The Intimate Merton : His Life From His Journals (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Patrick Hart (Author), Jonathan Montaldo (Author) "Today has the smells of a feast..." (more)
Key Phrases: real solitude, sheep barn, solemn profession, Our Lady, New York, Thomas Merton (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If you like your saints packaged without the messiness of an actual error-filled life, this book is not for you. If, however, you want a glimpse inside the mind and spirit of a splendid writer and thinker who tried live his life as honestly as he could as a journey into God, then this is a grace-filled beauty. Subtitled "His Life from His Journals," these selections--dating from 1939 (before he entered the monastery) to 1968 (within days of his death)--remind us how much of Merton's life unfolded precisely in and through his own writing--how he made himself through his writing. As he says, "it seems to me that writing, far from being an obstacle to spiritual perfection in my own life, has become one of the conditions on which my perfection will depend." Merton contends that writing--honest writing--is his way to move more and more deeply into the truth. In these very honest pages, covering everything from his meeting with the Dalai Lama to his experience of falling in love (25 years after entering the monastery), Truth unfolds itself through the act of writing. These pages are a thread into the center of that labyrinth, which is where he meets his God. Now we're invited along for the ride. --Doug Thorpe

From Publishers Weekly

"A path through the woods" is the description Hart and Montaldo (Merton's last secretary and a Merton lecturer, respectively) give to this condensation of the diaries faithfully kept by Merton before and throughout his 27 years as a Trappist monk at Our Lady of Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky. "Woods" serves as metaphor for Merton's full body of autobiographical work, encompassing the journals published during his life and the seven volumes that remained unpublished for 25 years after his death in 1968. This manageable portrait of Merton's inner and outer life, beginning in 1939, is condensed from the seven volumes and will likely suffice for all but Merton scholars and the most devoted aficionados. Merton's restlessness, his frustration with censorship of his anti-war writings and his affinity for nature are portrayed here. Readers are privy to his dreams and his experiences of divine and human love, including details of his secretive love affair. The volume ends as abruptly as his life, cut short at age 53 by accidental electrocution in Bangkok, where he was exploring Asian religions. The path cleared by Hart and Montaldo, worthy guides to this terrain, is a boon for busy readers, who will turn to Merton's journals not only for information about his life but to learn, from his spiritual self-scrutiny, more about themselves. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne; 1st edition (November 3, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062516205
• ISBN-13: 978-0062516206
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #674,789 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

55 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Merton has been well served by his editors., December 16, 1999

By A Customer

Thomas Merton set himself the task of living a truly spiritual life in a fiercely secular age. His journals should be read by all kindred souls, that is, anyone who values the reflective life, silence and solitude, and good books and fine writing. His editors have skillfully honed his seven volumes of published journals into one handsome book of less than 400 pages. Only complaint: print size a bit small.

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Perfect Companion for Merton readers!!!, August 13, 2000

By	Michael Mcgrath "troppo67" (macondo) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

For readers who have loved Merton's works such as Sign of Jonas or Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander; and who found the the seven volumes of now published journals of Merton too much to tackle at the moment, this book will make a perfect reading companion...many times as I read this I felt as if I were there with Merton in his hermitage...he reveals his innermost thoughts from his search for truth, his dislikes, his passions, even his own shortcomings in startling honesty and depth...there is no "holier than thou" rantings here...this is the real Merton, even in his uncertainties...if you are seeker of truth, you will find this volume very consoling; you will feel less lonlier in your search after while even reading this...this volume is an editing down of the 7 volume work already published...the editors state that it is like a path cut through the woods but it is not the only path, which will have whetted some of our apppetites to read Thomas Merton in his entirety...the part I found the most interesting was Merton's thoughts on love for a woman and his idealization of a girl who visited him in dreams called Proverb, with it's connection to a real someone-this from a celibate monk, who was devoted to his vocation but unabashedly human...this volume which I reciev'd for my b-day is a volume I will cherish and return to often...it is a book to take out with you into the woods or some quiet corner and delve into the mind of a remarkable writer, monk, and seeker of truth.....

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A spiritual master..., May 30, 2003

By	FrKurt Messick "FrKurt Messick" (Bloomington, IN USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

This review is from: The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals (Paperback)

The book `The Intimate Merton', edited by Brother Patrick Hart and Jonathan Montaldo, is a great encapsulation of the journals which Thomas Merton, monk, writer, activist and spiritual guide (I believe he would eschew the word leader, kept from the time he began considering a vocation (both as a monk and as a writer) to the time of his death nearly thirty years later.

The book is broken into sections reflective of Merton's monastic life. Each section is composed of selections, representative and/or significant, from his regular daily journals. Merton actually kept voluminous journals (published in seven thick volumes), much of which served as a basis and self-reflective sounding board for his other writings. This book is a user-friendly spiritual autobiography, distilled from the wisdom gained over twenty-nine years of teaching, prayer, reflection, prayer, writing, prayer, activity, and yet more prayer.

Merton was not (and still is not) universally loved, even by the church and monastic hierarchies who claim him as a shining example of one of their own. Merton's life is a quest for meaning, and quest for unity before God of all peoples, and a quest for love. These were not always in keeping with the practices of the church, which found itself more often than Merton cared for embroiled in political action in support of the state, or at least the status quo.

Merton was a Trappist monk. The Trappists derive their name from la Trappe, the sole survivor of a reformed Cistercian order in France about the time of the Revolution. This order of Cistercians (white-robed monks) had fairly strict observances which included the usual monastic trappings of vows of chastity, stability, obedience, poverty -- and a regime of prayer and psalm recitals coupled with daily work and study that is not at all for the faint-hearted (or faint-spirited). It was to this order that Merton pledged himself, in his beginning search for meaning and fulfillment.

`The great work of sunrise again today.
The awful solemnity of it. The sacredness. Unbearable without prayer and worship. I mean unbearable if you really put everything aside and see what is happening! Many, no doubt, are vaguely aware that it is dawn, but they are protected from the solemnity of it by the neutralising worship of their own society, their own world, in which the sun no longer rises and sets.'

Poetry in prose -- this passage, from the section on The Pivotal Years, reflects a searching nearing a conclusion, but still far from grasping, and far from complete. It also reflects the need for sharing, the drive toward caring, the simplest of things in the world, available to all, free of charge -- and most will never take possession.

God is calling in the sunrise. Merton recognises the call. He wants to deliver this sunrise in a package to the world. But he cannot. This is Merton's endless frustration, and the drive to do more, while yet being, as he would say himself, selfish in wanting to grasp it for himself, too. His time in the Hermitage, a time during which he was removed even from the company of fellow monks -- reflects this duality of vocation in Merton. He recognises that in some ways, it is an escape, but other ways, a fulfillment.

Even late in his life, after he was called away from his solitude at the Hermitage, because the world needed him, he was still humble and seeking. After nearly three decades of monastic practice and reflection on the level that Merton had done, one would expect a certain 'expertise' to have permeated his thinking. And yet, he would write:

`I have to change the superficial ideas and judgments I have made about the contemplative religious life, the contemplative orders. They were silly and arbitrary and without faith.'

This, on the basis of one retreat in December of 1967, with laypersons and clerics and monastics outside his Trappist order -- this is his conclusion, his resolute determination to not be boxed in, even by his own thinking. The true search can lead anywhere, even to the conclusion that one has been wrong all along.

And yet, Merton was not wrong. There was value in each of his spiritual discoveries as he discovered them. They still resonate for all of us today.

`Since Hayden Carruth's reprimand I have had more esteem for the crows around here, and I find, in fact, that we seem to get on much more peacefully. Two sat high in an oak beyond my gate as I walked on the brow of the hill at sunrise saying the Little Hours. They listened without protest to my singing of the antiphons. We are part of a menage, a liturgy, a fellowship of sorts.'

Near the end of his life, Merton was becoming more and more one with all around him, with all of God's creation, with nature, with people, with friends and strangers. And yet, he missed his privacy, his time for personal reflection and solitude.

`Everyone now knows where the hermitage is, and in May I am going to the convent of the Redwoods in California. Once I start traveling around, what hope will there be?'

Merton had premonitions that 1968 was a year `that things are finally and inexorably spelling themselves out', prophetic indeed, for in the same year the world lost Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and Brother Thomas Merton. He never was able to reclaim the solitude, pouring himself out for his friends ('what greater love hath anyone...'), who he counted as the entire world.

May Brother Thomas' journey enlighten your own.