The Seeker and the Monk
Everyday Conversations with Thomas Merton
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
WINNER of the 2021 Thomas Merton Award awarded by The International Thomas Merton Society
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this pleasing introduction to the thinking of Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915–1968), novelist Scott (All I Need to Get By) reflects on how Merton's concerns and advice remain relevant today. The author begins with Merton's opinions on a variety of subjects, including materialism ("Stanch in me the rank wound of covetousness and the hungers that exhaust my nature with their bleeding") and overworking. She builds on Merton's notion that "we concentrate so much that we get ourselves mixed up and make so many dumb plans that God can't do anything with us" to suggest that "when we don't make peace with or understand ambition, the monster, full of pride and resentment, rears up and makes life messy." Merton grappled with his own ambitions of being a secular writer, giving up many opportunities to enter the cloister, which Scott connects to her own focus on achievement rather than gaining experience. Later chapters cover feeding one's spirituality ("Joy is sublime sustenance"), finding community, and the importance of solitude for divine connection. Part biography and part spiritual meditation, this enjoyably amorphous work will appeal to Christians and general spiritualists alike.
