The feeling inside of me sometimes that I call God is very much inside of me today.  It’s a mix of joy, glow and meaning.

I was reading a book sent to me last week.

It was mailed to me by a woman I have never met or spoken with – Sister Lucy, a Catholic church nun.

She sent me a book that I had read some years ago but had lost and forgotten.

Re-reading it – it’s the “New Seeds Of Contemplation” by the Trappist Thomas Merton, I remember how important it was to me.  I spent a year on a mountain (2000) in contemplation of my life while studying the books and journals of Merton, who died years ago in a freak hotel electrical accident.

The experience – I wrote a book about it called Running To The Mountain – changed my life.

What a loss Merton’s death was.

But I am grateful to him all the time, usually every day. He was my prophet of change, solitude, faith, and contemplation. And he was dead long before I read his brilliant works.

 

 

It was the perfect book for me. Merton was deeply religious, but he was careful to write not only for the converted or Christian faithful but for people who just wanted some faith and grace in their lives.

People like me.

“The book,” he wrote in the preface,” has no other end or idea in view than what should be the ordinary fullfillment of the  Christian life of grace. Therefore everything said here can be applied to anyone, not only in the monastery but also in the world.”

This book was prescient; it was almost as if he foresaw the abandonment of his clear understanding of the Christian ethic for the new and cancerous and destructive Christian ethos, not of grace, but of political power, money,  domination, and bigotry.

Like the country, so much of Christianity often seems to have shed its sense of morality and compassion and turned angry and cruel like our politics.

I’m sorry I missed the Merton Christianity, but grateful for the guide to grace. I know it still exists in many Christians, but they seem to have been outshouted.

I have no idea how Sister Lucy understood why this book was essential to me; she did give a clue in her humbling handwritten letter, stuffed into the book, and she meant a great deal to me.

Letters like that go right into my heart.

“Jon, I Thought you might like some more books on  Thomas Merton. God bless you for all you do for so many – your writing, your work at Bishop Gibbons, and the Mansion. You are special, Sister Lucy.”

You are pretty special, Sister Lucy, to send me that book. God bless you.