Thomas Merton: "Your Life Is Shaped by the End You Live For."

"On the last day of January, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in the year of the great war, and down the shadow of some French mountains on the border of Spain, I came into the world."

Today is the birthday of contemplative writer and Trappist Monk, Thomas Merton (31 Jan 1915 to 10 Dec 1968). He stands out as among the most influential spiritual writers of the 20th century, being read and respected by Catholics, Protestants and members of other faith communities.

Thomas Merton ~ Conversion

He was raised by parents who were artists and experimental intellectually, and thus came of age under the influence of avant-garde intellectualism, sympathizing with heady notions such as Communism. After a wild and tumultuous youth that included fathering a child out of wedlock, Merton converted to Catholicism while attending Columbia University. In December of 1941 he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani, near Bardstown, Kentucky -- a community of monks belonging to the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (Trappists) taking the name Frater Louis. Thereafter he spent the rest of days writing what have now been deemed spiritual classics on topics such as solitude, contemplative prayer and spiritual direction.

Thomas Merton ~ Ongoing Appeal

Merton's works reflect his personal struggles as well as the struggles of the age in which he lived, both spiritual and cultural. Yet, book sales and the ongoing popularity of his writing suggest his sensibilities transcend culture and situation. They have resonated, and continue to resonate, with thinkers and spiritual seekers of all backgrounds and situations, and he remains one of the most widely read and written about spiritual figures of the modern times.

Merton died tragically by accidental electrocution while traveling in Asia in 1968.

Thomas Merton ~ Quotes

Some quotes from Thoughts in Solitude:

"If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life . . . . Your life is shaped by the end you live for."

"What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to prayer?"

"Before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves."

"This then is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. To trample it down under the hope of the Cross. To wage war against despair unceasingly. That war is our wilderness. If we wage it courageously, we will find Christ on our side."

Other writings include The Seven Storey Mountain, Contemplative Prayer, Life of Holiness

He is the author of more than seventy books that include poetry, personal journals, collections of letters, social criticism, and writings on peace, justice, and ecumenism.

Thomas Merton ~ A Prayer

A Prayer of Thomas Merton, from Thoughts in Solitude:

"I have found and have known, by Your great mercy, that the love of a man's heart that is abandoned and broken and poor is most pleasing to You and attracts the gaze of Your pity, and that it is Your desire and Your consolation, O my Lord, to be very close to those love You and call upon You as their Father. That You may have no greater 'consolation' than to console Your afflicted children and those who come to You poor and empty-handed with nothing but their humanness and their limitation and great trust in your mercy. Amen."

5 Principles of Holy Writing ~ The Wisdom of Frances de Sales

by Wendy Murray

Saint Francis de Sales (1567 – 1622), was a French bishop whose views about "holy imagination" redefined devotion in his time, especially as it is expressed in the arts. His wisdom is timeless and serves as an apt guide for those in the literary realm whose writing voice also possesses spiritual sensibilities.

His book Finding God Wherever You Are offers helpful lessons for writers and artists of any time who find themselves entrenched in the struggles of the human situation:

1. Make decisions and then act.  "Our spirit should give vent whole-heartedly to these good movements of the will . . . But do not linger too long with general movements of the will. You have to change them into deliberate decisions."

2. Stay honorable. "The really patient servant of God bears equanimity of the humiliating trials as well as the honorable."

3. Small mistakes at the beginning only grow larger if left unchecked: "Small mistakes made at the beginning of any project grown infinitely great as it progress . . . . Hence, you should know, before everything else, what is the virtue of devotion."

4. Protect your environment: "Nothing calms down an angry elephant so quickly as a the sight of a little lamb, and nothing breaks the force of cannon balls so easily as wool."

5. Think through projects carefully, choose them clear-headedly, and stay the course. "We are not to question our choice, but devotedly, calmly, steadfastly keep it up, carry it through. Although difficulties, temptations and many different things may beset our path, to make us wonder if we have done right, we are to remain resolute and take no notice . . . . Once our decision has been taken with God's help, we need never fear but that God will aid us to carry it through."

Other books by Frances de Sales include:

The Art of Loving God

Finding God's Will for You

Introduction to the Devout Life












(See Plogger's Pope Francis' call to be Digital Citizens, Message for the memorial service of Saint Frances de Sales)

MLK's Christian Faith and Why It Matters

Today,  Martin Luther King Day, marks the release of a new book highlighting King, his legacy, and the Christian faith that animated him.  Birmingham Revolution (IVP) by Edward Gilbreath, offers an intimate exploration of the modern church's role in challenging issues of our time. 

I worked with Ed for several years where we both served as editors at Christianity Today magazine and where we cut our teeth learning and exercising the importance of religious reporting and writing.

Below are excerpts from a longer interview I shared with Ed on the occasion of the release of his book:

~    ~    ~    ~

On King's 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail'
I decided to use Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” as a way of looking at his whole life and ministry. I wanted to plainly connect King’s life and work to the church, since I believe it was the church and King’s Christian convictions that inspired and empowered the movement he would lead. And I contend that the events of Birmingham in the spring of 1963 represent the defining moment of King’s ministry, where he fully embraced his prophetic call.

On King's Moral Failings
Despite his failings as a human being, he was operating out of a God-inspired, Christian ethic of justice and reconciliation. I’m hoping Birmingham Revolution can help folks see King in a new light. I wanted to shed light on other aspects of King and, above all, show today’s church that everything he did was driven by his Christian faith and values.

On King's Sense of Christian Mission
In Birmingham, Dr. King went to jail to help make the point that the pursuit of racial unity and justice is an essential part of the Christian mission. . . .What we do know about him is that he was a believer in the dignity and humanity of all men, women, and children. In “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he wrote,

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality... Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” 

On MLK and Social Media
I've got to believe the man who wrote “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” and “The time is always right to do the right thing” was a guy who would get a thrill out of the immediacy and wide reach of today’s social media.

Buy Ed's book

The Plaintive Faith of T. S. Eliot

Image Copyright©WendyMurray2014.
 All rights reserved.

Poet T.S. Eliot (1888 to 1965) died on this day, January 4, in 1965. Best known for the poem The Waste Land (1915), Eliot is considered a ground-breaking poet that changed the rules of modern poetry through the imagination and restraint he brought to this work.

(Listen to Eliot reading The Waste Land:)

He possessed a singularity of vision that captured the tension between the ballast of faith and the plaintive uncertainties of human experience. A sense of it is captured in this portion of the poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915):

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor--

And this, and so much more?--

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

"That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant, at all."

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--

Almost, at times, the Fool.

Tea with Frederick Buechner

By Wendy Murray

Fred Buechner, photo by Wendy Murray

On Rupert Mountain, Vermont, in May 2002, Frederick Buechner is serving tea, no cream, no sugar. I ask him what he means when he writes frequently about God's silence.

I have traveled to Vermont to meet with him in order to write an article for Christianity Today magazine. We have been chatting for about an hour when he decides it is time for tea. He hands me mine and takes his, settling back into his chair.

He says, "It was John Updike who said God saves his deepest silence for his saints. Some people might say, 'The hell with it.' His silence throws me back upon myself and I must search my own depths. I'm still searching, aren't you?" He bobs his tea bag. "If we're not searching, we're dead."

I tell him his novel The Storm left me sad.

"Oh, I disagree," he says. "I think it ends upbeat."

I say, "It feels like [the protagonist] Kenzie Maxwell simply gives up on his dreams and resigns himself to a life of mediocrity."

He replies, "Why, at the end, all these people come together. The brothers are reconciled. Kenzie stops writing his letters to his dead lover."

“But," I say, "at the end of the book Kenzie is lying alone in his bed, wondering about the crazy saints and if what had driven them crazy was their endlessly trying -- as he was -- to find where they really belonged." -- "Has Kenzie found where he belongs?"

"Maybe not," Buechner says. "But he's come a long way."

The Storm's narrator says (of Kenzie): "He thought of himself as a man who wrote because he couldn't think of anything else to do with his delusions." I ask Buechner what he meant.

"I wish I had said 'illusions'," he says. "Kenzie is a self-deprecating illusionist."

I ask, "Which of your novels would be your seminal work? Godric is as close as you've come to writing in your 'life's blood,' as you say. But I believe you could come closer."

He doesn't disagree. Then he adds, "All of my fiction was written with my life's blood."