Thomas Merton
Rowan Williams 
”När Williams läser Merton så verkar det som om de två talar med varandra : en dialog i tystnad. Den amerikanske trappistmunken Thomas Merton som avled 1968 och Rowan Williams fd ärkebiskopen av Canterbury möttes aldrig. Men i boken “A Silent Action: Engagements with Thomas Merton” uppstår en stor vänskap.
”Particularly after he embraced monastic life, Merton’s life was to a large extent a life of dialogue with people who were either far way of dead (many of them saints and writers of centuries past). Williams takes a close look at two of these dialogues: firstly the one with Orthodox theologian Paul Evdokimov and then with Karl Barth, a reformed theologian who happened to die on the same day as the Trappist monk. Williams reveals the impact Hannah Arendt, Fedor Dostoevskij, Vladimir Lossky, Olivier Cliflment, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Boris Pasternak and Giovanni della Croce had on Merton’s reflections.”
// Irène
PS
Merton’s famous revelation in downtown Louisville is described this way in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:
“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, 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 in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
