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The sixties were a time of restlessness, inner turmoil, and exuberance for Merton during which he closely followed the careening development of political and social activism – Martin Luther King, Jr., and the March on Selma, the Catholic Worker Movement, the Vietnam war, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Volume 5 chronicles the approach of Merton’s fiftieth birthday and marks his move to Mount Olivet, his hermitage at the Abbey of Gethsemani, where he was finally able to fully embrace the joys and challenges of solitary life: ‘In the hermitage, one must pray of go to seed. The pretense of prayer will not suffice. Just sitting will not suffice . . . Solitude puts you with your back to the wall (or your face to it!), and this is good’ (13 October, 1964).
E-Book Content
Thomas Merton
Dancing in the Water of Life Seeking Peace in the Hermitage
EDITED BY ROBERT E. DAGGY
Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction
xi
PART I :
PART II :
PART III :
PART IV :
PART V :
Living as a Part-time Solitary August 1963–June 1964
1
The Suzuki Visit June 1964
111
The Joy and Absurdity of Increasing Solitude June 1964–April 1965
119
Day of a Stranger Sometime in May 1965
237
“Hermit in the Water of Life” May 1965–December 1965
243
Some Personal Notes End of 1965
331
APPENDIX:
Index About the Author Other Books by Thomas Merton Cover Copyright About the Publisher
350
Acknowledgments As director of the Thomas Merton Studies Center at Bellarmine College in Louisville, Kentucky, for more than twenty years, I have long been aware of the interest in Thomas Merton’s “personal journals” and the anticipation that awaited their release twenty-five years after his death in 1968. When the restriction against publication ended in 1993, I was pleased that the Trustees of the Merton Legacy Trust named Brother Patrick Hart as general editor for the publication of the Journals. I immediately accepted when he asked me to edit the fifth of the seven projected volumes. As I come to write these acknowledgments, I realize that all the people I wish to thank are special people to me, special beyond their help and support through the years of my tenure at the Merton Center. They are my friends and they have been a great grace to me. Brother Patrick Hart’s place in Merton studies was, of course, already assured. The general editorship of the Journals simply caps his already distinguished contributions to Merton studies. That he offered support and helpful suggestions in the preparation of this volume goes without saying, for he is supportive and helpful with every Merton project. Most remarkable to me is that in over twenty years of cooperating on Merton affairs no cross word or tense moment has ever passed between us–a tribute more to him than to me. It has been my pleasure to work with the trustees of the Merton Legacy Trust–Naomi Burton Stone (Emeritus), Robert Giroux, James Laughlin, and Tommie O’Callaghan. Anne H. McCormick, administrator of rights and contracts for the Trust, has handled Trust business in which I was involved with efficiency and dispatch. I must say a special word about Tommie O’Callaghan, whom I met at a business lunch in 1973. It is she who, in her words and mine, “found me” and “gave me my great opportunity” at the Merton Center. Though I may not always have felt gratitude for that opportunity in moments of stress and distraction, it is quite true that I would not have had the privilege of editing this volume (or the Merton letters and other Merton material) if I had not eaten Kentucky barbecue with
her many years ago. For all the good things, Merton-related and otherwise, that kn