inscape ministries
 
We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.
Thanks be to God.
Dorothy Day
Let me seek the gift of silence, of poverty, and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer:  where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, and the wind in the trees is my prayer for God is all in all.  
Thomas Merton

Click on the PDF below to view the
Pilgrims & Prophets Brochure
Document
Pilgrims and Prophets of Peace
This play brings to life two of the most important and inspiring spiritual teachers of the last century.  We learn of their deepest struggles and intuitions about the meaning of life and death, about prayer, mystical experience, war and peace --- and the way of universal compassion and non-violent love which flows from a life of union with God.

May the witness of their lives touch, open, and expand our own hearts. 
As Mother Teresa once said:
"May God so break open our hearts that the whole world falls in."
"The play is done as if for radio -- no costumes, no sets, and both actors with scripts in hand. The absence of all distractions actually seems to make both Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton more present and more compelling. I say this as someone who knew them both. An extraordinary performance."

 

Jim Forest, Author of Love Is The Measure

(a biography of Dorothy Day) and Living With Wisdom, a Life of Thomas Merton
This one-act reader's play was spellbinding. It captured the essence of Merton and Day in a subtle but profound way. Beautifully acted and simply presented... not to be missed!

From Judith Hardcastle,
Program Director, Thomas Merton Society of Canada
SETTING:
The setting of the play is in a liminal twilight zone between life and death, heaven and earth, this life and the next.  It is the space between death and eternal life.  The place where the communion of saints and human life mysteriously intersect each other.  From this space the characters remember the entire panorama of their life's journey.  They take stock of their lives by a final truthful gaze on all that has happened on their way home to God.  This play is a reflective memory poem about their lives.

For them, it's the end of life's "long loneliness" at last.  It's the moment of the dawning of the Great Love of God.  The characters are right at the brink of that eternal threshold where we can cry out to God with the Psalmist:  "Let your Face fill me with delight, your Face -- the vision of which is where all roads lead." ... Where all roads lead.  At last their roads have led them to the place where contemplation and "the duty of delight" come into their final effortless fulfillment.  We eavesdrop on their intimate conversation they are having with themselves - and by extension us.  We join with them as they remember their journey into the embrace of the Love of God.
BACKGROUND:
Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day never physically met each other, although they very much knew of each other and read each others writings.  However, in the last 10 years of Merton's life, he and Dorothy Day frequently exchanged letters with each other in which they shared their deepest concerns. In some ways, they lived parallel lives ultimately pointed in the same direction:  toward the inner and outer peacemaking that comes from radically seeking God's Presence and Love in all things.
STYLE OF PRESENTATION:
The play is presented in the form of Reader's Theater:  actors are dressed in black and sit on simple stools with copies of the text.  There are no special props or costumes.  This is a form of theater in which there is no full memorization:  scripts are openly used during the performance. In many ways it is similar to oral storytelling in which the ears and the imaginations of the audience are central to helping to bring the performance to life.  So, relax and surrender yourself into the oral world which the performers create for us.  And hand yourself over to letting the spirits of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton come to life for us today.
Sharon Halsey-Hoover
aka Dorothy Day
David Hoover
aka Thomas Merton