Additional Resources for Studying Thomas Merton

James Finley (0:01)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:04)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:05)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:15)

Welcome to this very brief episode of Turning to the Mystics with James Finley. We've come to the end of our first season where we've been turning to the mystic Thomas Merton. We're so grateful for the positive feedback.

And in this episode, Jim is going to be answering questions that came through from many of you around additional resources and ways to continue studying with Thomas Merton. So Jim, over to you.

James Finley (0:42)

You know, first of all, all this, like we're right at the edge of spiritual direction, all this is so personal. And you might now be drawn to pursue Merton specifically further at this point. As you listen to these different mystics, you'll know the one that like most addresses you start. But I think Merton is a good person to start with because he's contemporary. There's a lot of sources available. And since he speaks the language of all the mystics, it's a good way to get into what all the mystics are saying.

So in order to pursue it, I have some thoughts.

First of all, in terms of accessibility, I think a good place to start with is his little book, Thoughts in Solitude, very short chapters.

Another good way to get into Merton is by reading his journal entries. There's several collections of these. And if you go also on the website of the International Thomas Merton Society, you'll find all these books and resources and studies and different things there. But the collection of his journal entries, some of his most insightful things are journal entries. So one collection is The Intimate Merton is one. There's several others. Also, they have his collected letters. And the volume, The Hidden Ground of Love, is letters all in the area of spirituality and prayer. So in his letters and in his journal entries and Thoughts and Solitude, you'd find a real good beginning to read it as Alexio Divina, just to read it.

Another source of this autobiographical sense of Merton is to read The Seven Story Mountain, which is the autobiography that he wrote, one of the New York Science Best Sellers list. And really, it's how he became known all over the world, really, as a spiritual teacher. And towards his life, there are things in him that changed. There's a kind of Catholic triumphalism in that early writings. You'll find that later on. But you get a good sense of his own conversion of the things that happened to him. It was a book that just moved a lot of people and toward the contemplative life and entering monasteries, touched a lot of people, touched me. So there's that.

Another thing in terms of journal entries, in terms of social justice. I want to say spirituality first specifically. There are also those two books. One is No Man is an Island and Disputed Questions. It's another one. And they're collected essays. And there's some very fine essays there on solitude, on the contemplative life, on prayer, and so on. Those are two nice sources for spiritual reading.

Also helpful as I did an audio set with Sounds True, Merton's Path to the Palace of Nowhere. And it's kind of like walking through what I found to be some seminal texts of Merton. So I read the text and comment on the text, and you might find that helpful. And my book, Merton's Palace of Nowhere, which is ultimate identity, Merton texts on identity beyond the ego. There's also Merton's works on social justice that he wrote during the Vietnam War.

And so there's Seeds of Destruction and Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander that he wrote. And also in his writings on dialogue with non-Christian mystical traditions is his book, Zen and the Birds of Appetite and Mystics and Zen Masters.

Also, the Asian Journal, which is the book he wrote in Asia when he died. He wrote writing that journal. It was just Meeting the Dalai Lama.

And also the collected book, there's I think it's Fons Vitae Press. They went on Thomas Merton in Taoism, the Tao Te Ching, and also Thomas Merton in Sufism, the Untold Story on Mystical Islam. He was very deeply involved with Islam, mystical dimensions of Islam.

And so I would say, and this classic work, probably the one that will be like a perennial classic in the Christian tradition, is New Seeds of Contemplation. And to walk through that in a very slow, prayerful way, there's a lot of depth and beauty to that. But it's not the easiest one to start with. But so this would be some that I'm thinking of right now. And my thought would be then, and we might have touched on this in the Merton talks, in terms of how to proceed with this, like how to read a mystic, is that you would take that, let's say you're going to start with Thoughts in Solitude. So you would read the first paragraph of the first chapter, the short chapters. Then you'd outline the first paragraph by hand. So Roman numeral one would be the topic sentence of the paragraph, endang capital letter A, capital B, like that, you'd outline it. In order to outline it, you have to read it.