A Silent Action

“Thomas Merton’s life, especially once he had become a monk, was to a great extent one of dialogue with people who were either distant or dead.” So says Archbishop Rowan Williams on the publication of this collection of essays on Thomas Merton.

In this book, Rowan Williams looks closely at two such relationships in Merton’s life—first with the Orthodox theologian, Paul Evdokimov, and then with Karl Barth, the Reformed theologian who, by a surprising providence, died on the same day as Merton. Rowan also takes note of the impact on Merton’s thought of books by Hannah Arendt, Dostoevsky, Vladimir Lossky, Olivier Clément, Bonhoeffer, Boris Pasternak, and St. John of the Cross.

In these essays Rowan shows us how Merton regarded Christian life without a contemplative dimension as incomplete insisting that the contemplative life is not only for those living in monasteries but for anyone who seeks an interior monasticism. Contemplative prayer, he reveals, is the vocation of every believer.

One of many points of agreement for Merton and Rowan is their Orwell-like awareness of the abuse of language; such as where war is described and justified in words that mask its actual purpose, cloaking its actual cost in human agony. The problem extends to religious words as well - ways of speaking about God that hide rather than reveal.

There is much in common between these two men who never met face to face. But what stands out in the dialogue is their conviction of God as the ground of their being and their commitment to the contemplative journey away from the false self, or what Thomas Merton refers to as the 'delusory self image', and toward the real self.