On Thomas Merton

On Thomas Merton
Author: Mary Gordon
Publsiher: Shambhala Publications
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2020-01-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781611807677

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From the best-selling novelist and memoirist: a deeply personal view of her discovery of the celebrated modern monk and thinker through his writings. “If Thomas Merton had been a writer and not a monk, we would never have heard of him. If Thomas Merton had been a monk and not a writer, we would never have heard of him.” So begins acclaimed author Mary Gordon in this probing, candid exploration of the man who became the face and voice of mid-twentieth-century American Catholicism. Approaching Merton “writer to writer,” Gordon illuminates his life and work through his letters, journals, autobiography, and fiction. Pope Francis has celebrated Merton as “a man of dialogue,” and here Gordon shows that the dialogue was as much internal as external—an unending conversation, and at times a heated conflict, between Merton the monk and Merton the writer. Rich with excerpts from Merton’s own writing, On Thomas Merton produces an intimate portrait of a man who “lived life in all its imperfectability, reaching toward it in exaltation, pulling back in anguish, but insisting on the primacy of his praise as a man of God.”

The Seven Storey Mountain

The Seven Storey Mountain
Author: Thomas Merton
Publsiher: Unknown
Total Pages: 467
Release: 1998
Genre: Electronic Book
ISBN: OCLC:994015919

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This unique spiritual autobiography is the account of the growing restlessness of a brilliant and passionate young man whose search for peace and faith eventually leads him, at the age of twenty-six, to take vows in one of the most demanding religious orders - the Trappists. At the monastery, and within the "four walls of my new freedom," Merton wrote this extraordinary testament - a document of a man who withdrew from the world only after he had fully immersed himself in it. For this Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, Robert Giroux has written a memoir of how he came to publish The Seven Storey Mountain, and Merton's distinguished biographer, William H. Shannon, has supplied a note for the reader.

No Man is an Island

No Man is an Island
Author: Thomas Merton
Publsiher: Shambhala Publications
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2005
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9781590302538

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This volume is a stimulating series of spiritual reflections which will prove helpful for all struggling to find the meaning of human existence and to live the richest, fullest and noblest life. --Chicago Tribune

The Ascent to Truth

The Ascent to Truth
Author: Thomas Merton
Publsiher: HMH
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2002-11-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780547537078

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The author of The Seven Storey Mountain explores the mysticism of Saint John of the Cross. The only thing that can save the world from complete moral collapse is a spiritual revolution. . . . The desire for unworldliness, detachment, and union with God is the most fundamental expression of this revolutionary spirit. In Ascent to Truth, author and Trappist Monk Thomas Merton makes an impassioned case for the importance of contemplation. Drawing on a range of thinkers—from Carl Jung to Pope Pius XII—Merton defines the nature of contemplative experience and shows how the Christian mysticism of sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite Saint John of the Cross offers essential answers to our disquieting and troubling times. “For any who have the desire to look into meditation and contemplation . . . this is the book for which they have waited.” —New York Herald Tribune Book Review “For those who may be curious about mysticism, and for those who may be called to a life of contemplation, this is an excellent book.” —Catholic World

The Sign of Jonas

The Sign of Jonas
Author: Thomas Merton
Publsiher: HMH
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2002-11-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780547544960

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This diary of a monastic life is “a continuation of The Seven Storey Mountain . . . Astonishing” (Commonweal). Chronicling six years of Thomas Merton’s life in a Trappist monastery, The Sign of Jonas takes us through his day-to-day experiences at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, where he lived in silence and prayer for much of his life. Concluding with the account of Merton’s ordination as a priest, this diary documents his growing acceptance of his vocation—and the greater meaning he found within his private world of contemplation. “This book is made unmistakably real and almost, at times, unbearably poignant by the fact that the exuberance of youth so often wells up through it with rapture, impatience, and even bluster.” —TheNew York Times “A stirring book—the most readable and on the whole, most illuminating of the author’s writings.” —Catholic World

Thomas Merton Spiritual Master

Thomas Merton  Spiritual Master
Author: Thomas Merton
Publsiher: Paulist Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 1992
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0809133148

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Includes excerpts from "Seven storey mountain", "Conjectures of a guilty bystander" and many other works including a chronology of Merton's life.

Man of Dialogue

Man of Dialogue
Author: Gregory K. Hillis
Publsiher: Liturgical Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2021-11-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780814684603

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How Catholic was Thomas Merton? Since his death in 1968, Merton’s Catholic identity has been regularly questioned, both by those who doubt the authenticity of his Catholicism given his commitment to ecumenical and interreligious dialogue and by those who admire Merton as a thinker but see him as an aberration who rebelled against his Catholicism to articulate ideas that went against the church. In this book, Gregory K. Hillis illustrates that Merton’s thought was intertwined with his identity as a Catholic priest and emerged out of a thorough immersion in the church’s liturgical, theological, and spiritual tradition. In addition to providing a substantive introduction to Merton’s life and thought, this book illustrates that Merton was fundamentally shaped by his identity as a Roman Catholic.

Zen and the Birds of Appetite

Zen and the Birds of Appetite
Author: Thomas Merton
Publsiher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2010-07-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780811219723

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Merton, one of the rare Western thinkers able to feel at home in the philosophies of the East, made the wisdom of Asia available to Westerners. "Zen enriches no one," Thomas Merton provocatively writes in his opening statement to Zen and the Birds of Appetite--one of the last books to be published before his death in 1968. "There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while... but they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the 'nothing,' the 'no-body' that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey." This gets at the humor, paradox, and joy that one feels in Merton's discoveries of Zen during the last years of his life, a joy very much present in this collection of essays. Exploring the relationship between Christianity and Zen, especially through his dialogue with the great Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki, the book makes an excellent introduction to a comparative study of these two traditions, as well as giving the reader a strong taste of the mature Merton. Never does one feel him losing his own faith in these pages; rather one feels that faith getting deeply clarified and affirmed. Just as the body of "Zen" cannot be found by the scavengers, so too, Merton suggests, with the eternal truth of Christ.