The Seeker and the Monk: Everyday Conversations with Thomas Merton

by Sophfronia Scott, Barbara Brown Taylor (Foreword by)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781506464978
Publisher:	Augsburg Fortress, Publishers
Publication date:	03/16/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	202
Sales rank:	817,763
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Sophfronia Scott is a novelist, essayist, and leading contemplative thinker whose work has appeared in Time, People, O: The Oprah Magazine, and numerous other outlets. When her first novel, All I Need to Get By, was published, she was nominated for best new author at the African American Literary Awards and hailed by Henry Louis Gates Jr. as "one of the best writers of her generation." Her other books include Unforgivable Love, Love's Long Line, and This Child of Faith. Scott holds degrees from Harvard and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.

Barbara Brown Taylor is an Episcopal priest and former rector of Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church in Clarkesville, Georgia. She currently holds the Harry R. Butman Chair in Religion and Philosophy at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia. A popular preacher, speaker, and workshop leader, she was recently noted in Newsweek as one of the twelve most effective preachers in the English language. Her books include Bread of Angels; Gospel Medicine; The Preaching Life; When God is Silent, Mixed Blessings, and her newest book, Home By Another Way.

Table of Contents

Foreword Barbara Brown Taylor ix

1 This Monk Who Follows Me Around: Getting to Know Thomas Merton 1

2 Alexa, Where's My Stuff? When What We Own Owns Us 17

3 Your Work and God's Work: How to Put Ambition in Its Place 35

4 I Am a Bird, Waiting: How to Find God's Presence in Nature 49

5 When Faith Tires: How to Revive Spirit after an Epiphany 65

6 The Soul Selects Its Society: How to Make Spiritual Friends 79

7 Human in an Inhuman Age: How to Serve the World 97

8 The Hermione Granger of Gethsemani: How to Pray 115

9 Hopeful Eyes on a Hopeless Issue: How to Resist Racism 135

10 Swiping Right in the Marketplace: How to Love 151

11 In Sight of the Harbor: Meeting Death without Fear 165

Acknowledgments 185

Notes 189

Bibliography 199

Editorial Reviews

02/15/2021

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. Agent: Brettne Bloom, the Book Group. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Part biography and part spiritual meditation, this enjoyably amorphous work will appeal to Christians and general spiritualists alike." —Publishers Weekly

"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." [Starred Review] —Englewood Review of Books

"This book is a marvelous journey that teaches us how to walk into the life of another while opening up new paths into our own life. The unlikely companionship of this African American woman writer and a white Catholic monk is one that few readers of this book will ever forget." —Dr. Willie James Jennings, associate professor of theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School; author of After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging

"If you know Thomas Merton, you now must know Sophfronia Scott. In remarkable and marvelous ways, she invites us to complete our seeing of Merton—and also to see ourselves—by completing his humble seeing of a forgiving God." —Patricia Raybon, author of My First White Friend and I Told the Mountain to Move

"The beauty of this book is that Sophfronia Scott and Thomas Merton's intimate conversations open outward to include anyone listening in, confident that what is deeply true about any of us is deeply true about all of us. Both Scott and Merton believe we belong to each other, and that faith frees us to speak frankly about our struggles with faith." —Barbara Brown Taylor, from the foreword.

"An exquisitely rendered account of the 'love affair' between an incandescent, twentieth-century flawed monk and a probing, twenty-first-century Black writer that brims with relevance and astonishing revelations. This book is a testament that if you seek, you indeed shall find." —Father Edward L. Beck, C.P., author and CNN commentator

"Sitting down with The Seeker and the Monk made me feel like I was overhearing a delightful conversation between two brilliant friends." —Carol Howard Merritt, pastor of Bedford Presbyterian Church and author of Healing Spiritual Wounds

"A compelling, imaginative book to assist the world as we grapple with issues of race, racism, belonging, faith, hope, and love." —Rev. Nancy Lynne Westfield, director, Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion

From the Publisher