Reviews for Thomas Merton, monk and poet

The average rating for Thomas Merton, monk and poet based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-07-07 00:00:00 Ole Bjerg Monks invoke the idea of individuals escaping from society to devote their lives to simplicity and prayer. There is a long tradition of such a practice going back to the desert fathers of the early centuries of the church who were rejecting what they saw as a decaying and materialistic society, and their goal was achieve a freedom from that society. Thomas Merton, a 20th century convert to Catholicism who then became a Trappist monk, fits into this tradition. Woodcock, a contemporary of Merton (who died in an accident in l968 at the age of 54), was not a believer himself, but he respected and found Merton an interesting and significant 20th century figure. What makes Merton singular is that while he remained a monk for his entire life, he never stopped writing and was always engaged with the wider society of which he was a part. He could observe the world as an outsider, as a “marginal” man, and he found much to criticize about it – some of his criticisms are as old as the desert hermits of the 3rd century. American society was materialistic to an extreme, full of injustice and a lack of compassion for the poor Its organized religions Merton found, following in the steps of Kierkegaard, were too often self-satisfied and hypocritical. He corresponded with a wide variety of people, including such leaders as Martin Luther King, and the Dalai Lama. Merton freely expressed his opinions on controversial matters such as the Viet Nam war, to which as a pacifist he was opposed. Merton was capable of self-criticism , progressing from his early and shrill denunciations of society in his best-selling THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN, toward positions of much greater tolerance. He was prolific, writing hundreds of articles and dozens of books on the meaning of religious life, as well as poetry and even one novel. In his religious writing he tried to clarify what a true religious outlook entails. It is a “gift of awareness, an awakening to the Real that is within all that is real. A vivid awareness of infinite Being at the roots of our own limited being, . . . an echo of God.” Merton felt that the contemplative life of a monastery was one way toward this unity, but he certainly didn’t limit its application to the confines of a monastery. Anyone could develop this “awareness” no matter what his station in life. Merton was a beneficiary of Vatican II, the Church council of the 1960’s, that attempted to reform the Catholic Church. He was given unprecedented freedom to explore his thinking., something that wouldn’t have happened in the pre-Vatican II church. He became intensely interested in Buddhist practices and what they could contribute to Christianity. While he remained a Catholic monk, he came to the conclusion that all religions  "lead to God, only in different ways, and every man should go according to his own conscience, and settle things according to his own private way of looking at things.” His poetry at the time of his death was becoming steadily more non-conventional, even post-modern in the sense that he was trying to find a replacement for linear and conceptual language. Merton was a relatively young man when he died on a visit to Asia. His legacy, as Woodcock emphasizes, is that in his way, he made all of us rethink and question our beliefs and ethical practices. Merton used his freedom as a monk, he wrote, to be “free to see, free to praise, free to understand, free to love.”

Review # 2 was written on 2016-06-28 00:00:00 Jeremy Lagant Rating: 2.5* of five The Publisher Says: It is possible not to care for Harold Brodkey's obsessive, digressive, almost plotless fiction and still be moved by this memoir of his last sufferings until his death, in mid-1996, of AIDS. Brodkey was a writer for whom style was everything, but in his own implacable and untimely mortality he found a subject before which style was nothing. In this assemblage of essays, journal entries, and brief notes, he confronts his illness from a clinical perspective without losing his ironic tone or his genius for minutiae. In a sense, Brodkey wrote nothing but autobiography throughout his career; this, then, is a fitting final chapter. My Review: Fabulous language, gorgeous emotional honesty, and why in the end do I care so little? His wife seems to me a woman who made a bad bargain and stuck with it; he seems self aware and unblinkingly honest about his fate, but some essential something that would give this book its heart wasn't put into it. I suppose it could be the supre-tight focus on Brodkey's death and death alone that makes me feel somehow bereft of personal feeling. Perhaps I feel slightly uninterested because I know so little of the man himself before the illness. I can't really be certain, since my editorial sense deserted me as I read this book. I fell into a fogged unwillingness to read or stop reading, a very unusual state for me. A very strange book. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.