Thanks for dropping by ProdigalKiwi(s). You’re quite right, I did enjoy reading your posts on Merton. I’d also add my recommendation to that of David (above)… Here’s a couple of links from ProdigalKiwi(s) to a couple of Mp3′s about Merton:

http://prodigal.typepad.com/prodigal_kiwi/2007/02/thomas_merton_c.html

And this: an interview with Paul Elie:

http://prodigal.typepad.com/prodigal_kiwi/2007/01/faith_fired_by_.html

Many thanks for this; I enjoyed reading it very much.

If you haven’t yet had a chance to read “Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing”, I highly recommend it. It is a collection of letters, and thus a bit of a different voice than the “published” Merton. In reading it I was stunned to find a letter Thomas Merton wrote to one of my college professors, the late Harry James Cargas, in 1966. It almost felt like a personal connection to Merton.

Thank you again for these posts. I look forward to checking in and reading your blog from time to time.

I’m a bit of an introvert, i’m drawn to solitude. It’s how I’m wired, but I think to be healthy in my Spiritual life, I need to be pulled in the direction of engagement with others.

thanks for the comment on my blog. I’ll be back here again.

As you share Merton’s interest in imaginative writing as a path to God, let me suggest “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” by Paul Elie which is an introduction to and comparison of the writings of Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Dorothy Day and Merton, himself.

Day, foundress of the Catholic Worker, was a journalist/activist. Percy and O’Connor are Southern Catholic writers of the first rank in the Canon of American Literature. Upon examination, I think you’ll find them worthy of inclusion on your “honor roll”. They’ve got it going simultaneously in the realms of intellect, imagination and culture.

I have deep respect for your roots in the Anabaptist heritage of work for peace and justice but question your openness to the critique of monasticism as “non-evangelistic”. I know you let Merton off the hook because of the “evangelical” value of the splash he made in literary circles in the fifties and sixties. In Merton’s own view, however, his fame as a litterateur got in the way of his life as a monk and was the greatest obstacle to discovery of his “true self”.

I know there are Protestant orders of monks and nuns but the Reform’s focus on the relationship between the individual and his God can sometimes impede understanding of the value of the monastic vocation as a purely contemplative participation in the mystical body of Christ and an essential part of the communal whole.

There is scriptural warrant for this view in the story of the good thief (Lk. 23:39-43), the only character personally promised salvation in the entire bible. Like Christ, he was crucified on the social structures of his time and unable to “do” anything but contemplate and call attention in his prayer to the operation of injustice in this world. For this (alone) he was assured of “paradise”.