Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: No Man Is an Island by Thomas Merton ISBN: 0-15-602773-9 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.91 (11 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Assurance That God is Able
Comment: A wellspring of encouragement for those who are looking for spiritual simplicity, without dogmatism. Merton's flowing prose carries the reader so effortlessly, that I often had to stop myself, saturated, and put off going on until I had the capacity to absorb more. The greatest challenge of this book is not in comprehending his points, but in accepting them as actually possible, and internalizing their meaning for one's own life context. Merton opens a door to a place of potential joy, that many will desire to pass through.
Rating: 5
Summary: Merton distills the essence of a Christian life powerfully.
Comment: Merton's understanding of our human nature and his spiritual understanding of scripture combine to make a personally challenging and thoroughly understandable realization of how to become more spiritual, not religious. This is a "centering" book. It centers you in God revealed through Christ. This book has matured me as a Christian tremendously.
Rating: 5
Summary: No Man is an Island.
Comment: The writings gathered in this volume will not be read quickly or superficially. Paragraphs will continually ask to be reread. Thomas Merton's perspicacious meditations, offered with such poetic strength, are to his reader like veins whose rich ore leads the miner deep. The effort is real and so too is the reward. Merton (1915-1968) was a contemplative monk, a Trappist, and although most of his readers may think themselves of another world, so to speak, it is the world of which Merton writes which is Real, and the clabbering, self-directed world of our common experience that is illusory.
A few thoughts, ones that are obviously directed more narrowly toward other Catholic monks, may generally be less helpful to most readers (I think of basically one chapter). I could offer other minor detraction but it would probably only amount to vanity on my part. It will be more valuable to meditate on these words of Merton:
"Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness. The urgency of their swift movement seems to ignore the tranquillity of nature by pretending to have a purpose. The loud plane seems for a moment to deny the reality of the clouds and of the sky, by its direction, its noise, and its pretended strength. The silence of the sky remains when the plane has gone. The tranquility of the clouds will remain when the plane has fallen apart. It is the silence of the world that is real. Our noise, our business, our purposes, and all our fatuous statements about our purposes, our business, and our noise: these are the illusion. God is present, and His thought is alive and awake in the fullness and depth and breadth of all the silences of the world. The Lord is watching in the almond trees [Jer 1.11, 12]. . . Whether the plane pass by tonight or tomorrow . . . whether the liner enters the harbor full of tourists or full of soldiers, the almond tree brings forth her fruit in silence.
"There are some men for whom a tree has no reality until they think of cutting it down . . . men who never look at anything until they decide to abuse it and who never even notice what they do not want to destroy. These men can hardly know the silence of love: for their love is the absorption of another person's silence into their own noise. And because they do not know the silence of love, they cannot know the silence of God . . . Who is bound, by His own law of Charity, to give life to all those whom He draws into His own silence."
 |
Title: The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton ISBN: 0156010860 Publisher: Harcourt Pub. Date: 01 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
 |
Title: New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton ISBN: 081120099X Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 01 March, 1972 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
 |
Title: Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton ISBN: 0374513252 Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux Pub. Date: 01 November, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
 |
Title: Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton, Thich Nhat Hanh ISBN: 0385092199 Publisher: Image Pub. Date: 05 February, 1971 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
 |
Title: Spiritual Direction and Meditation by Thomas Merton ISBN: 0814604129 Publisher: Liturgical Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1986 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
