Praying Daily Blog

This morning from Merton-L (a listserv dedicated to conversations concerning Thomas Merton), I received from Jim Forest the following notice , and trusting it’s all right to do so, wish to share it with you.   Reminding us that today is the 41st anniversary of the death of Thomas Merton, Jim provides an extended quotation from the last few pages of the revised edition of his Living With Wisdom: A Life of Thomas Merton:
 
* * *

In the decades since his death, far from fading from memory,
Thomas Merton seems to have influenced even more people than he
did while he was alive.

Not only do a great many of his books remain in print, but many
new, posthumous collections have been published. These include
his complete journals (seven volumes, plus an additional volume,
The Intimate Merton, with journal highlights) and five substantial
collections of letters, along with numerous exchanges of letters
giving both side of the correspondence — Bob Lax, Jean Leclercq,
James Laughlin, Czeslaw Milosz, Rosemary Ruether and others.
Various series of conferences presented to young monks in his
charge, originally circulated only in mimeographed form, are now
available as books. What might please him most was the recent
publication of two still-timely books that had once been banned by
his Abbot General: Peace in the Post-Christian Era and Cold War
Letters. Also now available is a book he wrote and rewrote many
times, but never quite finished: The Inner Experience. (Yet even
now not everything he wrote for publication has appeared in print,
including Art and Worship.)

Merton bibliographer Patricia Burton tells me that, since 1948, the
average number of Merton editions, re-issues, and new publications
per annum worldwide had been fifteen.

A good many of Merton’s books are available not only in English
but in twenty-nine other languages, including Dutch, French,
German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian,
Spanish and Swedish.

Besides his writings, many of Merton’s works of art and
photographs have also become much better known. The Thomas
Merton Center has created a collection of Merton’s photos that has
traveled as far from Louisville as Avila, Spain, and Vienna, Austria.

Apart from Merton’s own books, which in our house fill more than
three shelves, there are many books by other authors that are either
about Merton or refer to him in a substantial way. In our case, with a
collection far from complete, these currently take up another two
shelves.

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