Thomas Merton's three epiphanies

Theology Today, Apr 1999 by Commins, Gary

1For accounts of the Havana epiphany, see Patrick Hart, ed., Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation; The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume One, 1939-1941 (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995) 216-9; and Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (Garden City, NY: Image, 1948), 284-5. For accounts of the Louisville epiphany, see Lawrence Cunningham, ed., A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk's Vocation; The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Three, 1952-1960 (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 181-2; and Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Image, 1965), 156-8. For accounts of the Polonnaruwa epiphany, see Patrick Hart, ed., The Other Side of the Mountain: The End of the Journey; The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Seven, 1968 (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 3224. 2Seven Storey Mountain, 285.

3Thomas Merton, Love and Living (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1979), 19-20.

4Run to the Mountain, 216. 5Ibid., 217. 6Ibid., 218.

7Ibid. Elsewhere, he locates the presence "on the altar," Seven Storey Mountain, 218. 8Ibid. Merton had a fondness for lightning as an image; see "Prayer for Peace," in The Nonviolent Alternative (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1971), 270; and The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1977), l lS IS6. 9Seven Storey Mountain, 285. Ibid., 284.

11 Ibid., 285; and Run to the Mountain, 218.

t2Ibid., 286.

13See the comparison of Merton's language from Havana and Louisville in Gary Commins, Spiritual People, Radical Lives (San Francisco: International Scholars, 1996), 304-5. 14Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New York: New Directions, 1968), 51. 15Run to the Mountain, 218. 16Seven Storey Mountain, 284.

17Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert; sayings from the desert Fathers of the fourth century (New York: New Directions, 1960), 8. Merton insisted that the hermit's existence reminds others what they could see if they could "extricate themselves from the web of myths and fixations" of a "highly artificial society." See Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973), 241. He wrote that contemplative prayer could include a "flash of clarity"; The Ascent to Truth (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 209.

18Thomas Merton, "Cassian: Disposition for Prayer," Credence Cassettes, National Catholic Reporter, 1988.

19Thomas Merton, "The Mystical Life," Credence Cassettes. 2Seven Storey Mountain, 285. See also Louis Bouyer, Women Mystics (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993), 118.

2'Seven Storey Mountain, 320, 318, 325.

22A Search for Solitude, 182. This journal entry is elaborated in Merton's more famous account in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 156. 23Love and Living, 25-37, especially 25-7. Emphasis in original. 24Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 312.

25Thomas Traherne, Centuries (Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1960), 110. 26Robert Daggy, ed., Introductions East and West: The Foreign Prefaces of Thomas Merton (Greenboro, NC: Unicorn, 1981), 44.