A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk's True Life (The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol.3)

A third volume of the Trappist monk's journals explores the question of who and what a monk should be as he studies Zen, existentialism, Latin American culture, and Marxism and deals with disapproving superiors and the rigors of monastic life.

A Cistercian monk and author of the bestselling The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton records in his plain journal voice the struggles of a soul wrestling with both his vocation and his location, the Abbey of Our Lady of Gesthsemani near Bardstown,Ky. The journal pages are filled with spiritual ruminations, catalogues of Merton's correspondences and his reaction to them, lists of encounters with his fellows constrained by the discipline of the Abbey, his hopes for relocation to a mountaintop hermitage and all the day-to-day froth thst sits atop the deep currents of Merton's spiritual life. Part commonplace book, part spiritual journal, part diarist's discipline, the journal is both the sediment of his spiritual development and the tool he used to watch himself watching himself. Few readers who encounter this remarkable book will come away unchanged.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The third in this publisher's projected seven-volume publication of Merton's journals contains the monk's reflections on the conflicts between his contemplative life and his worldly life as an activist writer. In these entries, Merton struggles with the ways that his monastic orders restrict his engagement with the public sphere. Here also is a Merton who is increasingly drawn to Zen Buddhism, Russian spirituality, and Latin American writers like Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal. In addition, these entries reveal the embryonic form of Merton's classic Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966). Merton's lucid prose sparkles with a wealth of great social and contemplative vision. Highly recommended.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Like the first two volumes of Merton's journals, this third volume is full of insight into his life and work. Readers will be grateful that when it came to his journals, Merton's Trappist silence did not leave him speechless. In a 1956 entry, he notes that he had "always wanted to write about everything" --not to write a book that "covers everything" or contains everything, but "a book in which everything can go." The journals accomplish this largely by avoiding what he refers to (in a 1958 entry) as "the apostolate of alienation and hatred," a "mania for making everyone else like oneself." Merton's great gift, which shines through in the bits and pieces of his journals even more than in his finished work, is an ability to listen and respond to a world in which everything does go. Lawrence Cunningham notes in his introduction that Merton's journals are full of reflection on what it means to be a monk. In this volume, as in the second one, that reflection plays a major role in shaping his discernment of the world and his place in it. This volume maintains the high standards established in the first two and will leave readers anxiously anticipating the remaining four. Steve Schroeder