Overview
How did Thomas Merton become Thomas Merton? Starting out from any one of his earlier major life moments - wealthy orphan boy, big man on campus, fervent Roman Catholic convert, new and obedient monk - we find ourselves asking how by his life's end he had grown from who he was then into a transcultural and transreligious spiritual teacher read by millions. This book takes another such starting point: his attempt in the mid-1950s to move from his abbey of Gethsemani, in Kentucky - a place that had become, in his view, noisy beyond bearing - to an Italian monastery, Camaldoli, which he idealized as a place of monastic peace. The ultimate irony: Camaldoli at that time, bucolic and peaceful outwardly, was inwardly riven by a pre-Vatican II culture war; whereas Gethsemani, which he tried so hard to leave, became, when he was given his hermitage there in 1965, his place to recover Eden. In walking with Merton on this journey, and reading the letters he wrote and received at the time, we find ourselves asking, as he did, with so much energy and honesty, the deep questions that we may well need to answer in our own lives.
Full Product Details
Author: Donald Grayston
Publisher: James Clarke & Co Ltd
Imprint: Lutterworth Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.30cm
, Height: 2.00cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.461kg
ISBN: 9780718894160
ISBN 10: 0718894162
Pages: 318
Publication Date: 29 October 2015
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
The strength of Grayson's book is his exegesis of the Camaldoli Correspondence. Grayston knows Merton's life inside out, and he is able to comment on the letters by referencing many aspects of Merton's life, both inner and outer; thus, the reader wins a deeper, more insightful understanding of one of the greatest spiritual masters of our time. -Robert Waldron, Theology, Vol. 119 No. 5, 2016 This is a deeply engaging and reaadable book from which many, both inside and outside a monastic readership may greatly profit. Donald grayson has devoted a long experience of study to his subject, whom he reveres, though by no means uncritically, but at the same time with evident sympathy and painstaking researd, presenting to his readers a valuable perspective on a prophet who saw far ahead of his time and movingly articulated the vision. -Sr. Mary John Marshall O.S.B., Cistercian Studies Quarterly, 2016
Author Information
Donald Grayston retired in 2004 from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver as director of its Institute for the Humanities. He is a past president of the International Thomas Merton Society.
