How Thomas Merton Brought Us Together

Letters to the editor

How Thomas Merton Brought Us Together

Franklin O’Connor, Nanaimo

Volume 38  Issue 1, 2, & 3 | Posted: April 2, 2023

The Editor:

Thomas Merton brought my dear, dear Louise and me together. And she brings all the parts of my life, from conception to death and beyond death together.

Tennyson put it all together nicely in one line in his poem “Ulysses” –
I am part of all that I have met.”

It all starts at our conception, when we receive the genes and DNA we have from our biological parents, and it continues to what our belief systems (religious and atheist) suggest about God as Pure Spirit, Pure Matter or Pure Mystery.

My dear, dear Louise and I had a serendipitous moment, a week or so after we first met, near the end of 1978. We were standing in front of a bookstore window on Broadway in Vancouver. I pointed out a Merton book to Louise – Zen and the Birds of Appetite. Right away Louise wanted a copy. And I realized, at that moment, she was the right one for me. We married the next year.

Louise wrote the following about Thomas Merton: “The first book of his I read was Zen and the Birds of Appetite. Always intrigued with the Zen concept of contemplative life, I needed little encouragement to read it. Excitement, sheer happiness and joy surged through my being at his words. This was inspiration, reading with a total difference!

“Thomas Merton was a Trappist Monk and an ordained priest. By his own admission, he was not purely and simply a ‘spiritual writer.’

“An acquaintance with the impressive results of his twenty-five years of writing shows one that he tends his craft with the natural flair of genius. At last I had found really sensible insight into the fundamental issues of life, death, time, love, sorrow, fear, wisdom, suffering and eternity.

“His words brought me into increased awareness of the interior life. The emptiness I had lived with since my husband’s death lost its grip. I began to care again, even to enjoy food again. At that time, Merton’s influence became my only health. My suffering turned into a creative growing period and the builder was Merton. His view of the issues on which he wrote was not merely from the cloister of an austere Trappist monastery. After Vatican Council II in the early 1960s, he began travelling the world, speaking at seminars, teaching, and always writing. He understood and enjoyed deep insight into Eastern Religions…”

   

Franklin O’Connor, Nanaimo