The Intimate Merton: His Life From His Journals

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