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    Dialogues with Silence: Prayers & Drawings
    Dialogues with Silence: Prayers & Drawings
    Dialogues with Silence: Prayers & Drawings
    Ebook214 pages1 hour

    Dialogues with Silence: Prayers & Drawings

    By Thomas Merton

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    An intensely personal devotional book from Thomas Merton, the ultimate spiritual writer of our time, showing his contemplative and religious side through his prayers and rarely-seen drawings. The only Merton gift book available.

    Dialogues with Silence contains a selection of prayers from throughout Merton's life--from his journals, letters, poetry, books--accompanied by all 100 of Merton's rarely seen, delightful Zen-like pen-and-ink drawings, and will attract new readers as well as Merton devotees. There is no other Merton devotional like this, and the paperback edition will be elegantly designed and packaged.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061743245
    Dialogues with Silence: Prayers & Drawings
    Author

    Thomas Merton

    Thomas Merton (1915-1968) is widely regarded as one of the most influential spiritual writers of modern times. He was a Trappist monk, writer, and peace and civil rights activist. His bestselling books include The Seven-Storey Mountain, New Seeds of Contemplation, and Mystics and Zen Masters.

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    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      Anyone familiar with Thomas Merton will find this a delightful and inspirational addition to their library. These prayers by Merton reflect his profound understanding of God and the life of prayer within his own life. The pencil sketches are visual prayers in and of themselves.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Dialogues with Silence - Thomas Merton

    Dialogues with Silence

    Prayers & Drawings

    THOMAS MERTON

    Edited by JONATHAN MONTALDO

    Dialogues with Silence

    is dedicated to

    Ruth Calvert Jenkins Merton

    (1887–1921)

    Thomas Merton’s mother

    whom he lost to death when he was six

    You formed my inmost being.

    You knitted me together in my mother’s womb….

    You know me through and through,

    My being was no mystery to you

    When I was formed in secret,

    Woven in the depths of the earth.

    Psalm 139

    Contents

    Begin Reading

    Sources and Notes

    About the Authors

    Books by Thomas Merton

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that, if I do this, You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me, and You will never leave me to face my perils alone.

    Thoughts in Solitude

    Thomas Merton’s Dialogues with Silence

    The only unhappiness, Thomas Merton wrote, is not to love God. If this standard for his joy is accurate, if what he wrote in his private journal is true, then the book you hold in your hands bears the signature in prayers and drawings of a deeply happy human being.

    In defining monks, Saint Benedict, the father of Western monasticism, wrote simply that they truly seek God. By this criterion, Thomas Merton was probably formed a monk in his mother’s womb.

    He was born of artists—a New Zealander and an American who found each other in a painter’s studio in Paris. Retreating from the First World War and finding sanctuary in Prades, France, Owen sired, Ruth Jenkins bore, and both nourished a son who would become in time a world-celebrated monk and writer.

    He came into the world, like everyone else, captive to a tainted ancestry of human selfishness, greed, and violence that would inexorably graft itself unto his own heart. By a committed life of prayer and work he would learn the right means to root out the thicket of Western culture’s materialism lodged within him. He would rediscover for himself and for others reading over his shoulder a traditional road toward selflessness, generosity, and nonviolence. By his vocation to become a monk and writer, Merton would become another witness for his generation of the way out of self-defeating individualism by tracking anew the boundaries of that ancient other country whose citizens recognize a hidden ground of unity and love among all living beings.

    Merton possessed a critical mind and a poet’s passion. He wantonly loved books, women, ideas, art, jazz, hard drink, cigarettes, argument, and having his opinions heard. He nevertheless chose at the age of twenty-three to be baptized a Roman Catholic; then, going further at the age of twenty-six, he chose to become—to the consternation of his friends—a Trappist monk.

    He had exhibited compulsions that should have made him a literary precursor to the beat generation. Merton should have evolved into a wild man always high on a drug of choice, perpetually on the road, and writing in rebellion against the society of squares and gray suits. He enclosed himself instead in a forest monastery in the middle of America. Once a happy denizen of Manhattan, he placed himself in a subsistence farming community marked by frugal stability and routine, by a life of prayer, silence, and anonymity from the world’s one thousand and one interesting things. By becoming a monk, Merton ensured that his rebellion against the world and the madness it had induced in him would go deeper than any literary pose.

    On December 10, 1941, under a canopy of cold stars, Merton arrived in rural Kentucky at the Abbey of Gethsemani and immediately loved its walls. When the gatehouse door shut behind him, he abandoned his disordered youth and wedged himself into narrow borders so as to find out who he might more authentically become before he died.

    Once taking up his inner journey at Gethsemani, he would never waiver for long from its hard path. He participated by writing

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