New Seeds of Contemplation

Thomas Merton

New Directions Publishing, 1972 - Contemplation - 297 pages

This edition is a much-enlarged and revised version of Seeds of Contemplation, one of the late Father Thomas Merton's most widely read and best-loved works. In its original form, the book was reprinted ten times in this country alone, and has been translated into more than a dozen languages, including Chinese and Japanese. Christians and non-Christians alike have joined in praising it as a notable successor in the meditative tradition of St. John of the Cross, The Cloud of Unknowing, and the medieval mystics, while others have compared Merton's reflections with those of Thoreau. New Seeds of Contemplation seeks to awaken the dormant inner depths of the spirit so long neglected by Western man, to nurture a deeply contemplative and mystical dimension in our spiritual lives. For Father Merton, "Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity and love."

Contents

• WHAT IS CONTEMPLATION? I: 1
• WHAT CONTEMPLATION IS NOT: 6
• SEEDS OF CONTEMPLATION: 14
• EVERYTHING THAT IS IS HOLY: 21
• THINGS IN THEIR IDENTITY: 29
• PRAY FOR YOUR OWN DISCOVERY: 37
• UNION AND DIVISION: 47
• SOLITUDE IS NOT SEPARATION: 52
• WE ARE ONE MAN: 64
• IO A BODY OF BROKEN BONES: 70
• LEARN TO BE ALONE: 80
• THE PURE HEART: 84
• THE MORAL THEOLOGY OF THE DEVIL: 90
• INTEGRITY: 98
• SENTENCES: 104
• THE ROOT OF WAR IS FEAR: 112
• HELL AS HATRED: 123
• FAITH: 126

About the author

Born in France, Thomas Merton was the son of an American artist and poet and her New Zealander husband, a painter. Merton lost both parents before he had finished high school, and his younger brother was killed in World War II. Something of the ephemeral character of human endeavor marked all his works, deepening the pathos of his writings and drawing him close to Eastern, especially Buddhist, forms of monasticism. After an initial education in the United States, France, and England, he completed his undergraduate degree at Columbia University. His parents, nominally friends, had given him little religious guidance, and in 1938, he converted to Roman Catholicism. The following year he received an M.A. from Columbia University and in 1941, he entered Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, where he remained until a short time before his death. His working life was spent as a Trappist monk. At Gethsemani, he wrote his famous autobiography, "The Seven Storey Mountain" (1948); there he labored and prayed through the days and years of a constant regimen that began with daily prayer at 2:00 a.m. As his contemplative life developed, he still maintained contact with the outside world, his many books and articles increasing steadily as the years went by. Reading them, it is hard to think of him as only a "guilty bystander," to use the title of one of his many collections of essays. He was vehement in his opposition to the Vietnam War, to the nuclear arms race, to racial oppression. Having received permission to leave his monastery, he went on a journey to confer with mystics of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. He was accidentally electrocuted in a hotel in Bangkok, Thailand, on December 10, 1968.

Bibliographic information

• Title: New Seeds of Contemplation; Volume 337 of New Directions paperbook
• Author: Thomas Merton
• Edition: reprint, revised
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing, 1972
• ISBN: 081120099X, 9780811200998
• Length: 297 pages