A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals

by Thomas Merton

Overview

A 365 daily devotional from one of the most influential and spiritual writers of modern times · The perfect companion for daily gratitude, prayer, and reflection.

From the author of The Seven Storey Mountain comes engaging journal entries guaranteed to inspire, motivate, and facilitate self-reflection and spiritual guidance. Thomas Merton’s words touch the soul and spark the mind and can be read all at once or in parts, year-after-year.  

Packed with Merton's delightful pen-and-ink drawings and elegant black-and-white photographs, this is the perfect gift for any spiritual seeker and gratitude manifester in your life. If you struggle to stay in—and enjoy—the present moment, , or simply need some extra encouragement to slow down, this guide is for you.

Oftentimes, the joy and hope we seek is very much alive in our lives, we just need a little help uncovering it. Allow Merton’s affirmations to aide, provoke, and comfort your daily and spiritual journey—one essay, and day, at a time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061757679
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/13/2009
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

A Year with Thomas Merton
Daily Meditations from His Journals

January 1

A Breath of Zen

Fidelity to grace in my life is fidelity to simplicity, rejecting ambition and analysis and elaborate thought, or even elaborate concern.

A breath of Zen blows all these cobwebs out the window.

It is certainly true that what is needed is to get back to the "original face" and drop off all the piled-up garments of thought that do not fit me and are not "mine" -- but to take only what is nameless.

I have been absurdly burdened since the beginning of the year with the illusions of "great responsibility" and of a task to be done. Actually whatever work is to be done is God's work and not mine, and I will not help matters, only hinder them, by too much care.

Sunrise -- an event that calls forth solemn music in the very depths of one's being, as if one's whole being had to attune itself to the cosmos and praise God for a new day, praise Him in the name of all the beings that ever were or ever will be -- as though now upon me falls the responsibility of seeing what all my ancestors have seen, and acknowledging it, and praising God, so that, whether or not they praised God back then, themselves, they can do so now in me.

Sunrise demands this rightness, this order, this true disposition of one's whole being.

January 20–21, 1963, IV. 291–92

A Year with Thomas Merton
Daily Meditations from His Journals. Copyright © by Thomas Merton. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

[Merton] is an incredible source of light and comfort and humor.” — Anne Lamott

"[Thomas Merton] is perhaps the proper patron saint of our information-saturated age, of we who live and move and have our being in social media, and then, desperate for peace and rest, withdraw into privacy and silence, only to return. As we always will." — The New Yorker

From the Publisher