Thomas Merton

The seven storey mountain

Thoughts in Solitude

No Man Is an Island

The Silent Life

The third volume of Thomas Merton's journals chronicles Merton's attempts to reconcile his desire for solitude and contemplation with the demands of his new-found celebrity status within the strictures of conventional monastic life.

Pursuing the Monk's True Life, The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 3: 1952-1960

A Search for Solitude

A compendium of spiritual guidance in a beautiful special edition. “Every moment and every event in every man’s life on Earth plants something in his soul,” wrote Thomas Merton. A Trappist monk, Merton was both a poet and a theologian who pondered monastic life. He was praised for his meditations and conversations with God, as well as interfatith dialogue, tolerance, and non-violent activism during the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War. On Christian Contemplation, edited by Merton scholar Paul Pearson, is a collection of the great monk’s work, compiled into a gift-size edition. With poems, reflections, and social commentary, this is the perfect book to nurture the spirit of faith and duty guided by one of the twentieth century’s leading voices of theology and social justice.

On Christian Contemplation

On Contemplation: Easyread Large Bold Edition

Choosing to Love the World

This guide to monastic prayer, written in 1968 and thus turning out to be Thomas Merton’s final testament to us, is now available in a new edition commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of his death. While he wrote it for other monastics, all seekers drawn to explore the full dimensions of prayer will be enriched by his words, especially as they take on added meaning in today’s dizzying world. The climate in which monastic prayer flowers is that of the desert, where human comfort is absent, where the secure routines of the “earthly city” offer no support, and where prayer must be sustained by God in the purity of faith.

The Climate of Monastic Prayer

Becoming a Monk and a Writer (The Journals of Thomas Merton, V. 2)

Entering the Silence

"Almost from the beginning of his monastic career, Thomas Merton tentatively began to discover the great Asian religions of Buddhism and Taoism," biographer George Woodcock wrote in his introduction to Merton's Thoughts on the East. Merton, a longtime social justice advocate, first approached Eastern theology as an admirer of Gandhi's beliefs on non-violence. Through Gandhi, Merton came to know the great Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita, and further still came dialogues with the Dalai Lama and Taoist leader Daisetz Suzuki. Among the "Eastern" works of Thomas Merton are interpretations of the philosophy of Chuang Tzu and an unfinished journal Merton was compiling as he toured Asia to meet with its spiritual leaders. Eastern Wisdom, edited by Bonnie Thurston (author of Merton and Buddhism, 2007) gathers the best of his Eastern theological writings and studies into a gorgeously designed gift book edition. Included are poems, essays, dialogues, and journal entries that serve as the perfect entry for anyone curious about the religious beliefs of the East."--Publisher's description.

On Eastern meditation

Prayers & Drawings

Dialogues with Silence

"Last night I had a curious dream about Kanchenjunga. I was looking at the mountain and it was pure white, absolutely pure, especially the peaks that lie to the west. And I saw the pure beauty of their shape and outline, all in white. And I heard a voice saying-or got the clear idea of: 'There is another side to the mountain.'. . . This morning my quarrel with the mountain is ended . . . why get mad at a mountain? It is beautiful, chastely white in the morning sun-and right in view of the bungalow window."There is another side of Kanchenjunga and of every mountain-the side that has never been photographed and turned into postcards. That is the only side worth seeing" (November 19, 1968). The seventh and final volume of Thomas Merton's journals finds him exploring new territory, both spiritual and geographic, in the last great journey prior to his untimely death. Traveling in the United States and the Far East, Merton enjoys a new freedom that brings with it a rich mix of solitude, spirited friendship, and interaction with monks of other traditions. In his last days in the United States, Merton continues to follow the tumultuous events closing the 1960s, including the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. Meanwhile, with the blessing of his new abbot, Merton travels to monasteries in New Mexico and among the redwoods of Northern California, keeping his journal all the while. In these travels, as well as on a later trip to Alaska, he gains a better understanding of his eremitical yearnings and begins to see a way to reconcile his conflicting desires for solitude and fellowship. When Merton wins approval to participate in a meeting of monastic superiors of the Far East in Bangkok, Thailand, his life enters its most thrilling period. Arriving in Calcutta, Merton is heartbroken by the poverty of the many beggars; in New Delhi and Dharamsala, he makes contact with local Buddhists, including the Dalai Lama. Recognizing each other as kindred spirits, Merton and the Dalai Lama speak from the heart like old friends. In Bangkok at the beginning of December 1968, awaiting the beginning of the conference, Merton pens a letter home: "I think of you all on this Feast Day and with Christmas approaching I feel homesick for Gethsemani." Tragically, Christmas Day finds Merton back home after all. Electrocuted accidentally in his Bangkok room, Merton is returned to his beloved abbey to be laid to rest in a grave overlooking the woods so familiar to him from his twenty-seven years of monastic life at Gethsemani. Thirty years after his death, the contributions of Thomas Merton remain as vital as ever. Completing the published Journals of Thomas Merton, The Other Side of the Mountain conveys the intense spiritual exploration and powerful lessons that filled his short life.

The Journals of Thomas Merton Volume 7:1967-1968

The Other Side of the Mountain

These conferences, presented by Thomas Merton to the novices at the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1963–1964, focus mainly on the life and writings of his great Cistercian predecessor, St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153). Guiding his students through Bernard’s Marian sermons, his treatise On the Love of God, his controversy with Peter Abelard, and above all his great series of sermons on the Song of Songs, Merton reveals why Bernard was the major religious and cultural figure in Europe during the first half of the twelfth century and why he has remained one of the most influential spiritual theologians of Western Christianity from his own day until the present. As James Finley writes in his preface to this volume, “Merton is teaching us in these notes how to be grateful and amazed that the ancient wisdom that shimmers and shines in the eloquent and beautiful things that mystics say is now flowing in our sincere desire to learn from God how to find our way to God.”

Initiation into the Monastic Tradition 8

The Cistercian Fathers and Their Monastic Theology

Written during the last decade of Merton's life, these articles reflect his mature thought on monastic life in community and in solitude. Appealing to the monastic dimension in al of us, his reflections have meaning for those living outside as well as inside monastery walls, fellow travellers on the same journey he took, aware of the fragility and imperfections, as well as the great potential for growth and love, within each human person.

The Monastic Journey

In a miniature collection of classic essays taken from the bestselling Mystics and Zen Masters, Thomas Merton examines the diverse ways Christians of vastly different times and places have regarded the meaning and method of the Way that leads to the highest levels of religious and metaphysical awareness.

Ways of the Christian Mystics

This book is to consider some of the special ques-tions and problems which surround the Bible itself--a book for which all blurbs are impossible.

Opening the Bible

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 nothing. That has its own life. A faithful book. I no longer look at it as a "book." -- Thomas Merton, July 17, 1956 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 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 reveals a life lived in continuous pursuit of meaning, equanimity, and love. The Intimate Merton captures the essence of what makes his life journey so perennially relevant. "My best writing has always been in journals." -- Thomas Merton

His Life from His Journals

Intimate Merton

Thomas Merton wrote The Silent Life a decade after he took orders. In his Prologue, Merton describes the book as "a meditation on the monastic life by one who, without any merit of his own, is privileged to know that life on the inside . . . who seeks only to speak as the mouthpiece of a tradition centuries old." It is a remarkable work-one that combines a lucid and informative description of the nature and forms of monasticism, communal and solitary, with a passionate defense of the contemplative's quest for God. The intense beauty of Merton's meditation, radiating from beneath its surface calm, makes The Silent Life a classic of its kind.

La montaña de los siete círculos

Thomas Merton emprendió la escritura de esta autobiografía a instancias de su superior en la abadía de Nuestra Señora de Getsemaní, en Kentucky, donde llevaba una vida volcada en la oración y la contemplación. Después de una infancia viajera y de una juventud disipada en el seno de una familia de artistas, Merton, que nunca fue bautizado ni había recibido formación religiosa, comenzó a sentirse atraído por la fe católica. La profundización en su conocimiento de la religión le llevó a convertirse al catolicismo y a entrar finalmente en la orden trapense, la más ascética de las órodenes monásticas. Pocos escritores de obras espirituales alcanzan la altura literaria de Merton, que destaca, por su humildad, su exquisita sensibilidad y sus hondas reflexiones que calan en todos los lectores (sean religiosos o no). Desde su publicación en 1948, esta obra se ha convertido en un clásico de la literatura espiritual. Reconocida como una de las obras más influyentes de nuestro tiempo ha sido traducida a más de veinte idiomas y ha transformado la vida de miles de personas

Thomas Merton

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