The book 'The Intimate Merton', edited by Brother Patrick Hart and Jonathan Montaldo, is a great encapsulation of the journals which Thomas Merton, monk, writer, activist and spiritual guide (I believe he would eschew the word leader, kept from the time he began considering a vocation (both as a monk and as a writer) to the time of his death nearly thirty years later.

The book is broken into sections reflective of Merton's monastic life. Each section is composed of selections, representative and/or significant, from his regular daily journals. Merton actually kept voluminous journals (published in seven thick volumes), much of which served as a basis and self-reflective sounding board for his other writings. This book is a user-friendly spiritual autobiography, distilled from the wisdom gained over twenty-nine years of teaching, prayer, reflection, prayer, writing, prayer, activity, and yet more prayer.

Merton was not (and still is not) universally loved, even by the church and monastic hierarchies who claim him as a shining example of one of their own. Merton's life is a quest for meaning, and quest for unity before God of all peoples, and a quest for love. These were not always in keeping with the practices of the church, which found itself more often than Merton cared for embroiled in political action in support of the state, or at least the status quo.

Merton was a Trappist monk. The Trappists derive their name from la Trappe, the sole survivor of a reformed Cistercian order in France about the time of the Revolution. This order of Cistercians (white-robed monks) had fairly strict observances which included the usual monastic trappings of vows of chastity, stability, obedience, poverty -- and a regime of prayer and psalm recitals coupled with daily work and study that is not at all for the faint-hearted (or faint-spirited). It was to this order that Merton pledged himself, in his beginning search for meaning and fulfillment.

'The great work of sunrise again today.
The awful solemnity of it. The sacredness. Unbearable without prayer and worship. I mean unbearable if you really put everything aside and see what is happening! Many, no doubt, are vaguely aware that it is dawn, but they are protected from the solemnity of it by the neutralising worship of their own society, their own world, in which the sun no longer rises and sets.'

Poetry in prose -- this passage, from the section on The Pivotal Years, reflects a searching nearing a conclusion, but still far from grasping, and far from complete. It also reflects the need for sharing, the drive toward caring, the simplest of things in the world, available to all, free of charge -- and most will never take possession.

God is calling in the sunrise. Merton recognises the call. He wants to deliver this sunrise in a package to the world. But he cannot. This is Merton's endless frustration, and the drive to do more, while yet being, as he would say himself, selfish in wanting to grasp it for himself, too. His time in the Hermitage, a time during which he was removed even from the company of fellow monks -- reflects this duality of vocation in Merton. He recognises that in some ways, it is an escape, but other ways, a fulfillment.

Even late in his life, after he was called away from his solitude at the Hermitage, because the world needed him, he was still humble and seeking. After nearly three decades of monastic practice and reflection on the level that Merton had done, one would expect a certain 'expertise' to have permeated his thinking. And yet, he would write:

'I have to change the superficial ideas and judgments I have made about the contemplative religious life, the contemplative orders. They were silly and arbitrary and without faith.'

This, on the basis of one retreat in December of 1967, with laypersons and clerics and monastics outside his Trappist order -- this is his conclusion, his resolute determination to not be boxed in, even by his own thinking. The true search can lead anywhere, even to the conclusion that one has been wrong all along.

And yet, Merton was not wrong. There was value in each of his spiritual discoveries as he discovered them. They still resonate for all of us today.

'Since Hayden Carruth's reprimand I have had more esteem for the crows around here, and I find, in fact, that we seem to get on much more peacefully. Two sat high in an oak beyond my gate as I walked on the brow of the hill at sunrise saying the Little Hours. They listened without protest to my singing of the antiphons. We are part of a menage, a liturgy, a fellowship of sorts.'

Near the end of his life, Merton was becoming more and more one with all around him, with all of God's creation, with nature, with people, with friends and strangers. And yet, he missed his privacy, his time for personal reflection and solitude.

'Everyone now knows where the hermitage is, and in May I am going to the convent of the Redwoods in California. Once I start traveling around, what hope will there be?'

Merton had premonitions that 1968 was a year 'that things are finally and inexorably spelling themselves out', prophetic indeed, for in the same year the world lost Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and Brother Thomas Merton. He never was able to reclaim the solitude, pouring himself out for his friends ('what greater love hath anyone...'), who he counted as the entire world.

May Brother Thomas' journey enlighten your own.

One may wonder why another book on Thomas Merton, one of the most self-chronicled lives of the twentieth century, is needed, but The Intimate Merton serves a valuable purpose. Only academics and fanatical devotees of the famous writer and monk will have the time and interest to read all seven volumes of his personal journals. And yet, as this selection of entries from them demonstrates, Merton's journals are a treasury of autobiographical revelation, psychological honesty, and spiritual insight.

Just a few of the more memorable entries justify the book. These include an hilarious account of Merton the non-driver taking a jeep for a spin, a beautiful description of a night watch as a dark night of the soul, and Merton's sober yet grateful meditations on his 50th birthday.

Nevertheless, it is the sweep of years, the chronicle of a soul, that make these meditations most interesting. The Intimate Merton wisely focuses on the journal entries from the 1960s, material not covered by The Seven Storey Mountain and other earlier works. Thus we see a self-portrait of the older Merton wrestling with his need to be an individual versus his need to love and be loved, fitfully learning to accept his failures and to appreciate the gifts of others, and searching for his home in this world and beyond.

Thomas Merton was a complicated, Thoreauvian figure who considered himself to be, among other things, an "amateur theologian." Yet an amateur is essentially a lover, and Merton, for all his faults and doubts, was certainly a lover of God. Other lovers of God will enjoy tracing his spiritual journey through these pages.

I've been amazed over the years at how many people see themselves when they read something by Thomas Merton. What was it about this man? Women, Protestants, the unchurched, all sorts of people who are outwardly nothing like him, yet feel a strange, strong kinship. People have even told me what Merton would be doing if he were alive right now, as if they could know!
Reading this volume I understood anew how this is so. Merton wrote his soul, he wrote his life. We ARE THERE as we read it. I actually find answers to some of my life questions as I share the life of this Trappist monk. Many other people do, too.
This book is helpful because it puts so much of Thomas Merton's life between its covers. And, easy as he is to befriend, he is endlessly mysterious, perhaps just because he reveals so much. So many threads - what a complex and endearing man.

review by Janet Knori, author of Awakening in God

At the end of The Seven Story Mountain, Merton records his understanding of what God was
telling him as he continued as a young monk. The final passage in the book reads, in part, "But
you shall taste the true solitude of My anguish and My poverty and I shall lead you into the high
places of my joy and you shall die in Me and find all things in My mercy which has created you
for this end. . . That you may become the brother of God and learn to know the Christ of the
burnt men." And that is how Merton died, a burnt man in a monastic habit on a bathroom floor in
Thailand, electrocuted by a faulty fan switch as he stepped out of the shower. Eerie how things
work out sometimes. The Asian Journals record the end--spiritual as well as temporal--of
Merton's journey, and I tend to think that he found what he was looking for. I like to think he did,
and when I visited Gethsemani myself, it was the Asian Journal, even more than Thoughts in
Solitude, that convinced me of this. Of course, Merton had all but left Gethsemani behind when
he took down the Journals; there is speculation that he was at some point going to ask his abbot
to approve him staying in Asia as a hermit of some sort, and the fruits of that adventure in
following God are lost to us, among so much else that was lost when we lost Fr. Louis, our
Thomas Merton.

The Asian Journal is many things. It is both a travelogue and a tribute to place, strangely
comparable to Matthiessen's Snow Leopard or Merwin's Lost Upland. It is a record left by one of
the greatest Christian spiritual mentors of the 20th century of visits with two of the most
important Buddhist spiritual mentors of the 20th century, the current Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat
Hanh. It is a sustained rhapsody on both Hinduism and Theravada Buddhism by a Christian
monastic most influenced in his "Eastern path" by Rinzai Zen and Confucianism. It is a fairly
good work of Buddhist art criticism, particularly if you are interested in comparative
iconography. But more than all this, it is just Merton, plain and simple. It is unvarnished, the man
knew he was no saint, though he also knew he was looked upon as such by an increasing number
of people. This from a man who wrote on the back of his ordination card the passage from
Genesis referring to Enoch, "He walked with God and was seen no more, for God took him"!
Merton wanted a deeper solitude. He found it, and eventually found it in death, in Asia. All this,
and more, is recorded in Merton's Asian Journal. His account of his final enlightenment
experience at Polonnaruwa, when he writes "I mean, I know and have seen what I was obscurely
looking for," is alone worth the price of the book. It is easily Merton's most personal work,
though much unlike the multi-volume set of journals published after the restrictions in Merton's
will ran out. Seven Story Mountain was also personal, but was written by a precociously brilliant
young writer still in the somewhat triumphalistic flush of his conversion to Roman Catholicism.
The Asian Journals are, quite literally, the last things Merton ever wrote, and in them he is at the
height of his powers, and he is deep into the divine mystery of God when he writes these
journals, even when he is joking about parrots or Indian food. Throw in all the photos taken by
Merton himself (the man experiences dai kensho and still has the presence of mind to take
pictures of the reclining Buddhas!?) and the documents relating to his death, and there is no
excuse for a lover of Merton's life and teachings not to own this book.

One simply never tires of reading Thomas Merton. The Asian Journal provides a remarkably poignant and tireless encampment with one of the remarkable men of letters of the 20th century. The text is colored throughout with Merton's search for a place of greater solitude (his dissatisfaction on many levels with the cheese factory his beloved Gethsemani abbey had become being well known for some time before his death) -the redwoods of California, possibly Alaska- and as the journal progresses one begins to feel in his words a kind of prescient kinship with his own accidental death, occurring, of course, in Bangkok before he had completed his Asian pilgrimage. The appendices are priceless - the characteristic sweetness of his informal talk on monasticism given at Calcutta, and the remarkable lecture on Marxism and Monastic Perspectives with its prophetic last sentence "So I will disappear". Free of polemics, so giving in its human searching, this is, once again, essential Merton.

I guess not many folks have read this extremely intelligent book. Merton's close readings of many giants of literature from his Christian perspective are illuminating. My personal favorite is his reading of Camus. It would have been fantastic if these two could have sat down and spoken to one another! While I am not into orthodox or fundamentalist Christianity, I fully agree with Merton's perspectives, and he has nourished my spirituality with his writing. As an English major he has altered and illuminated my readings of these great authors. I think that this, along with "The New Man" and His "Asian Journals" provide the most in depth, intelligent, mature writings of Merton at the height of his powers. Incidently, "The New Man" is largely based on his reading of Camus and the Romantics, and he provides a perspective that is missing from the many critical perspectives that have been offered, even up til now.

Apart from the gospels and new testament,this is,THE,most rewarding book i have ever read.It stresses with clarity the fundamental importance of becoming aware of our true identity in christ,and equally important of becoming aware of our false self,the self rooted in the ego.The book is a wake up call for all those who would see the spiritual life as a process of self agrandizement.With it's raw honesty and gentleness one gradually becomes ever more aware of just how important the issue of identity is in the spiritual life,and the huge importance merton ascribed to it.This book is a threat to the ego and it's hollow and false little world,that it creates in it's rivalry with god.I advise all christians to read and reread this beautiful book,even if at times,it becomes a little tough.

This book successfully pulls off the difficult trick of being both a serious scholarly text and an enormously engaging introduction to the history and architecture of Crusader castles for the lay reader. The book is an obvious labor of love, which helps to account for its great charm. You first get a sense of this on the dedication page - "For Xana, with love, to remind her of Syrian days" - whereby Kennedy expresses his appreciation for his daughter's companionship on his rovings around Syria. (In his "Acknowledgements," he also credits his daughter with persuading him "to complete the climb to Bourzey when the spirit was willing but the flesh was getting a bit weak.")

If you needed any further confirmation that Kennedy is a scholar with a puckish sense of humor and a droll wit, you get it at the beginning of his "Note on Names," where he wryly observes that, "Like the naming of cats, the naming of Crusader castles is a complicated problem." Kennedy's writing voice conjures to mind images of a cozy library in some great English country house, where your host relaxes in a satin smoking jacket while both of you swirl brandy in your snifters and discourse about the comparative merits of crumbling castles on the western fringes of Asia. The book's first chapter - a survey of the development of Crusader castle studies from the mid-nineteenth century to the present - beautifully encapsulates Kennedy's discursive style and story-telling skills. "[Emmanuel Guillaume] Rey's life is something of a mystery," he muses, and you want to lean forward from your chair on the opposite side of the fireplace and say, "Tell me more." And he does, with an notable eye for the memorable quote, such as T.E. Lawrence's ironic complaint, while traveling around the Levant in 1909, that he was unable to reach Amman owing to "the unthinking activity of some local Bedawin in tearing up the Hejaz railway."

In form, the book consists of a generally chronological survey of the development of the Crusader castle, with individual chapters on siege warfare and the special features of (respectively) the castles of Templars, Teutonic knights, Hospitallers, and the Muslim princes. Another sign of Kennedy's passionate engagement with this project is the fact that he took all of the 90-some color and black-and-white photographs that illustrate the book himself. (There are also another two dozen plans, sketches, and prints illustrating the text.)

The photographs, together with Kennedy's text, cover not only the well-known structures like Krak des Chevaliers, Belvoir, Saone, and Montfort, but will also introduce you to a fascinating collection of lesser-known castles. Among these are the great Hospitaller citadel of Marqat, near the Syrian coast; the two castles overlooking ancient Petra; and - most curious of all - the cave-castle of al-Halbis Jaldak overlooking the Yarmuk River valley, the subject of a siege memorably described by the twelfth-century historian William of Tyre (which Kennedy helpfully quotes in its entirety). Kennedy's enthusiasm also extends to the humbler fortified towers of the lesser Latin nobility.

Kennedy's secret is plainly that he is both a scholar and a romantic - as anyone who wishes to write effectively about the Crusades should probably be. Let me close this review by quoting his own explanation for his enterprise in producing this book:

"There is something fascinating and frequently moving about forlorn and failed enterprises, those 'old, forgotten far-off things and battles long ago,' however perverse they may now seem. It is impossible for me to stand on the windswept battlements of Crac des Cevaliers, climb to the remote crags of the fortress overlooking Petra or explore the magical stillness of the deserted valley by Bourzey, without feeling a potent mixture of admiration and nostalgia which breathes excitement and emotional commitment into scholarship."

This book can be enthusiastically recommended to history buffs and armchair travelers, as well as to those with a more scholarly basis for their interest.

Voila, the compacted dithers of mutton & larks! Ecco, predicted lathers of metro & lux! Lo, the monastic matters of mirrors & lakes! Zounds, the hermetic spiels of motor & locks! Behold, the gathered deepistles of monachus & littera! Witness the mighty phrasings of miracle lustrum! All hail the bibliotickles, viva the dublintenders, long live the fortunetells of hoy & halloo! Heed the prophetic warblings of minus & linus! Lament the bombastic tangles of mittwoch & letznacht! Observe the respected nightingales, doves & coulombians. Celebrate the valiantimes scattered by freundlich & freud! Three cheers for the bandied ampersands of max & louie, the mingled missives of joyful eremites.

This is Thomas Merton's journal covering his years teaching literature at St. Bonaventure's college in New York. It concludes as Merton is on the cusp of making a decision to enter the Trappist Order.

As for the contents of the journal, you will need to be a bit patient. Because this is a journal, even though abridged, you will have to slog through a lot of Merton's thoughts on certain poets, writers etc.

The interesting thing is that it gives some insight on Merton as an intellectual. But at this stage in his life, he doesn't seem comfortable in that skin. In fact, he often laments his arrogance and wonders whether any of these things (i.e., book reviews, articles in the Times) are really all that worth discussing in the first place.

A great deal of the material, particularly towards the end, is material that you will find repeated in Seven Storey Mountain. It would appear to me that Merton took a good read through his journal when he sat down to write Seven Storey Mountain. Of course, the journal is not polished, but it is every bit as fascinating as Seven Storey Mountain.

I also found Merton's thoughts on WWII, as it ravaged Europe, quite fascinating. A significant portion of this journal involves thoughts on war and what it means to be in a war; whether we should fight wars.

In sum, this journal is largely a reflection on literature, coversion, and war. If you are a fan of Merton, read this immediately. If you haven't really been exposed to Merton, read Seven Storey Mountain first and then return to the journal.

As for me, I give it four stars!

A good friend of mine sent me all seven volumes of Merton's journals. It was a gift of immeasurable worth and value. I will no doubt still be reading through these wonderful books for years to come.

Having just finished the first volume, "Run to the Mountain," I stand in awe of the sheer depth and scope of the life we've each been given. The life presented here, that of Thomas Merton, is remarkable in many ways. "Run to the Mountain" is the chronicle of the years when he started instructing English in college up to his entry at the Trappist monastery in Gethsemani Kentucky.

Beyond the external events of his times (the late thirties and forties) lies the bigger story of Merton's eternal destiny. Not since my own salvation have I encountered a story which so clearly illustrates God's pursuing love and grace. The reader can palpably feel Merton being called by God in these pages.

It is quite tempting to imagine what might have become of Merton had he not heeded his call. These pages (and most of his later works) make clear his incredible power as a writer. It is not hard to imagine that he would have become at least as, if not more famous than Jack Kerouac, his fellow student at Columbia. It is one of the great "what ifs" (and there are several) of Merton's life.

It is a great thing to be able to read about Thomas Merton's journey--to see him be changed and opened. It is an even greater privilege to take his thoughts and words with me on my own journey. This is one gift I am trully grateful for. Get this book. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

An outstanding account of the beginning of a vocation. From the first stirrings of spirituality to the full fleged desire to enter a monastery, Fr. Merton records his faith and doubts, his triumphs and disasters, his hopes and fears. His writing is eloquent yet simple. And his style becomes more free and prayerful as he comes closer to entering the Trappist monastery at Gethsemani. A wonderful book to feed and encourage the soul of anyone on a spiritual journey.

This is not a book to learn about Thomas Merton the thelogian, Thomas Merton the literary figure, or Thomas Merton the Catholic monk. In these pages, you learn from a close friend about Merton the human being.

Seitz takes pains to recall Merton's gestures, speech patterns and poeticism so the reader can sense why the Trappist monk was an imposing world figure: because he lived and perceived the world in a remarkable, creative, insightful, intelligent, earthy, human way.

But this is Seitz's book, not Merton's. By the final pages, you get a sense of what Seitz lost when Merton died in Bangkok, 1968. And through his sad remembrance, you feel what the world lost too.

Ron Seitz is a poet who was befriended by Thomas Merton during the last 10 years Of Mertons life. He recorded this "memory vision" about Merton, and it is a delight. He wonders early on why Merton seeks him out and confides in him, then a series of meetings over the final 10 years of his life are explained, full of imagery and delightful wordplay between the two poets. Setz is firm in his belief that Merton was first and foremost a poet, and a poet of the first order, and this is where the initial identification tales place. They became so close that it was Seitz who drove Merton to the Louisville airport as he began his "Asian Journey" which eventually led to his all to early death in Thailand on Dec 10th, 1968. The volume is illustrated with many photographs by the author, and decribes some delightful anecdotal moments. Meton at a jazz club with the author and his wife, The author trying to impress Mertons publisher, the legendary j. laughlin of New Directions{and failing,miserably, until a wonderful musical moment brings it all together], merton and seitz meeting the wonderful minimalist poet {and Mertons best frind] Robert Lax, Merton doing an impromptu dance with Seitz three children around the dinner table to a Jimmy smyth organ piece,and toher such memories.Mention is made of the affair Merton had with margie Smith, a young nurse who attended him in a Louisville hospital after back surgery,without anything salacious... Seitz is a good writer,his memories are heartfelt and above all honest, and has honored his friend by this book. And us, too.

I am an afficionado of books about monasteries and convents and the contemplative life in general. As such I was excited about getting an indepth look at the Trappist Abbey, Gethsemani. Unfortunately it was a much more simplistic description of abbey life than I had expected. Except for the detailed and good description of lectio divina, the text was pretty superficial. I especially hoped to find explanations of how 25 disparate men could learn to live together peaceably over the long term. The book told me that this was indeed a challenge for folks who have committed to never leaving, but the author never got into the kinds of interactions that moved the monks toward unity and those that disrupted the process. I was disappointed.

I don't know that this would be a very good description for
"Making a Heart for God." I see it more as a glimpse at what
life is like at the Abbey of Gethsemani. It is bits and pieces
of what the author has seen and heard while on retreat. It is
something to give the reader just a taste of what the life must
be like for the monks. As such, it told me quite a bit. If I
would want more, I would most likely look for something written
by a monk who lives in such an abbey. That would be more likely
to have the details about day to day life.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Of course, as a couple of the other comments pointed out, this book is not an in-depth presentation of life in a trappist monastery. But it is not pretending to be such a thing. This book gives a nice taste of life in the monastery for a monk and for a retreatant. You get just enough of the taste of the history of this monastery to whet your appetite for more.
If you're interested in more, the author has a large, photo-illustrated history of Gethsemani. There are other books on trappist monasteries as well. If you've ever been to Gethsemani and had the pleasure to hear Fr. Matthew's evening talks, you'll want to look for some of the books of his writings. Matthew Kelty is his name.

Also, I have read another book in this same series (A Week Inside) on a Buddhist Monastery. Very very interesting. As with Making a Heart for God, it gives you enough of a taste of Buddhism, the monastery itself and a retreat inside the monastery to whet your appetite for more.

I hope to find more books in this series.

I would suggest this book to the scholar anxious to follow Merton's life story ,but it is certainly not a book for those interested in developing their christian faith and needing a book to help them know the Lord more.It is so full of contradictions,I am not even sure that it represents an adequate picture of firm christian life , let alone monastic life.I would imagine that his experimentation with so many other forms of spiritually led him to lose his identity.And what of the statement in the previous volume that he was to remain faithful to "M" all his life.A year later he was burning her letters without even opening them!A rather open form of fidelity! The book is probably a must for historical scholars,but for those wishing to find a book that steers the pilgrim in the rough and tumble of spiritual life, this book is not for you!

I found this book at my local "Catholic" bookstore and it re-arranged my head for the better. After being a pretty regular journal writer, I found myself completely taken with the "place" that Merton created as he wrote day-to-day. I discovered that I simply "lost track" of about four decades of my life......either that or his style and words brought me so completely into my past and present that time lost all meaning and I was both myself now and myself then. Since I read his last journal as my introduction to Thomas Merton in general, I have read several of his journals.......I still cannot believe that he died in Thailand when I was in high school since I feel his
presence in Fall River MA each night as I write in my own little book....must be the sign of a truly awesome writer.

Patricia Walsh

As an avid Thomas Merton fan who owns almost every book this Trappist monk ever wrote, I have been eagerly anticipating each new volume of the Merton journals as they have been released over the past few years. This final volume is the last in a simply superlative set, every volume of which is a "must have" for any Merton devotee.

As the books are journals that were not really intended for publication, the voice is not "Thomas Merton, Best-Selling Author and Religious Thinker". The voice we hear now is "Thomas Merton, Sinner Just Like the Rest of You, But Doing the Best He Can". And the bottom line is that I really like this voice! I like Merton! Not just the best-selling author Merton, but the every-day guy Merton - who makes mistakes, gets angry or even irratible, and sins in spite of himself.

Highly recommended for any Merton fan, but also of interest to religious scholars and biographers (the books are well indexed) and even everyday folks who are merely interested in the life and times of a Trappist monk in the 20th century.