E-Book Overview
In this diary-like memoir, composed of his most poignant and insightful journal entries, The Intimate Merton lays bare the steep ways of Thomas Merton's spiritual path. Culled from the seven volumes of his personal journals, this twenty nine year chronicle deepens and extends the story Thomas Merton recounted and made famous in The Seven Storey Mountain. This book is the spiritual autobiography of our century's most celebrated monk -- the wisdom gained from the personal experience of an enduring spiritual teacher. Here is Merton's account of his life's major challenges, his confrontations with monastic and church hierarchies, his interaction with religious traditions east and west, and his antiwar and civil-rights activities. In The Intimate Merton we engage a writer's art of "confession and witness" as he searches for a contemporary, authentic, and global spirituality. Recounting Merton's earliest days in the monastery to his journey east to meet the Dalai Lama, The Intimate Merton captures the essence of what makes Thomas Merton's life journey so perennially relevant.
E-Book Content
The Intimate Merton His Life from His Journals
edited by Patrick Hart and Jonathan Montaldo
The Intimate Merton is dedicated to Naomi Burton Stone, Robert Giroux, James Laughlin, Anne McCormick, and Tommie O’Callaghan
Contents
vii
A Path Through Thomas Merton’s Journals
pa rt i
1
The Story of a Vocation, 1939–1941
pa rt i i
45
Becoming a Monk and Writer, 1941–1952
part iii
103
Pursuing the Monk’s True Life, 1952–1960
pa rt iv
155
The Pivotal Years, 1960–1963
pa rt v
211
Seeking Peace in the Hermitage, 1963–1965
pa rt v i
269
Exploring Solitude and Freedom, 1966–1967
part vii
313
The End of the Journey, 1967–1968
367
Index About the Author Other Books by Thomas Merton Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher
Either you look at the universe as a very poor creation out of which no one can make anything, or you look at your own life and your own part in the universe as infinitely rich, full of inexhaustible interest, opening out into the infinite further possibilities for study and contemplation and interest and praise. Beyond all and in all is God. Perhaps the Book of Life, in the end, is the book one has lived. If one has lived nothing, one is not in the Book of Life. I have always wanted to write about everything. That does not mean to write a book that covers everything—which would be impossible, but a book in which everything can go. A book with a little of everything that creates itself out of everything. That has its own life. A faithful book. I no longer look at it as a “book.” July 17, 1956
A Path Through Thomas Merton’s Journals
He kept a journal as early as 1931 when he was only sixteen. From boyhood he apprenticed himself to the notion that his life would be inexhaustibly rich if he wrote about it. Writing would make him a main celebrant at Life’s infinite creation. Writing became Thomas Merton’s second nature: his mode of breathing from the diaphragm to take everything in. Writing was his way to taste and see. A smell became perfume when he had captured it on a page. “To write,” he noted in his journal, “is to think and to live—even to pray” (September 27, 1958). By writing, “life lived itself ” through him (April 14, 1966). He found himself a place to be within a written word. He wrote his heart out as if his heart’s next beat depended upon his writing about it. Blessed with an inclusive imagination, he wanted to write a “book” into which everything in his life was able to go. Life’s very self would live through him as he explored a path through the world’s ten thous