Portable Merton from Inksinger

A little over a year ago, a generous friend bought me A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals. A Year with…Merton has proven to be a great
companion, so much so that I wondered if there was an audio version. I could then listen to each day’s meditation while I was riding my bike to work.

What would Merton, if the monk were alive today, think about his words being broadcast from an iPod? I hadn’t thought of the irony of that until now…
So yesterday I emailed the editor of the book, Jonathan Montaldo. I thanked him for editing such a swell collection of journal entries and asked if there was an audio version. more

What is the real face of Thomas Merton? From The Real Merton. This is a very interesting site. Worth seeing and pondering.

"When he painted the portrait of his friend Merton standing near the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, Ed Rice deliberately blanked out Tom's face. He confessed to being confused. Over the years, the scholars, the followers, publishers, the church itself, had drawn a portrait that was unrecognizable, that of a plastic saint, a monk interested mainly in pulling nonbelievers, and believers in other faiths, into the one true religion. This was not the Merton that his friends from younger days and later days, Jim Knight and Ed Rice, knew. Merton was eminently human. He honored, and reached out to other faiths. He loved, he laughed. In essence he was a poet, who used words to help us understand the thousands of things we need to understand. This is his portrait, as recalled by his very close friends." Jim Knight link

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