The writings of Thomas Merton spoke to me when I was in college. I borrowed the Seven Story Mountain from the library and kept it for a year. When I returned it, it had been a companion in dark times, and his autobiography about how he transformed from an aimless student to a Trappist monk affected me deeply. The overdue fines cost me over $100, and I repaid them by reshelving books. Best non-$100 I’ve ever spent.
Today I received a gift of the “Selected Poems of Thomas Merton” from my wife as an early Valentine’s present. We spent a lovely date sipping cappuccino at Riff Raff books in Olneyville and reading poetry. It was a good day after a rough couple of weeks and a sign that a light always shines in the darkness.
The first poem is “Lent in a Year of War,” published in 1942. The first line is, “One of you is a major, made of cord and catskin, But never dreams his eyes may come to life and thread The needle-light of famine in waterglass.”
He wrote “Lent in a Time of War” sometime in 1941 while teaching at St. Bonaventure College in upstate New York. He had been baptized into the Catholic faith in 1938. Later that year, just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he left the academic world and started his life as a monk at the Trappist Monastery in Gethsemane.
