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Dilatato Corde 6:1
January - June, 2016 
This is a wonderful little book. First published in 2003, it has now been made available in paperback to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Merton. Excerpts from the book were read frequently during the course of the third Gethsemani Encounter in 2008, when Buddhist and Catholic monks and nuns gathered to reflect on their traditions’ teachings with regard to care and respect for the natural environment. The proceedings of that gathering were published in Green Monasticism. Like Ruth gleaning wheat in the field of Boaz, Kathleen Deignan spent two decades carefully sifting through the writings of Thomas Merton. From one of his works she plucks a comment about a fallen leaf, from another an observation about the wind or the rain, or about the arrival of spring, the snow that blankets everything, the setting sun, the stars that he is able to identify after the night office. Gathering together and arranging these few hundred fragments, she fashioned little anthologies on winter, rain, birds, bees, flowers, mountains, the night. . . . The whole Merton can be found in each of his observations, for every one of them reflects what is in his heart. More than once he notes, “What I see is what I am.” His vision is that of a son of Bernard, a Zen monk, a humble psalmist, a Taoist sage. In amazement, he exclaims “Dominus est!” much like the beloved disciple on the Sea of Galilee at the end of an unsuccessful night of fishing, or like Dom Columba Marmion, who found in these two words of the Gospel the key to the meaning of the most ordinary daily events. On every page the readers meets the same fresh and unpredictable Merton who conveys, almost in spite of himself, his sense of God and of life: “Sense of God all day” (p. 62). |
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