Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #thomasmerton
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1. I walked the day we moved from leafy Strawberry Hill to Woodford in 1960, for my dad’s work. I was youngest by 5 years. With 4 sisters, I was destined 2b named Charlotte, & everyone was shocked. Fortunately I was baptised Michael Anthony, sharing Padua’s feastday. #OfGodAndMe 
2. It was a ‘mixed marriage’: so Catholic schooling. I lived the slow impact of Vat2. Our churches were Franciscans at Woodford Green & a brand new church of Blessed Anne Line a walk away; my school was solid. I adored Midnight Mass, the words of hymns, but much else was a blur.
3.I loved my sisters & felt truly enfolded in family. We did homework together. If they weren’t quite ready 2 go out, I took their boyfriends into the garden for football & cricket, & got them proper sweaty. The eldest was married & gone 2 NZ in 1967. She had been my second mum.
A few more days to catch Christine Jensen Hogan’s intriguing play about #ThomasMerton & #AnneBradstreet, ‘Un Pas de Deux, Un Pas de Dieu’... Just 35’, “very amusing and touching, it brought tears to our eyes”... English Version, YouTube Link 1/
bit.ly/3rBId35
bit.ly/3rBId35
Also available is a version with #Spanish subtitles, provided by Fernando Beltrán Llavador from his 2000 translation of the play, published in Spain...2/ Spanish Subtitles Version, YouTube Link
bit.ly/31Mf1Mb
bit.ly/31Mf1Mb
Also, catch the scintillating Panel contributions from Professor Carmen Manuel & Dr Gary Hall, with some great questions also. Well worth a listen... Panel Discussion 3/3
bit.ly/3umxTh1
bit.ly/3umxTh1
#MastersofSocialIsolation #12. In 1941 #ThomasMerton entered the strict cloister of the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani. In the Trappists his heart was captured by the image of men “on this miserably noisy, cruel earth, who tasted the marvelous joy of silence and solitude."
Henceforth he would serve the world by his prayers. Yet even as he longed for even greater solitude, his attitude toward the world was changing. On an errand in Louisville he had a mystical epiphany in which he saw his deep connection with the mass of human beings.
“I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation..."
Fifty years ago today, on Dec. 10, 1968, #ThomasMerton died in Bangkok. It's not a stretch to say that Thomas Merton changed my life. There is no person (other than Jesus, of course) so responsible for my vocation to religious life. Like so many, I am so grateful for his life.
Here are the words that changed my life, from his book "No Man is an Island"...
"Why do we spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if only we knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?”
