Monday, December 29, 2014

Review: Thomas Merton: Faithful Visionary


Thomas Merton: Faithful Visionary
Thomas Merton: Faithful Visionary by Michael W. Higgins

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This was a well-written, seemingly well-researched book on Thomas Merton.

Although this short biography presents a sympathetic view of the famous monk's life, work and influences, surprisingly, I came away with a very bad taste in my mouth.

From the first instance of Merton's hearing God's call to enter the Our Lady of Gethsemany Trappist Monastery soon after being conscripted for service in 1941, to his constant bickering with the Abbott in charge of the monestary, to his willfulness in continuing to be a celebrity writer while supposedly being a sequestered monk, to his secretely falling in love with a young nurse, I felt Merton's responses to all of these events and situations quite insincere.

What Higgins ultimately presents the reader with is a picture of Merton as a brilliant literary man yearning to be many things, to be the voice of anti-nuclear/pacifism for his generation, to experience a monk's solitary life of devotion to the Church, etc., but only on his own terms. Ultimately he wanted, and always remained, a writer, from his days as a student at Columbia to the questionable circumstances of his death as suicide/accidental death/assination in Japan, Merton wrote.

It seems that everything else in his life only served as material for his writings.



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