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Book One: Entering the School of Your Experience
Helps readers explore what contemplative living and contemplative dialogue means while moving them forward in their journey toward spiritual transformation.
Book Two: Becoming Who You Already Are
Helps readers learn to utilize their own life experiences as the primary tool for spiritual growth. It points us to embrace our deep connections with all of creation through the God who made us.
Book Three: Living Your Deepest Desire
Merton believed that for all of us our deepest desire is for loving communion with God and so with all of creation.
Book Four: Discovering the Hidden Ground of Love
Leads participants to explore the power of love and to embrace God as love and ultimate source of our very being.
Book Five: Traveling Your Road to Joy
Participants examine joy in its innumerable facets. Joy is not a reward for our practice but is always a no-strings gift of the Holy Spirit, mediated through all the events of our lives. It is not a state of being, but the wholehearted embrace of the divine presence.
Book Six: Writing Yourself into the Book of Life
To live contemplatively is to embrace the realization that whatever we do and whomever we are, constitute a testimony of love that we are writing for loved ones and neighbors to read. Participants reflect together on their own book of life that they write in every day.
Book Seven: Adjusting Your Life's Vision
Thomas Merton knew that the only way to change the world is by changing individual people. Participants adjust their visions of life to encompass constant compassion and self-giving love.
Book Eight: Seeing That Paradise Begins Now
Thomas Merton believed that the gates of paradise are all around us. Participants discover where those gates are and how to open them.
Each booklet is 64 pages.
Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was arguably the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, has sold over one million copies and has been translated into over fifteen languages. He wrote over sixty other books and hundreds of poems and articles on topics ranging from monastic spirituality to civil rights, nonviolence, and the nuclear arms race.
Merton was born in Prades, France to a New Zealand-born father and an American-born mother, who were both artists. After a rambunctious youth and adolescence, Merton converted to Roman Catholicism and on December 10th, 1941 he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani, a community of monks belonging to the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (Trappists).
The twenty-seven years he spent in Gethsemani brought about profound changes in his self-understanding. This ongoing conversion impelled him into the political arena, where he became a prominent voice in the peace movement of the 1960s. Referring to race and peace as the two most urgent issues of our time, Merton was a strong supporter of the nonviolent civil rights movement, which he called "certainly the greatest example of Christian faith in action in the social history of the United States." For his social activism Merton endured severe criticism, from Catholics and non-Catholics alike, who assailed his political writings as unbecoming of a monk.
During his last years, he became deeply interested in Asian religions, particularly Zen Buddhism, and in promoting East-West dialogue. It was during a trip to a conference on East-West monastic dialogue that Merton died, in Bangkok on December 10, 1968, the victim of an accidental electrocution.
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