Thomas Merton died in 1968, and almost everything he was most concerned with has become more urgent since. The compulsive performance of identity. The exhaustion of a life organized around achievement and image. The hunger for something that Eastern traditions seemed to offer and Western ones seemed to have forgotten. The question of whether it is possible to live contemplatively without withdrawing from the world entirely. Merton was not ahead of his time. He was simply paying attention to things that most people around him were not yet ready to see.

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This retreat takes Merton as a guide for three interlocking questions that his work never stops circling. The first is the distinction he drew, throughout his writing, between the true self and the false self. Merton believed that beneath the self we perform and protect lies something deeper and more fundamental, and that the entire movement of the contemplative life is directed toward that ground. ​The second question is his relationship with the East. Merton spent the last decade of his life in serious, sustained dialogue with Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist traditions, using those encounters as a mirror that sharpened and deepened his understanding of the Christian contemplative tradition he inhabited. For anyone who has looked eastward and found genuine things there, but suspects that the fit was never quite right, Merton's journey is unusually honest company.

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The third question concerns the relationship between contemplation and the world. Merton wrote from a monastery, but he was one of the most politically engaged writers of his generation, and he saw no contradiction in this. This retreat explores how he held his contemplative vocation together The contemplative life, in his account, does not produce withdrawal. It produces a quality of presence and clarity that makes genuine engagement with the world possible. His writing on race, war, technology, and the violence embedded in ordinary social life grows directly from his contemplative practice. In this retreat, we will explore how Merton held his contemplative vocation with his call for social justice and responsibility, and what we can learn from that as contemporary contemplatives.

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Each weekend takes one strand of this work as its focus, moving from the false self through solitude, dialogue with the East, and contemplative engagement with the world, toward what Merton called the hidden wholeness underlying all things. Participants will work between sessions with practices rooted in the contemplative tradition Merton inhabited, oriented throughout toward the ordinary life in which that tradition must ultimately take root.

 

No prior knowledge of Merton is assumed. The retreat is open to people of any religious background, or none.