhivago and Pasternak’s layered life. But to the novel I now turn.

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This article was first posted in Radix Magazine

Ron Dart - "Erasmus: Christian Humanist/Literary Primate of 16th century"

Ron Dart on The Absurdist Podcast - Culture Wars, Hierarchies vs Egalitarianism

In which Ron Dart reasons with a right-wing commentator, critiquing the ideologues' (right or left) oversimplification (gnostic) and misread of history for their own ends.

Jordan Peterson & Proverbs' Lady Wisdom - Ron Dart & Paul VanderKlay

Memoricide: Conservative & Progressive Amnesia - Ron Dart (with Brad Jersak)

Dr. Zhivago: Then & Now - Ron Dart

Dr. Zhivago: Then & Now - Ron Dart

The High Tory Position - Ron Dart on the Absurdist Podcast

Jim Forest's "Writing Straight with Crooked Lines" - Review by Ron Dart

Jim Forest, Writing Straight with Crooked Lines: A Memoir (Orbis Books, 2020).

I first met Jim Forest in the mid-1980s when he was still general secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR) and I was on staff with Amnesty International. We met, initially, the old fashioned way (letter writing). Jim and I have stayed in touch since then. Jim and I, working for two different Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) in the area of peace and human rights, indeed, know what it means to be “Beggar-in Chief” (a chapter in Writing Straight with Crooked Lines). We are often expected to run like racehorses yet fed like beggars. But, to the book. The mid-1980s signaled a significant shift in the Cold War, March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in the former USSR. Who would have guessed the changes in the USSR and religion in Russia (an important topic and life changer for Jim and his wife Nancy) with Gorbachev coming to power? Many are the chapters in this Memoir of Jim’s trips to Russia, Orthodoxy, and Russian literature. Jim and I have had some lovely email correspondence recently of Boris Pasternak and Dr. Zhivago, 2020 being the 60^th anniversary of Pasternak’s death. Interestingly, as Jim noted in his missive when Nancy Reagan was in Russia with her husband, Ronald Reagan, she took the time to go to Pasternak’s grave. Jim sent Nancy Reagan a photograph of the grave and Nancy Reagan replied in a letter of gratitude. History is, indeed, replete with those small and often ignored acts of transcending the tribalism of ideological culture and political wars.    

Writing Straight with Crooked Lines, in the birthing chapters, dealt with Jim’s parents, parents immersed in Marxist thought and communism, and in McCarthy era America, knowing the paid price for such commitments. There is a poignant sense that Jim was gifted with parents who knew the cost of standing by convictions, convictions perhaps naïve and misguided, yet faithful to a vision. It was this underlying experience that, perhaps, partially, explains Jim’s turn, post naval job, to a form of public Christian faith that was also very much about faithfulness to Christian convictions (Jim’s father and mother, although Marxist, were not anti-religious or anti-Christian). The turn by Jim in the early 1960s to work with the Catholic Worker and Dorothy Day certainly had left of centre tendencies, tendencies inherited from his parental past. Many of the initial chapters in A Memoir deal with Jim’s meandering journey (crooked yet moving in a discernable direction) to an Anglican then Roman Catholic ecclesiology with an engaged peace focus to it. Dorothy Day pointed the way, in time, to Thomas Merton (both significant models and mentors for Jim). Each of the insightful, fast-paced and anecdotal chapters in the autobiography are both a journey with Jim as he moves through time and history but also an overview of the terrain of the time, war, and peace ever at odds.

I might add that most of the black-white photographs in the book are keepers not to miss.

The 1960s-1980s brought Jim into contact with some of those most committed to peace but peace in a just manner: Dan and Phil Berrigan, Thich Nhat Hanh, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, A.J. Muste, Joan Baez, Al Hassler, Jim Douglass, Adolfo Perez Esquival, Martin Luther King Jr. and many other women and men on the just peace train. The larger public and political issues of peace and unity, so the crooked lines go, took Jim to a variety of marriages that were not about peace but more discord and disunity, separations troubling and painful. It was the meeting with Nancy that brought, for Jim, solid and straight lines, a path to deeper life and love that shines clean and clear in A Memoir, in time, Nancy offering her kidney so Jim’s body could be more at peace.

The almost 70 short yet riveting chapters in this must-read beauty are more than worthy of multiple reads. Much is learned, of course, about Jim’s journey (and many of those he interacted with) but also the cost of being someone concerned for peace and acting on it. The transition of Jim-Nancy to the Orthodox church (given their trips to Russia in the Russian thaw) makes for a window into the glasnost-perestrioka years and, perhaps more importantly, dukhovnost (spiritual life of the people). It would have been interesting to hear Jim’s thoughts on Putin and the state of the Russian Orthodox Church these days. It was somewhat interesting how, in many ways, Henri Nouwen was a healing shepherd to Jim as he was living through a painful marriage crisis, and yet, when Jim/Nancy turned to the Orthodox Tradition,  Nouwen found such a move problematic. Jim’s reflections on this fuller ecclesiology are included in the autobiography with an oft-quoted passage by Merton on uniting the Eastern and Western forms of Christianity.

Writing Straight with Crooked Lines comes to an apt and fitting close with Jim tipping his grateful hat (replete with photographs) to his mentors: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Thich Nhat Hanh, Daniel Berrigan, Henri Nouwen and Al Hassler-Joan Baez (certainly high-level worthies of the 20^th-21^st centuries peace movements and various types of activism). The final photo (peace fingers held in a joyful way and full-face smiles) is fitting of Jim and Nancy (his decades-long wife who has brought him much peace and many a straight line) on, appropriately, the feast of St. Martha.

Ron Dart             

Jim Forest's "Writing Straight with Crooked Lines" - Review by Ron Dart

Jim Forest, Writing Straight with Crooked Lines: A Memoir (Orbis Books, 2020).

I first met Jim Forest in the mid-1980s when he was still general secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR) and I was on staff with Amnesty International. We met, initially, the old fashioned way (letter writing). Jim and I have stayed in touch since then. Jim and I, working for two different Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) in the area of peace and human rights, indeed, know what it means to be “Beggar-in Chief” (a chapter in Writing Straight with Crooked Lines). We are often expected to run like racehorses yet fed like beggars. But, to the book. The mid-1980s signaled a significant shift in the Cold War, March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party in the former USSR. Who would have guessed the changes in the USSR and religion in Russia (an important topic and life changer for Jim and his wife Nancy) with Gorbachev coming to power? Many are the chapters in this Memoir of Jim’s trips to Russia, Orthodoxy, and Russian literature. Jim and I have had some lovely email correspondence recently of Boris Pasternak and Dr. Zhivago, 2020 being the 60^th anniversary of Pasternak’s death. Interestingly, as Jim noted in his missive when Nancy Reagan was in Russia with her husband, Ronald Reagan, she took the time to go to Pasternak’s grave. Jim sent Nancy Reagan a photograph of the grave and Nancy Reagan replied in a letter of gratitude. History is, indeed, replete with those small and often ignored acts of transcending the tribalism of ideological culture and political wars.    

Writing Straight with Crooked Lines, in the birthing chapters, dealt with Jim’s parents, parents immersed in Marxist thought and communism, and in McCarthy era America, knowing the paid price for such commitments. There is a poignant sense that Jim was gifted with parents who knew the cost of standing by convictions, convictions perhaps naïve and misguided, yet faithful to a vision. It was this underlying experience that, perhaps, partially, explains Jim’s turn, post naval job, to a form of public Christian faith that was also very much about faithfulness to Christian convictions (Jim’s father and mother, although Marxist, were not anti-religious or anti-Christian). The turn by Jim in the early 1960s to work with the Catholic Worker and Dorothy Day certainly had left of centre tendencies, tendencies inherited from his parental past. Many of the initial chapters in A Memoir deal with Jim’s meandering journey (crooked yet moving in a discernable direction) to an Anglican then Roman Catholic ecclesiology with an engaged peace focus to it. Dorothy Day pointed the way, in time, to Thomas Merton (both significant models and mentors for Jim). Each of the insightful, fast-paced and anecdotal chapters in the autobiography are both a journey with Jim as he moves through time and history but also an overview of the terrain of the time, war, and peace ever at odds.

I might add that most of the black-white photographs in the book are keepers not to miss.

The 1960s-1980s brought Jim into contact with some of those most committed to peace but peace in a just manner: Dan and Phil Berrigan, Thich Nhat Hanh, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, A.J. Muste, Joan Baez, Al Hassler, Jim Douglass, Adolfo Perez Esquival, Martin Luther King Jr. and many other women and men on the just peace train. The larger public and political issues of peace and unity, so the crooked lines go, took Jim to a variety of marriages that were not about peace but more discord and disunity, separations troubling and painful. It was the meeting with Nancy that brought, for Jim, solid and straight lines, a path to deeper life and love that shines clean and clear in A Memoir, in time, Nancy offering her kidney so Jim’s body could be more at peace.

The almost 70 short yet riveting chapters in this must-read beauty are more than worthy of multiple reads. Much is learned, of course, about Jim’s journey (and many of those he interacted with) but also the cost of being someone concerned for peace and acting on it. The transition of Jim-Nancy to the Orthodox church (given their trips to Russia in the Russian thaw) makes for a window into the glasnost-perestrioka years and, perhaps more importantly, dukhovnost (spiritual life of the people). It would have been interesting to hear Jim’s thoughts on Putin and the state of the Russian Orthodox Church these days. It was somewhat interesting how, in many ways, Henri Nouwen was a healing shepherd to Jim as he was living through a painful marriage crisis, and yet, when Jim/Nancy turned to the Orthodox Tradition,  Nouwen found such a move problematic. Jim’s reflections on this fuller ecclesiology are included in the autobiography with an oft-quoted passage by Merton on uniting the Eastern and Western forms of Christianity.

Writing Straight with Crooked Lines comes to an apt and fitting close with Jim tipping his grateful hat (replete with photographs) to his mentors: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Thich Nhat Hanh, Daniel Berrigan, Henri Nouwen and Al Hassler-Joan Baez (certainly high-level worthies of the 20^th-21^st centuries peace movements and various types of activism). The final photo (peace fingers held in a joyful way and full-face smiles) is fitting of Jim and Nancy (his decades-long wife who has brought him much peace and many a straight line) on, appropriately, the feast of St. Martha.

Ron Dart             

Servant Leadership in the Public Square - Ron Dart

The Renaissance of Syriac Spirituality: the Forgotten Sibling - Ron Dart

See also Ron Dart and Abp Lazar Puhalo on "Syriac Fathers & Syrian Crisis" here:

John: Contemplative Theologian: John 11 - Lazarus, Mary, Martha & Caiaphas: Who are We?: Literalism and Allegory - Ron Dart

Syriac Christianity: More to the Mountain - Ron Dart

There has been a tendency, in the west, when focusing on Christianity, to ponder the Roman Catholic Tradition, the break from the Roman Catholic ethos in the 16^th century, then the emergence of the multiple strands and schisms within Protestant Christianity. Such as been the western indulgence and reality. We discuss, live and reflect on what we know, the part of the mountain we see and have trekked in, built cornered plots of ground on and call home. Needless to say, our understanding of the faith journey is shaped and formed from what we can see from our vantage point on the mountain (regardless of how high or low we are on the part of the mountain we are on).

There has been a turn, in the last few decades, for various reasons, to the Orthodox and Oriental form of Christianity. There are those, more in a reactionary mode than anything else, who make such a turn, to idealize the Oriental and Orthodox brand of Christianity and either dismiss or subordinate Western or Occidental types of Christianity. Those committed to such an approach merely inhabit simply another part of the mountain of faith, the faith mountain, of course, much larger than either Western or Eastern Christianity can fully embody.

The tensions and clashes both within and between Western and Eastern types of Christianity in the areas of Biblical exegesis, theology,

ecclesiology, sacramentalism, liturgy, icons, cognitive-meditative ways of knowing, leadership styles, philosophy, public responsibility, monastic-lay life, creeds, councils, confessions, soteriology and anthropology collide in many places, hence faith tribes and clans live on their plots of land on different parts and places of the mountain, each thinking or assuming, their portion of the mountain is the wisest and best, truest and more comprehensive.

Is there more to the mountain, though, then the replay of West and East, Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism-Protestantism? Are there parts of the faith mountain that have been inhabited for centuries, been largely ignored but have been, in the last few decades, rediscovered? This is where, I think, the rediscovery of Syriac Christianity comes to the fore. The yeoman’s labour of Professor Sebastion Brock, more than most, has done much to restore and point to communities on the mountain that are part of the larger but often forgotten faith family. The publication of The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life (1987) opened up for many a mother lode and gold mine of faith, Brock doing both the introduction and translation. It is significant that The Syriac Fathers by published by Cistercian Publications (Roman Catholic)  Some of the publications by Brock on Syriac Christianity have been also published by the Sisters of the Love of God and Fairacres Press (Anglican publishing). The interest by Roman Catholics and Anglicans, at a higher and more irenical level, has done much to chart routes and pathways to the Syriac tradition and its oft-forgotten heritage. The growing interest and turn to the classical tradition of faith (Patristic era) is now rounding the mountain to sections on it, for centuries hidden from western and eastern forms of Christianity. Many are those more than keen to visit and learn from their fuller family.

I have been fortunate to be in contact with Sebastion Brock and, equally grateful, to be teaching four courses on Syriac Christianity in 2020-2021. Indeed, there is more to the mountain to yet see and as we hold the way-finder in our hands and hearts, minds and imaginations, this much more on the mountain cannot but help to enrich, deepen and mature our faith journeys.

amor vincit omnia

Ron Dart      

Golden Larches - Ron Dart

Golden Larches

 

Rock cathedrals, dusting of snow on them, 

gaze down, silent, much seen.

They will last the winter.

They have weathered many storms and winters.

 

Spring and summer season of the journey

finished for the golden larches, no return

to beginnings, their season in time over and

done.

 

Final autumn gift, thin needles turn golden

yellow, high alpine trails carpeted in soft

larch middens, pathways to walk for those,

carving their way to the high regions, easing

their journey, trees aglow like lanterns, beckoning

to another dimension.

 

Snow returns, golden needles fade, return to the

soil, final autumn phase bountiful beauty, a royal

road for others to walk.

The Swords and the Snake - a tale - Ron Dart

The Swords and the Snake

 

A tale was once told of a boy who wandered far from home, and as the boy slept under an ancient tree (which some say had no beginning) a snake coiled itself 'round his body.

 

The boy awoke as his breath was near the end and his head and body were about to be drawn into the ravenous body of the snake. The initial passivity of the boy and what seemed his inevitable end gave way to a burst of determined energy and life. He managed to draw out the small Swiss knife he carried about for years and as he did so, the knife became a sword, and after many swings of the sword, the head of the snake was cut off.

 

But the snake, like the hydra of old, had many heads and with the cutting off of each head, two more grew. The weariness of the battle wore the boy down and defeat seemed nearer each tragic moment. A horn was sounded in the distance and many valkyrie-like women arrived who knew the mere cutting off of the serpent's head was not enough. Many ancient swords were used and driven deep into the snake-hydra's body and heart. The boy was gathered and enfolded into the arms of the time tried warriors and brought to their home high in the mountains for months of healing. 

Ron Dart on Canadian Conservatism (High Red Toryism) with Cornelius Christian