Silence and Solitude - Journey with Merton

 

You rest in Him, and He heals you with His secret wisdom.
- Thomas Merton

I took my book - The Seven Storey Mountain -  out on a lunch date, complete with a cute heart-shaped straw in my iced matcha. With the Valentine's Day straw vibe and a red covered book, I was playing into the colours of the month, yet what I was reading was about love different from the way culture celebrates it on Feb 14. It was about love that leads to God, pointing to Him through everything that was created by their being.

This book is the spiritual autobiography of Thomas Merton and his journey into the Catholic Church and then the decision to become a Trappist Monk - taking place in the 1920s-1940s. But his journey is not smooth or expected. It is full of turbulence, loss, and bad choices - faltering, taking the easy road, living deeply in the world and acting fully selfish and seeking his own desires. This is the way we all live if we don't give ourselves and our desires to God. But it's a journey. We are caught in our own cycle of selfish living, spiraling downward deeper into what we think is love, but are greatly mistaken. 

When Merton was deliberating back and forth if he should be a priest, he wavered a lot. He visited monasteries, thought he knew, left, didn't think he knew, talked with priests for council, was more confused, he prayed. He danced around what he ultimately wanted all along through his young adult life - silence and solitude. He kept avoiding it, it seemed, by getting distracted with other things that came along. He ultimately felt most free behind the walls of the monastery, when he finally decided to join the Abbey of Gethesmani in Kentucky. 

Merton learned what love was - the disinterested love of God that gives and is fulfilled never lacking. He learned how easy it was to fall prey to the devil's snares, as it caught him over and over as he wrestled with his decisions. He felt the pull of the church, specifically the Catholic Church, but it took him a long while to join. "Why are you waiting?" was the voice he heard. Joyfully he entered in and found what he was missing and chasing all along.

I understand why this was a bestseller and still draws readers. We can all see ourselves in his journey. The wrong paths we take, ignoring the call toward God to pursue your own desires. It is a wrestling journey, and it gives us hope. The last part of the book is so clear-minded and desirous for God, it's beautiful to read. And inspiring.

Merton leaves us with many passages to contemplate on, to help us in our own journey:

The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows, not by clarity and substance but by dreams and creatures of psychosis. 

What are you doing with your time?

 

What are you doing with your time?

I think about this from a daily notion. How we have a limited number of hours each day and how our decisions, which may be conscious or unconscious (like a routine), shapes this. If I constantly feel I have so little time in my day and it's not a lack of leading a simple life, what is it? It's allowing distractions to enter in, throwing off the time here and there adding up to loss of hours.

Søren Kierkegaard wrote that "the person who employs himself solely with the eternal, uninterruptedly, at every moment, if that were possible: he is not busy...To be busy is to be divided and distracted." (Works of Love)

Kierkegaard describes how one who is divided is not whole. Obvious, right? We are too busy to notice it most of the time. Especially now, as our culture is made up of distractions, we allow ourselves in the name of 'self-care' to be taken to the extreme, taking us away into whatever worldly distraction it is with aim at addicting you. It comes in endless forms.

But Kierkegaard ponders the way of love, true Christian love in the charity, agape, self-less, disinterested way, and concludes that when we are in full Christian love, we are whole and even though we are doing activities, it's not departed from its true meaning, it is the fulfillment of it. And it's not self-satisfied or making promises instead of taking action.

I ponder within myself when I feel overwhelmed and busy - what am I being distracted with? Social media is usually a contender, but it's not always the top distractor for me so I have to look deeper. It can be anything that takes your focus off the eternal. Meaning, it takes departure to selfish satisfaction and inward dwelling with focus on the selfish wants and desires to their full extent. The desires may not be in themselves bad things, but if it's measured out in doses that distract from the meaning of it from the eternal perspective, it is a distraction and you are divided.

Encouragement for keeping focus on love in the agape sense toward others and wholeness in the sense of our eternal focus - 

Cultivate and study the good, the true, and the beautiful

If we truly focused on the three transcendentals, it would lead us to wholeness because these things all point us to the eternal. They are signposts that direct us to God. The point is to allow these things to direct us to God.

How to cultivate the good, the true, and the beautiful -

Ask yourself with everything you consume - books, media, music, movies, TV, games, activities - are these things I focus my time on pursuing the good, the true, or the beautiful? Do they lead you to ponder the eternal? Or do they encourage you to think more selfishly? Does it produce good to partake in it? Does it promote beauty from an eternal (not worldly) perspective? Does it speak some objective truth to you?

The activities that you can answer "yes" to that they are aiming at the good, the true, and the beautiful with that eternal view. These are the things worth pursuing. Whatever your interests, look for the eternal perspective and follow it. When you spend your time here you are less distracted by all the things the world wants you to pay attention to, and you are not divided because of these other things that pull you away from such focus.

25º

 

25º

Northwind air has come
Cruel in its icy chill
Bringing sharpness into my home
Abiding in its own weather-will.

The air too cold for skin
Brings winter in its true form
Artic weather more akin
To peaks of mountains forlorn.

We are on the flat sea sands
But winds travel from far
At the back of the north wind stands
Like a ray of light from a star.

Freshly Printed - Oxford Literarium

 

Look how beautiful this cover is! I can't get over how gorgeous the Radcliffe Camera is, which is why I decided to place it front and center on the cover of my new book - Oxford Literarium: Oxford Writers in Time and Place. Available now on Amazon.

The Radcliffe Camera is part of the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford. It is one of the most beautiful spaces in which to read, work, and write. It houses the History Faculty Library. It plays an important role in the lives of the writers I visit with through the book for they would have used the Bodleian Library in different ways along with their college library, and it played a key role in my own research there at the Bodleian. I spent probably 40-50% of my library time there at the Radcliffe Camera. I'd research books to find, treasure hunt them (usually held down underground in the Gladstone Link stacks), then I'd bring them up to the upper Rad Cam to read. The other ~50% of my library time was mostly split in the Old Bodleian, the Duke Humfrey's Library, and the Weston Library Manuscripts Reading Room.

If you are interested in history, authors (like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, Dorothy L. Sayers), Oxford, libraries, learning, poetry, connecting ideas across time, then you'll find this book interesting. As I researched connections these authors had I found more, and it led me to more trails to follow in a purely delightful path of discovery. I take you along the journey through this book, and visit with these authors in Oxford specifically to see how it impacted them. This book was a joy to research and write. I hope you'll find it interesting. 

I hope you will pick up a copy today! 

Oxford Literarium - Book Release!

 

Happy 2026! The best way to start a new year - With a new book!

I am thrilled to announce that my newest book is now available - published on Amazon.

Oxford Literarium: Oxford Writers in Time and Place

This book is a labor of love and research. Filled with authors who lived, taught, wrote, thought, and experienced Oxford in different ways, such as:

C.S. Lewis
J.R.R. Tolkien
Dorothy L. Sayers
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Lewis Carroll
Evelyn Waugh
Robert Burton
And More!

I had the immense privilege to live in Oxford for most of March 2025 where I spent everyday in the Bodleian Libraries reading books and viewing manuscripts and letters from these amazing authors. It was a great dream of mine to research in the Bodleian Libraries. I got to live across the street from the Radcliffe Camera (part of the Bodleian) where I walked into the quadrangle every morning with my coffee, stepped inside the library to warm up and treasure hunt the books to read that day. 

You will journey with me on my travels as I experience the Bodleian during my research and the places associated or visited by these authors (colleges, pubs, libraries, gardens). I explore how these authors are connected in surprising ways across space and time. In my research, finding those connections in my reading was such a joy. To see how some authors knew each other, some referenced older authors, led a similar youth journey, or were inspired by each other's writings.

It is a bit frightening to share one's writings with the world, but I believe when we are given an ounce of a talent and the passion to put something that promotes good, it is meant to be shared. The power comes through the sharing and the talking with others about it or about some concept explored through it. I hope you will check it out, and if you have any interest in any of these authors you'll pick it up out of curiosity. You might learn something and share in an appreciation of the place Oxford and its many amazing writers.

You can check it out and purchase a copy on AMAZON

If you read my new book, I'd love if you left a review!