As one review noted, Christopher Nolan’s remarkable new film about the creation of the Atom Bomb avoided one rather significant dimension: it did not directly depict the suffering of the people on whom the bombs were dropped. The closest it gets is the imagined terror in Oppenheimer’s mind’s eye when he finds himself having to utter words of congratulation and praise for the ‘success’ of the bombs to a group of his colleagues. There, we see a few brief images of the kind of horror unleashed on human flesh by these monstrous weapons.

There is, I think, a kind of power in refraining from showing the horrors of destruction caused by the bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. That power is nowhere more expertly wielded than in the hands of Thomas Merton, whose stunningly ironic prose poem, Original Child Bomb, recounts the events shown in Oppenheimer with the use of deliberately flat, understated language.

Here are two of its 41 sections to give a flavour:

32: The bomb exploded within 100 feet of the
aiming point. The fireball was 18.000 feet
across. The temperature at the center of
the fireball was 100,000,000 degrees. The
people who were near the center became
nothing. The whole city was blown to bits and
the ruins all caught fire instantly
everywhere, burning briskly. 70,000 people
were killed right away or died within a
few hours. Those who did not die at once
suffered great pain. Few of them were soldiers.

33: The men in the plane perceived that the
raid had been successful, but they thought of
the people in the city and they were not
perfectly happy. Some felt they had
done wrong. But in any case they had obeyed
orders. “It was war.”

Merton makes reference to the many religious terms used by those in the project, again noted flatly to emphasise the idolatrous sense of awe generated by such a demonstration of human prowess. He was all too aware that language laced with superlatives could never touch the real depth of horror faced by the residents of those two cities. Equally, the dry understatement heightens the sense of pathological dissociation that must exist for human beings to be involved in the deliberate annihilation of fellow humans. It generates a language field in which all compassion has been deliberately excised.

I think Oppenheimer did succeed in presenting the very real moral turbulence created for many of those involved in the Manhattan project, not least Oppenheimer himself. And it skillfully shows how real human suffering can be consigned to a footnote in geo-political narratives.

Another deeply affecting work by a Catholic author does, however, give us an unflinching depiction of the suffering of the bombs’ victims. Takashi Nagai’s, The Bells of Nagasaki, recounts the author’s first-hand experiences in the wake of the bomb.

The authority of his prose comes from his direct involvement in the events he describes rather than from any kind of literary manipulation – he also employs a simple, factual style of description and that is what makes it so devastatingly powerful. Nagai dedicated himself to peacemaking for the remainder of his life, a life shortened by the effects of radiation, not from the bomb, but from its therapeutic use in his medical work.

These two Christian voices add much to the narrative so effectively brought to the wider public’s notice again by Nolan’s film. Together, might they shake us out of our collective complacency about the appalling, inhuman weapons on which we continue to rely?

Bibliographical note: Merton’s poem was published as a limited edition of 8000 copies, which are reasonably affordable if you look around. It is more easily accessed in a number of other collections, including his Collected Poems and the collection, Thomas Merton on Peace.

In his wonderful overview history of Orthodox Christianity, Fr John McGuckin intriguingly suggests that the treasures of Orthodoxy, if willingly shared and gratefully received, might find that their perseverance in the West will be at least as much in the non-Orthodox churches as in the relatively poor and often ethnically specific churches of the Orthodox diaspora. My understanding is that these treasures might include such things as iconographic traditions, spiritual theology, ascetical practices, liturgical texts and music, and so on. Clearly, such ‘borrowings’ (if that’s what they are) are very much in the mainstream for many churches in the ‘West’ if you consider the prevalence of icons in many non-Orthodox settings, the widespread use of the Jesus Prayer (see, for example, Franz Jalics’ work) or the broad-based engagement with Desert spirituality (Nouwen, Merton, Ward, Williams, Chitty, etc.).

Some Orthodox are troubled by this tendency, seeing it as a kind of appropriation of Christian traditions of one part of the Christian family by another. This can be problematic both because of the imbalanced history of relations between these families of churches and because the adoption of only some traditions, torn from their primary context in a living community, can look rather like a pick ‘n’ mix spiritual consumerism, lacking integrity or coherence.

I don’t deny this risk, but I would want to make two suggestions for other processes that may be at work here. One is the simple reclaiming of lost elements of shared spiritual heritage. The iconographic traditions of early mediaeval Scotland or Italy could be (and have been) mistaken for images deriving from Coptic or Byzantine sources. The Jesus Prayer ultimately finds its roots in the Desert Fathers, not least Diadochus of Photiki, who should rightly be seen as a saint of the undivided church. The ‘Eastern’ manner of making the sign of the cross was common to all Christians before the modern period. These practices need not be seen as belonging to only one part of the church any more than the use of the Psalter as the core prayer book of all Christians who are serious about a disciplined life of prayer. I am cautious about the Anglican love of the ‘Vincentian Canon’ (that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all) because it risks a simplistic view of the development of tradition (see David Bentley Hart’s excellent work on this). However, it does express something important, which is that there is something like a common repository of spiritual texts, insights, doctrines and practices which properly belong to the mainstream of catholic/orthodox Christianity. It can’t be defined as neatly as to be called a canon, but we would surely all agree on some elements of that shared inheritance that go beyond Scripture and Credal faith (Eucharist, Baptism, other sacramental rites, works of compassion, some level of Patristic witness, certain practices like fasting, devotional gestures, some degree of common iconography, patterns of daily prayer, recognition of certain saints, patterns of ordained ministry in continuity with the Apostles, musical traditions etc.). Some of these elements are hotly contested, some missing from certain traditions, and some are more strongly local in their flavour than others. For Anglican Christians like me, who have a keener sense of continuity than disruption in their view of how we fit into the sweep of Christian history, it is vital that we relearn some of the habits that were lost in that iconoclastic blip we experienced in the early modern period. To do that, it seems reasonable to do that relearning by humbly listening to those who did not experience such ruptures without, of course, falling into the trap of imagining that we will find some kind of pristinely preserved source.

The second process I would propose is not unrelated. It is the desire that many of us have to see the closer unity of Christians. The road to that unity is one in which mutual learning is vital, and the gradual adoption of shared practices seems desirable as we learn how to grow closer together. This is not a one-way street. Orthodox churches might benefit from the insights of those who have long practised Christian faith in ‘Western’ contexts in terms of what cultural forms resonate with believers here.

I have long benefited from the wisdom of many Orthodox teachers who have cultural roots in the West (Clement, Gillet, McGuckin, Behr-Sigel, Ware) as well as those from lines of inheritance deeply rooted in the Orthodox cultures of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, some of which were transplanted in the West. It is hardly surprising that these interactions would lead to an enrichment of Western European Christian life with treasures from its shared roots with spiritual siblings from other parts of our small continent, roots which might well have flowered in more similar patterns had history taken different turns. I pray that their rediscovery will be a means of greater unity and, possibly even more importantly, spiritual growth.