Download or read book Thomas Merton s Paradise Journey written by Thomas Merton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book which traces the development of the thoughts and writings of the 20th-century Cistercian monk, Thomas Merton, on the subject of contemplation.
Download or read book The Paradise Man written by Linhxuan Vu and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2016-10-12 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Adam and Eve left Eden, humanity has endured through long millennia of hardships and sufferings, especially death. But the hearts of their children and great-grandchildren have never given up the hope that, someday, they could return to the place of happiness that once had been their inheritance. It is a legitimate and dignified dream. In fact, since the day Adam and Eve left, paradise has remained on earth, waiting for every single human child to return. Mertons paradise, in the last analysis, is on earth, but it is not a spacious place. It is rather an attitude of heart, a state of consciousness, in a spiritual journey. The recovery of paradise occurs when the ego in us becomes empty like a desert. The more the noisy ego diminishes, the more the paradise appears in all its beauty. In fact, this paradise is the face of God, not just an imaginary picture but the true God Himself. The more the face of our ego fades out, the more the face of God shines in his glory, might, and goodness. The desert path is more a journey within our consciousness than through geographical space and time. That is why it belongs to all people and is not just reserved for desert hermits. According to Thomas Merton, you need not be a bishop, a priest, a monk, a nun, a religious person, or a hermit to enter the spiritual journey. You may be a lay person, a normal churchgoer very busy with your daily duties, but you certainly could be a real paradise man.
Download or read book Beholding Paradise written by Thomas Merton and published by . This book was released on 2015-11-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beholding Paradise: The Photographs of Thomas Merton provides the reader with the only available overview of Thomas Merton's photographs while also providing a highly accessible introduction to Merton as a photographer. For Merton, his photography, as his writing, became a way for him to explore and express his relationship with the world. As he discovered contemplative photography, and how to use a camera as a contemplative instrument, he produced images that had the same effect as much of prose and poetry writings in the last decade of his life. Media and advertisers used images manipulatively to sell a story or an object. By contrast, Merton's images have nothing to sell, they cause us to pause, to stop, to see, to see what is right in front of us every day. This volume allows the reader to explore, meditatively, the way that Thomas Merton came to see the world in the final decade of his life.
Download or read book The Seven Storey Mountain written by Thomas Merton and published by Christian Large Print. This book was released on 1985 with total page 770 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One man's search to find his role in the world is revealed in the writer's portrait of his youthful political activism and entry into a Trappist monastery
Download or read book Thomas Merton written by William Henry Shannon and published by Franciscan Media. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "He was something of a legendary figure among the old boys of his generation and he was clearly something of a rebel." That description of Thomas Merton by his English headmaster influenced this captivating introductory look at the monk-writer and his works. Merton scholar William H. Shannon presents Merton's life story "to suggest that this mid-twentieth-century writer can speak meaningfully to women and men now several years into a new century, to develop…some of the themes that make their way through his writings, and to suggest a possible order for reading his books as one enters into the huge library of Mertoniana…."
Download or read book Day of a Stranger written by Thomas Merton and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book No Man is an Island written by Thomas Merton and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2005 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a stimulating series of spiritual reflections which will prove helpful for all struggling to find the meaning of human existence and to live the richest, fullest and noblest life. --Chicago Tribune
Download or read book The Inner Experience written by Thomas Merton and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-09-11 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, revised and redesigned: This is Thomas Merton's last book, in which he draws on both Eastern and Western traditions to explore the hot topic of contemplation/meditation in depth and to show how we can practice true contemplation in everyday life. Never before published except as a series of articles (one per chapter) in an academic journal, this book on contemplation was revised by Merton shortly before his untimely death. The material bridges Merton's early work on Catholic monasticism, mysticism, and contemplation with his later writing on Eastern, especially Buddhist, traditions of meditation and spirituality. This book thus provides a comprehensive understanding of contemplation that draws on the best of Western and Eastern traditions. Merton was still tinkering with this book when he died; it was the book he struggled with most during his career as a writer. But now the Merton Legacy Trust and experts have determined that the book makes such a valuable contribution as his major comprehensive presentation of contemplation that they have allowed its publication.
Download or read book When the Trees Say Nothing written by Thomas Merton and published by Ave Maria Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2003 and now available in paperback to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Thomas Merton's birth, When the Trees Say Nothing has sold more than 60,000 copies and continually inspires readers with its unique collection of Merton's luminous writings on nature, arranged for reflection and meditation. Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk, author, poet, social commentator, and perhaps the most influential and widely published spiritual writer of the twentieth century. In When the Trees Say Nothing, editor Kathleen Deignan sheds new light on Merton by focusing on a neglected theme of his writing: the natural world as a manifestation of the divine. Drawing from Merton's voluminous writing on nature, Deignan has thematically assembled a collection of lucid, poetic reflections. Chapters on the four elements, the seasons, the Earth and its creatures, and the sun, moon, and stars provide brief passages from his diverse works that reveal the presence of God in creation.
Download or read book A Book of Hours written by Thomas Merton and published by Ave Maria Press. This book was released on 2007-03-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Merton was the most popular proponent of the Christian contemplative tradition in the twentieth century. Now, for the first time, some of his most lyrical and prayerful writings have been arranged into A Book of Hours, a rich resource for daily prayer and contemplation that imitates the increasingly popular ancient monastic practice of "praying the hours." Editor Kathleen Deignan mined Merton's voluminous writings, arranging prayers for Dawn, Day, Dusk, and Dark for each of the days of the week. A Book of Hours allows for a slice of monastic contemplation in the midst of hectic modern life, with psalms, prayers, readings, and reflections.
Download or read book Soil and Sacrament written by Fred Bahnson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recounts the author's experiences founding a faith-based community garden in rural North Carolina, and emphasizes how growing one's own food can help readers reconnect with the land and divine faith.
Download or read book Seeking Paradise written by Thomas Merton and published by . This book was released on 2011-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: RELIGION & BELIEFS. In these essays, talks, and a stunning selection of his own photographs, Thomas Merton hauntingly evokes the spirituality of a uniquely American sect. Largely remembered today for a legacy of extraordinary craftsmanship, the Shakers espoused a way of life, as Merton shows, with surprising relevance for today. In their approach to work as a form of worship, in their practice of community, their simplicity and rejection of violence, and their profound witness to the Kingdom of God, Merton finds lessons for all Christians. In the Shakers' prophetic departure from the American myth of progress, efficiency, and individualism, he finds a message of enduring value for our time.
Download or read book The Environmental Vision of Thomas Merton written by Monica Weis and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nature was always vital in Thomas Merton’s life, from the long hours he spent as a child watching his father paint landscapes in the fresh air, to his final years of solitude in the hermitage at Our Lady of Gethsemani, where he contemplated and wrote about the beauty of his surroundings. Throughout his life, Merton’s study of the natural world shaped his spirituality in profound ways, and he was one of the first writers to raise concern about ecological issues that have become critical in recent years. In The Environmental Vision of Thomas Merton, author Monica Weis suggests that Merton’s interest in nature, which developed significantly during his years at the Abbey of Gethsemani, laid the foundation for his growing environmental consciousness. Tracing Merton’s awareness of the natural world from his childhood to the final years of his life, Weis explores his deepening sense of place and desire for solitude, his love and responsibility for all living things, and his evolving ecological awareness.
Download or read book The Seeker and the Monk written by Scott Sophfronia and published by Broadleaf Books. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if we truly belong to each other? What if we are all walking around shining like the sun? Mystic, monk, and activist Thomas Merton asked those questions in the twentieth century. Writer Sophfronia Scott is asking them today. In The Seeker and the Monk, Scott mines the extensive private journals of one of the most influential contemplative thinkers of the past for guidance on how to live in these fraught times. As a Black woman who is not Catholic, Scott both learns from and pushes back against Merton, holding spirited, and intimate conversations on race, ambition, faith, activism, nature, prayer, friendship, and love. She asks: What is the connection between contemplation and action? Is there ever such a thing as a wrong answer to a spiritual question? How do we care about the brutality in the world while not becoming overwhelmed by it? By engaging in this lively discourse, readers will gain a steady sense of how to dwell more deeply within--and even to love--this despairing and radiant world.
Download or read book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander written by Thomas Merton and published by Image. This book was released on 2009-11-17 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this series of notes, opinions, experiences, and reflections, Thomas Merton examines some of the most urgent questions of our age. With his characteristic forcefulness and candor, he brings the reader face-to-face with such provocative and controversial issues as the “death of God,” politics, modern life and values, and racial strife–issues that are as relevant today as they were fifty years ago. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander is Merton at his best–detached but not unpassionate, humorous yet sensitive, at all times alive and searching, with a gift for language which has made him one of the most widely read and influential spiritual writers of our time.
Download or read book The Sign of Jonas written by Thomas Merton and published by HMH. This book was released on 2002-11-18 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This diary of a monastic life is “a continuation of The Seven Storey Mountain . . . Astonishing” (Commonweal). Chronicling six years of Thomas Merton’s life in a Trappist monastery, The Sign of Jonas takes us through his day-to-day experiences at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, where he lived in silence and prayer for much of his life. Concluding with the account of Merton’s ordination as a priest, this diary documents his growing acceptance of his vocation—and the greater meaning he found within his private world of contemplation. “This book is made unmistakably real and almost, at times, unbearably poignant by the fact that the exuberance of youth so often wells up through it with rapture, impatience, and even bluster.” —TheNew York Times “A stirring book—the most readable and on the whole, most illuminating of the author’s writings.” —Catholic World
Download or read book Zen and the Birds of Appetite written by Thomas Merton and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2010-07-27 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Merton, one of the rare Western thinkers able to feel at home in the philosophies of the East, made the wisdom of Asia available to Westerners. "Zen enriches no one," Thomas Merton provocatively writes in his opening statement to Zen and the Birds of Appetite—one of the last books to be published before his death in 1968. "There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while... but they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the 'nothing,' the 'no-body' that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey." This gets at the humor, paradox, and joy that one feels in Merton's discoveries of Zen during the last years of his life, a joy very much present in this collection of essays. Exploring the relationship between Christianity and Zen, especially through his dialogue with the great Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki, the book makes an excellent introduction to a comparative study of these two traditions, as well as giving the reader a strong taste of the mature Merton. Never does one feel him losing his own faith in these pages; rather one feels that faith getting deeply clarified and affirmed. Just as the body of "Zen" cannot be found by the scavengers, so too, Merton suggests, with the eternal truth of Christ.
