A Search for Solitude

Inexorably life moves on towards crisis and mystery. Everyone must struggle to adjust himself to this to face the situation for 'now is the judgment of the world.' In a way each one judges himself merely by what he does. Does not says. Yet let us not completely dismiss words. They do have meaning. They are related to action. They spring from action and they prepare for it they clarify it they direct it. -- Thomas Merton August 16 1961 <P> The fourth volume of Thomas Merton's complete journals one of his final literary legacies springs from three hundred handwritten pages that capture - in candid lively deeply revealing passages - the growing unrest of the 1960s which Merton witnessed within himself as plainly as in the changing culture around him. <P> In these decisive years 1960-1963 Merton now in his late forties and frequently working in a new hermitage at the Abbey of Gethsemani finds himself struggling between his longing for a private spiritual life and the irresistible pull of social concerns. Precisely when he longs for more solitude and convinces himself he could not cut back on his writing Merton begins asking complex questions about the contemporary culture (the 'world' with its funny pants of which I do not know the name its sandals and sunglasses) war and the churches role in society. <P> Thus despite his resistance he is drawn into the world where his celebrity and growing concerns for social issues fuel his writings on civil rights nonviolence and pacifism and lead him into conflict with those who urge him to leave the moral issues to bishops and theologians. <P> This pivotal volume in the Merton journals reveals a man at the height of abrilliant writing career marking the fourteenth anniversary of his priesthood but yearning still for the key to true happiness and grace. Here in his most private diaries Merton is as intellectually curious critical and insightful as in his best-known public writings while he documents his movement from the cloister toward the world from Novice Master to hermit from ironic critic to joyous witness to the mystery of God's plan. <P> Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Trappist monk writer and peace activist. His spiritual classics include New Seeds of Contemplation The Sign of Jonas Mystics and Zen Masters and The Seven Story Mountain