This top-drawer collection of meditations has been edited by Jonathan Montaldo of The Merton Institute for Contemplative Living in Louisville, Kentucky. The American writer Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a monk at The Abbey of Gethsemane for 27 years. He was distinctive in his ministry:
"Whereas an older school of monastic observance warned monks to abandon 'the world' as decisively as one flees a sinking ship, Merton's monastic project was a blend of world-engaging actions: he prayed, wrote books, and, as a mature monk, publicly protested any perspective that threatened the unity of all beings that was at the heart of what he believed 'real' in human experience."
His life at the monastery provided Merton with the disciplines necessary for developing his inner spiritual life. As a "marginal person," he was able to speak out on social issues and to pioneer interfaith dialogue.
Montaldo has collected quotations from the Trappist monk on the inner ground of love, living in wisdom, contemplative listening, dialoguing with silence, the inner experience of love, a monastic life of prayer and protest, and the door to the clear light. Here are a few samples of the material in this book:
• "The world has in fact no terms of its own. It dictates no terms to man. We and our world interpenetrate. If anything, the world exists for us, and we exist for ourselves. It is only in assuming full responsibility for our world, for our lives and for ourselves that we can be said to live really for God."
• "There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves."
• "No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees."
• "There is not much use talking to men about God and love if they are not able to listen. The ears with which one hears the message of the Gospel are hidden in man's heart, and these ears do not hear anything unless they are favored with a certain interior solitude and silence."
• "The greatest of God's secrets is God Himself. He waits to communicate Himself to me in a way that I can never express to others or even think about coherently to myself. I must desire it in silence. It is for this that I must leave all things."
