Come into the Silence: 30 Days with Thomas Merton

By Thomas Merton

Come into the Silence is an easy-to-use devotional for all those seeking peace, stillness, and solitude in a busy and noisy world. Part of the bestselling Great Spiritual Teachers series, this book invites you into the contemplative life through the words of Thomas Merton, one of the most popular spiritual masters of the twentieth century.

In his journals, letters, and spiritual writings such as New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton explored the tension between the human longing for both connection and solitude. Merton, a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani, offered a model of contemplative life that allowed him to be deeply engaged with pressing issues of the time, including the nonviolent civil rights movement.

Requiring only a few minutes each day, Come into the Silence helps you realize how God sees you and to embrace his divine vision of you and each person you encounter. This devotional also allows you to reflect deeply on the fundamental longings for meaning, belonging, and intimacy as well as the call to service and social justice in your life.

Each book in the Great Spiritual Teachers series provides a month of daily readings from one of Christianity's most beloved spiritual guides. For each day there is a brief and accessible morning meditation drawn from the mystic's writings, a simple mantra for use throughout the day, and a night prayer to focus one's thoughts as the day ends. These easy-to-use books are the perfect prayer companion for busy people who want to root their spiritual practice in the solid ground of these great spiritual teachers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ave Maria Press
• Release date: Jan 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781646800421

Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) is widely regarded as one of the most influential spiritual writers of modern times. He was a Trappist monk, writer, and peace and civil rights activist. His bestselling books include The Seven-Storey Mountain, New Seeds of Contemplation, and Mystics and Zen Masters.

Book preview

Contents

Who is Thomas Merton?

How to Pray This Book

Thirty Days with Thomas Merton

One Final Word

Notes

Permissions

WHO IS THOMAS MERTON?

Thomas Merton was a mid-twentieth-century spiritual master. A Catholic monk, teacher, mystic, poet, and author, he was probably the most popular monastic writer to come along in 1,500 years. Not since St. Augustine in Roman antiquity, with his Confessions and The City of God, which are still assigned reading to many university and seminary students today, had there been a monastic writer who would be read by so many people as Thomas Merton was in the generations since his work first started to appear, immediately following the Second World War.

His early life was not one of obvious preparation for the monastery. He was baptized into the Church of England, the religious tradition of his father. His mother was a Quaker, but neither parent lived a religiously active life. Merton’s mother died when Merton was only six. And he was an orphan, following his father’s death, by the age of sixteen.

He lived quite peripatetically, mostly in Bermuda, France, and England, as a child, following his father around as he tried to make a living as a painter and an artist. He also had grandparents on Long Island, New York, and was often left there for long periods of time. This led him to feel rather rootless as a young person.

After attending preparatory school in England, Merton enrolled at Cambridge University and started to shine as a young scholar and intellectual. But after one year, he was kicked out for moral indiscretions. It was discovered that Merton had had a sexual relationship with a young woman, and that she had become pregnant. Merton’s godfather and guardian sent him back to his relatives in America, and Merton enrolled at Columbia University in New York City.

It was during his time at Columbia that Merton began to really hunger for God. There had been earlier moments, such as a summer trip to Rome when he mysteriously felt the desire to read the Bible, but for the most part, Merton’s teenage and young adult life was filled with raucous friendships, drinking and parties, and the wit and cynicism of young intellectuals.

At Columbia, however, he was blessed with two professors who had a profound influence on him. Mark Van Doren taught him poetry and Daniel Walsh, philosophy. Both men answered the many questions of a searching young man in pursuit of the meaning of life. After Merton’s death, Van Doren wrote an obituary of his former student, saying, I for one have never known a mind more brilliant, more beautiful, more serious, more playful. The energy behind it was immeasurable, and the capacity for love.1

Merton soon converted to Roman Catholicism and, in November 1938, was baptized at Corpus Christi Catholic Church, at 121st and Broadway, near the Columbia campus. As he wrote in his autobiography about that day and that momentous time in his life: What mountains were falling from my shoulders! What scales of dark night were peeling off my intellect, to let in the inward vision of God and His truth!2

Briefly afterward, Merton considered a vocation with the Franciscans. He earned a master’s degree in English at Columbia, writing a thesis on the poetry and mysticism of William Blake. He also tried teaching English to college students; he kept trying to write novels; and he worked among the poor, for a short time, in Harlem. In early 1941 he spent a spring break on retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani, a