Today marks the 111th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Merton (1915–1968). He has been remembered as a spiritual writer, a mystic, a monk, a poet, a social critic, a champion of justice, an artist, a proponent of Christian nonviolence, and someone whose literary output was simply extraordinary. He was only 53 years old when he died in December 1968 while speaking at a conference on monasticism in Bangkok, Thailand, but he left the world thousands of letters, personal journals that would total seven large published volumes, dozens of books, and hundreds of poems, as well as scores of drawings and photographs.

It is challenging to summarize the life and legacy of such an extraordinary person. Merton was a prophet in the biblical sense of the word: he had an astonishing ability to see the world as it really was while also recognizing the vision for the world God intended. Like the Hebrew prophets, Merton did not hesitate to draw attention to the distance between those two realities and exhort anyone who would listen (or read him) to examine themselves in order to better follow God’s will.

His vocation as a monk at the margin of society afforded him a distinctive perspective at a consequential time in the United States and beyond. He was critical of the United States’s use of nuclear weapons in World War II and decried the nuclear arms race during the Cold War. He was also deeply disturbed by and critical of the Vietnam war. And he was a powerful champion of racial justice during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, which is something that surprised many given his social location as a white, male, Trappist monk and Catholic priest who lived in Kentucky. These important themes can be explored in books like Seeds of Destruction, Faith and Violence, Peace in a Post-Christian Era, and Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.

Merton was also a man of prayer and someone who invited all people—not just professed religious or ordained ministers—to attend to their relationship with God and consider the practice of Christian contemplation. For many people, Merton’s teaching and exhortation to the contemplative life were life-changing. With classic works like New Seeds of Contemplation, Thoughts in Solitude, and No Man is an Island, Merton continues to inspire and guide spiritual seekers in contemplation and prayer.

But at this particular moment in history, on this specific anniversary of Merton’s birth, I’m drawn to reflect on a concept Merton introduced in the prologue to his essay collection Raids on the Unspeakable; namely, “the unspeakable.”

A play on the T. S. Eliot’s phrase “Raids on the Inarticulate,” from his Four Quartets, Merton’s notion of “the unspeakable” is intentionally ambiguous and aimed at those phenomena and experiences for which, as the expression goes, there are no words. In the prologue to Raids, he writes:

The Unspeakable. What is this? Surely, an eschatological image. It is the void that we encounter, you and I, underlying the announced programs, the good intentions, the unexampled and universal aspirations for the best of all possible worlds. It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss...It is the emptiness of “the end.” Not necessarily the end of the world, but a theological point of no return, a climax of absolute finality in refusal, in equivocation, in disorder, in absurdity, which can be broken open again to truth only by miracle, by the coming of God…for Christian hope begins where every other hope stands frozen stiff before the face of the Unspeakable.

Thirteen years ago, when I was living in Boston, I wrote an essay about this notion of “The Unspeakable” in the context of the Boston Marathon Bombings, which killed and maimed dozens of runners and innocent bystanders. As a resident of Boston, I was shaken like a million others by the unsettling presence of an unspeakable event of violence in my own backyard.

Today, we bear witness to unspeakable events of violence in our collective backyard once again, not only in cities like Boston and Chicago, but especially in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Instead of two rogue, radicalized, sibling citizens who planned and executed this unspeakable violence in the bright daylight of Boston’s storied marathon on the Patriot Day holiday, today’s unspeakable violence is being planned and executed by twisted government officials and seemingly rogue law-enforcement agencies. This unspeakable violence is also perpetrated on American soil and in otherwise peaceful cities in bright daylight. This unspeakable violence leaves families forcibly separated, children terrorized, and at least two United States citizens shot dead. Their crime was only standing up, peacefully and in a manner constitutionally protected, for the human dignity and ostensible rights of their immigrant neighbors.

While he disliked the label “pacifist,” Merton was a staunch advocate of Christian nonviolence and would, I imagine with confidence, loudly condemn the violence we witness today. One of the reasons Merton disliked the terminology of pacifism is that it was too often mistaken for “passivity.” The Christian vocation of nonviolence is anything but passive. Like the peaceful protests and civil disobedience of the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, today we are called to engage in the prophetic work of denouncing injustice, violence, and fear. We, like Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who gave their lives for their neighbors (which is, as Jesus of Nazareth famously preached, the highest kind of love), are called to face “The Unspeakable” and stand before the abyss.

Like Merton before me, I pray that there is no more violence, no more slaughter in the daylight or nighttime or anytime. But I also think of how Merton’s legacy is one that challenges all Christians and people of good will to resist the fear that such intimidation campaigns elicit and embrace the call to love with our whole heart and mind and soul.

On this birthday, I pray that Merton might intercede for all those who are confronted by “The Unspeakable.” And that we remember the true source of our strength and courage, for “Christian hope begins where every other hope stands frozen stiff before the face of the Unspeakable.”

Daniel P. Horan, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy, Religious Studies and Theology at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Ind. He is a columnist for National Catholic Reporter, and the author of many books, including Engaging Thomas Merton: Spirituality, Justice, and Racism (2023). Follow him on Facebook.

Given the state of current affairs in the United States—with ICE agents acting inhumanely with impunity in places like Minneapolis and Chicago, with the United States unilaterally intervening in the affairs of sovereign nations like in Venezuela, with an American president who often acts with less maturity and competence than a toddler — it can be hard to find sources of hope, guidance, or wisdom that speak to the “signs of the times” we are facing.

Fortunately, or perhaps providentially, today just so happens to be Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which always inspires me to return to some of the martyred preacher and Civil Rights activist’s writings. Considering how dedicated King was to explicating the Gospel and preaching Christ’s message of peace and justice to a society steeped in discrimination and violence, it shouldn’t be surprising that I find King’s words not only insightful but also eerily timely.

I spent some time today rereading and reflecting on one of my favorite of King’s sermons, “Loving Your Enemies,” which he revised for publication in the 1963 book Strength to Love. Taking the passage from Matthew 5:43–45 where Jesus admonishes his followers to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” King proceeds to lay out the hard truth of the Gospel for anyone who has “ears to hear” (Matt 11:15).

King begins: “Probably no admonition of Jesus has been more difficult to follow than the command to ‘love your enemies.’ Some men have sincerely felt that its actual practice is not possible.” This impossibility of the Gospel feels all too real today. What is one to do when others have made themselves your enemy, when you did not solicit hate or discrimination, violence or persecution, but it has been unleashed on the streets of your city and your neighbors have been deemed dispensable?

Today, I feel a deep sorrow, an at-times overwhelming feeling of grief and anxiety over the treatment of my Black and Brown and Indigenous siblings, who have become the overt targets of a vicious campaign of dehumanization by the sitting president and his hate-filled advisors. I think especially of those people who have risked their lives in order to flee violence and poverty, seeking nothing more than the remote possibility of a new hope, a chance at a minimal quality of life for their children and maybe their children’s children someday. Those called “undocumented” who have as much right to be recognized as fully human as the bigots who wish to remove them and the thugs they pay to do their dirty work masked and hidden, seeking anonymity for their injustice and impunity for their violent actions.

Like so many people of good will, including especially those most vulnerable and persecuted by this regime, I did not ask for these ICE agents to be my enemy. But by Jesus’s definition, and in solidarity with those who are precariously situated in our communities, they have become so. And, indeed, I find it very, very difficult—if not impossible— to love them.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., with the clarity of a biblical prophet, calls from decades past to challenge me in my struggle to be authentically Christian.

…this command of Jesus challenges us with new urgency. Upheaval after upheaval has reminded us that modern man is traveling along a road called hate, in a journey that will bring us to destruction and damnation. Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one’s enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival. Love even for enemies is the key to the solution of the problems of our world. Jesus is not an impractical idealist: he is the practical realist.

The proof of the authenticity of King’s call is the price he paid with his life; for “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). And so we should listen.

The sermon King published contains two major sections. Part one is describes as How do we love our enemies? While the second part, in King’s words, moves from the practical to the theoretical: Why should we love our enemies? What is found in both parts is worth reading in their entirety, but for the sake of brevity and accessibility, I will highlight the major points he conveys.

How Do We Love Our Enemies?

1. We Must Develop the Capacity to Forgive. This first step in loving our enemies is easier said than done. “He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love,” King writes. “It is impossible even to begin the act of loving one’s enemies without the prior acceptance of the necessity, over and over again, of forgiving those who inflict evil and injury upon us.” Importantly, King does not suggest that the process of forgiving those who have harmed us (or others with whom we are practicing solidarity) means ignoring or brushing past the wrongs, evils, harms, or violence. Rather, forgiveness in this sense means that “the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship.” It is about removing an impediment to being in relationship with the other, which is indeed a challenging and noble effort.
2. The Evil Deed of Our “Enemy-Neighbor” Never Expresses All that That They Are. What King describes here as a step in loving our enemies can be summed up by an expression often shared by Sr. Helen Prejean, CSJ, the anti-capital punishment activist. She is fond of reminding those who struggle to make sense of her ministry with those convicted of truly heinous acts that “we are all more than the worst thing that we’ve done.” The way that King puts it is: “there is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us.” We are exhorted to remember that God loves all people and that our enemy is also created in the divine image, even if it can be nearly impossible to recognize, even if they themselves cannot recognize this truth.
3. We Must Not Seek to Defeat or Humiliate the Enemy, But Win Their Friendship and Understanding. This step can appear particularly impossible when the enemy is committed to not only defeating and humiliating those they are unjustly targeting, but also dehumanizing and destroying them. King grounds this step of loving one’s enemy in Christ’s very specific understanding of love — it is an agapic love, which is sacrificial, difficult, challenging, and demanding. It is loving when the one we are meant to love is unlikeable or even seemingly unlovable. It is loving when it is hard and counterintuitive. It is about caring for the good of the other even with the other seems to will nothing but violence and destruction in turn. At the end of his sermon, King writes: “Love is the most durable power in the world. This creative force, so beautifully exemplified in the life of our Christ, is the most potent instrument available in mankind’s quest for peace and security.” This is a difficult truth, but then again so is authentic Christian discipleship.

Why Should We Love Our Enemies?

1. Returning Hate for Hate Multiplies Hate. The first reason is, as King himself notes, “fairly obvious.” He reminds us that “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.” Without mentioning the theoretical work of René Girard, King’s reflections here echo the twentieth-century literary scholar’s claims about mimetic desire and Jesus’s unique position as the innocent victim of violence whose death and resurrection unveil the impotence of the scapegoat mechanism and cycles of hatred and oppression. King describes the “chain reaction of evil,” which can never bring about peace. Therefore, love is the only way; love will break the cycle. Again, this is much harder to do than to merely think or say.
2. Hate Scars the Soul and Distorts the Personality. Fr. Bryan Massingale, the moral theologian at Fordham University, has written frequently about what he calls the “soul sickness” of racism. Racial injustice—and, truly, any form of injustice—is not only a social or political problem, it is also a spiritual problem. But it’s not just a problem for those who are “sinned against,” to borrow a phrase from Korean-American theologians who write about the concept of Han, it is a problem for the sinners, the perpetrators of violence and injustice. As King reminds us, “Hate is just as injurious to the person who hates. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.”
3. Love is the Only Force Capable of Transforming an Enemy into a Friend. I am reminded of something that the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has said about how fear functions. Fear is a self-centered, narcissistic emotion, which closes the individual in on themselves and separates one from another. Evolutionarily, this makes sense when one is facing an existential crisis or threat, like a lion approaching in a field. However, in our modern contexts, fear often is stoked to create enemies and establish opposition. I believe that hate and fear are deeply related. Like the fear that is often beneath the surface of hate, hate itself “by its very nature […] destroys and tears down; by its very nature, love creates and builds up. Love transforms with redemptive power,” King preaches. Nussbaum argues that you cannot fear and hope at the same time, which rhymes with King’s Christian conviction that you cannot hate and love simultaneously. Only love and hope will break the cycles of fear and hate.

There is so much more to say about this particular sermon and the many other texts and speeches that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has left us as resources for navigating times such as these. But I think it especially fitting to leave King with the last word, so I will share one long quote from this sermon that continues to resound through the decades and I hope touches the hearts and minds of all the people of good will struggling for peace and justice in our time.

To our most bitter opponents we say: “We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”

Daniel P. Horan, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy, Religious Studies and Theology at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Ind. He is a columnist for National Catholic Reporter, and the author of many books, including Engaging Thomas Merton: Spirituality, Justice, and Racism (2023). Follow him on Facebook.

This is part of an ongoing, occasional series of essays offering commentary on Thomas Merton’s classic book New Seeds of Contemplation (1961)

Background and Context

This chapter, which appears in New Seeds as Chapter Six, “Pray for Your Own Discovery” (NSC 37–46), also appears in the 1949 edition of Seeds (15–21) in a shorter form. While some key passages are found in both editions, such as the well-known paragraph about the True Self that begins “Our discovery of God is, in a way, God’s discovery of us,” Merton excised several short passages (e.g., a reference to “the mystics of the Orient” in Seeds), provides parenthetical English translations for two Latin quotations, and expanded the original draft by several pages.

One of the interesting insights revealed in Donald Grayston’s study of the development of New Seeds is how much this particular chapter changed from the original typescript before the 1949 publication of Seeds and the ways Merton kept editing the manuscript through the various versions of the chapter up to New Seeds. One notable change is the way Merton initially wrote with a more first-person, reflective writing style in the unpublished first typescript, which was later edited to be more objective (while still including his occasional use of first-person pronouns). One example of this comes in the second paragraph of the original typescript chapter:

I am like a word seeking to discover the Voice Who utters me. And that is a discovery that I will / actually / never make if I look for that voice outside myself. Although I may find out some abstract principles for my own existence by studying the other words His creation has uttered, I cannot find Him anywhere except at the center of myself, at the point where I spring out of nothingness and am held in being by His love for me. It is at that point that I am truly myself (TS1)

Merton originally begins with himself as the subject of the sentence, and personalizes the quest for the discovery of the True Self in a way that is opened up somewhat in the revision that is published first as Seeds, which puts God as the first subject.

God utters me like a word containing a thought of Himself. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it. But if I am true to the concept that God utters in me, if I am true to the thought of Him I was meant to embody, I shall be full of His actuality and find Him everywhere in myself, and find myself nowhere. I shall be lost in Him (Seeds)

Another example of a stylistic change in the earliest revisions from the first unpublished typescript to the publication of Seeds is seen about a page later when, at first, Merton wrote in what can be described as a rather stuffy and abstract manner. His rewriting makes the point more accessible and readable.

Here’s the original draft:

God is present in everything by His immensity. He is present in everything as Creator: for without immediate contact with Him nothing that exists could exist. He is present in all things by His awareness of their being. He is present /in/ all things by His loving Providence and will guiding and shaping every moment and every circumstance of every life and created existence (TS1)

And the 1949 published version in Seeds:

But although God is present in all things by His knowledge and His love and His power and His care of them, He is not necessarily realized and known by them. He is only known and loved by those to whom he has freely given a share in His own knowledge and love of Himself (Seeds).

One of the more theological significant passages in this chapter appears very late in the development of New Seeds. I’ll bold in the quoted passage what Merton added to the 1961 publication, which reflects a kenotic Christology or an emphasis on the Incarnation that takes into account God’s self-offering or self-emptying to enter into deeper relationship with the finite world.

In order to know and love God as He is, we must have God dwelling in us in a new way, not only in His creative power but in His mercy, not only in his greatness but in His littleness, by which He empties Himself and comes down to su to be empty in our emptiness and so fill us in His fullness. God bridges the infinite distances between Himself and and the spirits he created to love Him, by supernatural missions of His own life. The Father, dwelling in the depths of all things and in my own depths, communicates to me His Word and His Spirit (NSC 40).

In some ways, this addition of the kenotic Christological reflection anticipates similar themes found in the chapter titled “The General Dance” at the conclusion of New Seeds, a section Merton added to the 1961 edition. There will be more to say when we get to that important chapter.

Commentary: “Pray for Your Own Discovery”

This chapter continues some of the themes previously examined in the earlier chapters, synthesizing some of the most important topics in New Seeds, including the True Self, contemplation, and discovery of and intimacy with God.

The opening lines anticipate Merton’s engagement with the concept of the Point Vierge as discussed by Merton’s friend and correspondent Louis Massignon (1883-1962), the Catholic scholar of Islam and an early leader in the field of Christian-Muslim dialogue.

There exists some point at which I can meet God in a real and experimental contact with His infinite actuality. This is the “place” of God, His sanctuary—it is the point where my contingent being depends upon His love (NSC 37).

Merton doesn’t mention Massingon in New Seeds, even though the first mention of Le Point Vierge and Massingon appears in a May 30, 1960 journal entry (a fuller reflection appears on June 5, 1960, and later on November 3, 1965). Given the proximity to the revision and publication of the project that would become New Seeds, it’s possible that Merton could have made some mention or correlation, but instead keeps the text as it appeared in the 1949 edition of Seeds with only very minor edits. It won’t be until the publication of Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander 1966 that Merton will explicitly name Massingon’s concept in publication, this time at the end of the revised reflection on his March 1958 “epiphany” at the corner of Fourth and Walnut Streets in Louisville:

Again, that expression, le point vierge, (I cannot translate it) comes in here. At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our son-ship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere (CGB).

It is interesting to read the Fourth and Walnut “epiphany” reflection with the inclusion of the point vierge alongside the opening lines of this chapter in New Seeds. The common threads connecting these passages is the emphasis on (a) God’s proximity to all people–in the Augustinian sense of “God is the one closer to us than we are to ourselves”; and (b) the quest and discovery of the True Self.

Building on what came in the previous chapter concerning the nature of the True Self (and its distinction from all concepts of the self that are illusory or false), Merton emphasizes that salvation is personal in a metaphysical sense. Whereas one might think of “salvation” in general and abstract terms, Merton goes to great lengths to argue that when God “saves” us, he “saves” each of us as we are created in our particularity.

It is not only human nature that is “saved” by the divine mercy, but above all the human person. The object of salvation is that which is unique, irreplaceable, incommunicable—that which is myself alone (NSC 38)

Again we see the strong influence of John Duns Scotus on Merton’s thinking, not only about individuation and the self, but also in terms of soteriology. In other words, Merton is making the point that salvation is not experienced in terms of humanity as such (the quiddity or “what” of our being), but in the absolute particularity of our true selves (the haecceity or “this” of our being). What is “saved,” Merton explains, is who we really are from the falsity of the “illusory self” or “worldly self,” as he puts it here.

Merton continues to reflect on the unity of the discovery of God and the discovery of our true self, emphasizing the intimacy we have with God on account of the divine immanence we experience as a result of God’s love, will, and mercy. “Our discovery of God is, in a way, God’s discovery of us,” Merton writes. Drawing on the kenosis of God in the Incarnation, Merton reminds us that God “comes down from heaven and finds us. He looks at us from the depths of His own infinite actuality, which is everywhere, and His seeing us gives us a new being and a new mind in which we also discover Him” (NSC 39). This is further developed in the explicitly kenotic passage that follows on page 40, which I quoted in the previous section as added late in the revisions of New Seeds. Here Merton echoes the great Christological hymn of Philippians 2:5–11:

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death — 
even death on a cross!… (Phil 2:5–8)

One of the most overlooked sections of this chapter is one of the more interesting. On pages 44–45 of the New Seeds edition (and 35–36 of Seeds), Merton appears to embed prayer into the prose of the chapter. Merton goes from referring to God in third person, speaking as it were to the reader as his primary audience, to speaking directly to God. This section begins:

Justify my soul, O God, but also from your fountains fill my will with fire. Shine in my mind, although perhaps this means “be darkness to my experience,” but occupy my heart with Your tremendous Life. Let my eyes see nothing in the world but Your glory, and let my hands touch nothing that is not for Your service…

This prayer continues until the line on page 45: “For there is only one thing that can satisfy love and reward it, and that is You alone.”

It is a beautiful prayer, if one that might have benefited from being separated from the body of the text for the sake of accessibility and recognition. Merton appears to include it as an illustration of what it looks like to pursue the True Self in seeking God. Immediately after the prayer concludes, he writes: “This then is what it means to seek God perfectly” (NSC 45) and proceeds to list what an effective response to this prayer would look like in practice.

The title of the chapter, “Pray for Your Own Discovery,” which remained consistent throughout every version of the book from Seeds to New Seeds, summarizes well Merton’s aim in this section. Not only does he synthesize many of the key themes in the previous chapters concerning the True Self and intimacy with God, but he also includes a prayer as a model for beginning this journey of mutual discovery.

Reflection Questions

• Where do I look to discover myself? When I look inward, do I also find God close to me? How can I better discover God and therefore my true self?
• What are the obstacles I face in pursuing a deeper spiritual life? What insights does Merton offer me in this chapter of New Seeds to help me on my spiritual journey?
• What does it mean for me to be “saved” in my particularity, that God knows, loves, and saves my “True Self”?

Works Cited

Donald Grayston, Thomas Merton: The Development of a Spiritual Theologian (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1985).

Daniel P. Horan, “Thomas Merton the ‘Dunce’: Identity, Incarnation, and the Not So Subtle Influence of John Duns Scotus,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 47 (2012): 149–175.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1961).

Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1949).

Daniel P. Horan, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy, Religious Studies and Theology at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Ind. He is a columnist for National Catholic Reporter, and the author of many books, including Engaging Thomas Merton: Spirituality, Justice, and Racism (2023). Follow him on Facebook.

New Seeds 6: Pray for Your Own Discovery was originally published in Journal of Everyday Mysticism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is part of an ongoing, occasional series of essays offering commentary on Thomas Merton’s classic book New Seeds of Contemplation (1961)

Background and Context

An earlier version of this chapter, titled “Things in Their Identity,” appears in the 1949 edition of Seeds of Contemplation as Chapter Two (8–14). Although the titles of both versions of the chapter are the same, Merton edited and slightly expanded what would become the final version in Chapter Five of New Seeds (NSC 29–36).

The sources and inspiration for Merton’s thought are, understandably, complex and manifold. He was a famously voracious reader and deep thinker, who synthesized a wide range of ideas and insights in his spiritual and theological writing. And yet, there are some key themes in Merton’s corpus that can be traced back to particular sources and significant schools of thought. In the case of “Things in Their Identity,” the most influential sources for Merton’s thinking are the medieval Franciscan philosopher and theologian Blessed John Duns Scotus (d. 1308) and the nineteenth century British Jesuit and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (d. 1889).

The preoccupation with the particularity of identity and the dignity of the individual, loved into existence as such and known to God, is built on the foundation of Scotus’s concept of haecceitas (literally “this-ness”). This medieval theory of individuation holds that when God creates, God creates this particular creature (horse, tree, person, stone, etc.), loves this particular creature, and knows this particular creature. This is in contrast to the more common medieval theories of individuation that prioritize the quiddity or “what” of something—that which is shared in common. For Merton, like Scotus and Hopkins before him, it is not the “whatness” that God primarily wills into existence, but a creature’s individual, particular, “thisness.” We can see this reflected in numerous passages in this chapter, including in the third paragraph when Merton proclaims: “No two created beings are exactly alike. And their individuality is no imperfection. On the contrary, the perfection of each created thing is not merely in its conformity to an abstract type but in its own individual identity with itself” (NSC 29).

Merton began his study of Scotus under the tutelage of Profesor Dan Walsh at Columbia University as an undergraduate student. But it was under the mentorship of the Franciscan friar and scholar Philotheus Boehner, OFM at St. Bonaventure University during his time teaching there that Merton developed a particular fondness for the Subtle Doctor’s thought in addition to that of Scotus’s predecessor Bonaventure (d. 1274).

Even as Merton was finishing The Seven Storey Mountain as a young monk in formation at the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1946, he wrote to his literary mentor Mark Van Doren about his continued fascination with the medieval thought of these two Franciscan giants.

Duns Scotus and St. Bonaventure are tremendous. A book on that Scotus is brewing, I can see that: it will take time, though, and God will have to give me a lot of special graces if I am going to do it well, because Scotus is something big. The thing is: while St. Thomas got off with Aristotle and tended to be intellectual and systematizing, Scotus knew how to take Aristotle and leave him alone and he keeps the full tradition of St. Augustine and St. Anselm—which keeps love in the first place all the way down the line—in its purity. Also he is the one who most glorifies Christ, that is, gives to the Incarnate Word, the Man-God, the full limit of everything that can be given Him (quotes in Kilcourse, 243).

Reflecting on this letter to Van Doren and Merton’s own clear indebtedness to Scotus in New Seeds, George Kilcourse wrote about this precise section of New Seeds: “Given the contents of the chapter, ‘Things in their Identity,’ and the sacramental vision of the book, it is plausible that Seeds of Contemplation has evolved as a semblance of the desired Scotus book” (Kilcourse, 243).

That Seeds of Contemplation, and later New Seeds, could have begun as a book project about Scotus is indeed quite possible. This is an especially tenable theory when one also considers the manner in which many of Merton’s books, sans SSM, were begun, developed, revised, and edited by Merton over the years. Often he would collect essays, ideas, conference notes, book reviews, etc., on a given theme and work and rework the material into what would eventually be published as the books we know today. Even if Merton abandoned the effort to develop a full-fledged monograph on Scotus, the presence of themes reliant on Scotus’s unique theory of haecceity and supralapsarian argument for the Incarnation later in Chapter Thirty Nine, suggest that Merton drew from prior notes and reflections on the thought of John Duns Scotus.

A second major influence in Chapter Five of New Seeds is Hopkins, whom Merton had tentatively proposed writing a doctoral dissertation on at Columbia University before accepting the teaching position at St. Bonaventure University in 1940. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hopkins was also deeply inspired by the work of Scotus, writing in his journals and in letters of the Subtle Doctor’s influence on his own thinking. He dedicated poems explicitly to Scotus, such as “Duns Scotus’s Oxford,” while also penning original works saturated with Scotus’s philosophical and theological genius.

When it comes to the concept of haecceitas, it is Hopkins’s poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” that beautifully reflects Scotus’s metaphysical commitment to the divine primacy of the particular over that which is share in common among like kinds.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is — 
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

It is also from Hopkins that Merton borrows the neologism “inscape” (Hopkins’s term for haecceity used elsewhere), which appears in this chapter when Merton describes each creature’s inherent dignity and value as an individual, particular being: “Their inscape is their sanctity” (NSC 30).

While most of the additions and edits of this chapter from Seeds to New Seeds are minor, there are some small changes worth noting. For example, in addition to the other nonhuman elements of creation Merton includes by way of illustrating their creaturely particularity and relationship to the divine, Merton added: “the lakes hidden among the hills are saints, and the sea too is a saint who praises God without interruption in her majestic dance” (NSC 30).

Another minor yet significant edition to New Seeds is the short sentence: “I was born in a mask,” which follows the line found originally in Seeds: “To say I was born in sin is to say I came into the world with a false self” (NSC 33). In the time between 1948 and 1961, Merton felt it necessary to add yet another synonym to help the reader grapple with the concepts of the True and False Selves. The metaphor of a “mask” has become a popular and useful way to discuss the false self ever since.

Commentary: “Things in Their Identity”

This is one of my favorite chapters in New Seeds. Not that I don’t love the entire book, but there are some standout chapters that are better than the others, and “Things in their Identity” is one of them! For this reason, I find it difficult to be concise in offering some commentary on the text, although I’ll try my best to be succinct and simply highlight a few of the most striking parts of this chapter.

First, Merton’s commitment to the particular affirms the absolute dignity and value of all creatures, including every human person. Diversity is neither a divine afterthought nor an aberration from some universal model or common nature. While each dog shares something we can identify as “dogness” with every other dog, this particular dog is individually known, loved, and sustained in existence by God. This is also the case with each and every human person. Difference in appearance, ability, sexuality, gender, race, or any other characteristic of one’s identity is not be viewed as unfortunate or exceptional. On the contrary, our respective identities are loved by God and we ought to love and respect one another in all our glorious difference and particularity.

Second, this celebration of divinely intended diversity within creation also means that all nonhuman creatures—sentient and otherwise—are also wondrously particular. This means that no blade of grass, grain of sand, or household cat can ever be repeated for each is radically unique. It is striking that Merton spends so much time at the outset of this chapter in New Seeds focused on nonhuman creatures—a tree, a colt, a dogwood, a leaf, a bass and a trout, a lake, and a mountain (NSC 29–31)—before ever mentioning human beings. In true Franciscan form, we are invited to see the world as a dynamic community of creation composed of individuals loved into existence by God. Imagine if we could see the true dignity and value of everything that, to quote Pope Francis, “shares our common home” (Laudato Si’). Perhaps we would treat our creaturely kin with more dignity and respect than we have in recent centuries.

Third, it is within this chapter that Merton cleverly lays the philosophical foundations for his most famous spiritual contribution: the True Self. If each of us is intended and created by God in our absolute particularity, then God knows us totally and completely. There is, in other words, a “self” that is “true” insofar as it is who we are before God and recognized in God’s eyes. This sense of ourselves is quite different from any external standard, expectation, or means of evaluation. It is also not the same as our own desires or sense of self. This is why Merton can say that “The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God” (NSC 35), for who we truly are is who God created us to be in our thisness. Anything other than that is, indeed, “false.”

Merton goes to great lengths to note that the discovery of our true self is not something simple and static, but it is something that requires deliberation and attention (this is where contemplation will come in)—prayer is part of this journey because the discovery of myself is only possible in discovering God. As Merton writes, “If I find Him [sic] I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him” (NSC 36). In this way, our discovery of ourselves—our true selves—is a cooperative effort, which requires our working with God, as it were. Merton contrasts this with the experience of nonhuman creatures that are what God created them to be and therefore, according to Merton, are already their true selves. Instead, our experience is dynamic and free, and we have agency as subjects and persons in the world. “Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny” (NSC 32).

Reflection Questions

• When I think about creation, what do I see? A community of unique individuals or a collection of generic beings?
• How do I understand God’s relationship to the created world, to nonhuman creatures, to human beings?
• What does it mean to be truly myself? How do I work with God in becoming more truly who I am? In what ways do I pursue identities other than who I am before God?

Works Cited

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose (New York: Penguin Classics, 1985).

Daniel P. Horan, The Franciscan Heart of Thomas Merton: A New Look at the Spiritual Inspiration of His Life, Thought, and Writing (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 2014).

Daniel P. Horan, “Thomas Merton the ‘Dunce’: Identity, Incarnation, and the Not So Subtle Influence of John Duns Scotus,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 47 (2012): 149–175.

George Kilcourse, Ace of Freeedoms: Thomas Merton’s Christ (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1961).

Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1949).

Daniel P. Horan, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy, Religious Studies and Theology at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Ind. He is a columnist for National Catholic Reporter, and the author of many books, including Engaging Thomas Merton: Spirituality, Justice, and Racism (2023) and A White Catholic’s Guide to Racism and Privilege (2021). Follow him on Facebook.

New Seeds 5: Things in Their Identity was originally published in Journal of Everyday Mysticism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It has been almost a year since my last installment in a series of essays offering a commentary of and study guide to Thomas Merton’s 1961 spiritual classic New Seeds of Contemplation. As I noted when announcing this series, it is intended in the most literal sense to be an “occasional” project, which means that I did not set a strict deadline or schedule for the publication of the essays. While I didn’t expect a hiatus of a year since publishing the commentary on Chapter Four, I did know that this would be a project that I could and would return to when I had the intellectual and temporal bandwith.

Needless to say, it’s been a busy year. In many ways it has been a good year with a number of blessings and surprises, even as things nationally and globally have taken some disturbing turns in recent months.

I haven’t had the opportunity to return to this project as quickly as I would have liked, but because I have received a number of inquires from well-meaning folks asking about the status of this project, I wanted to state definitively that it has not been abandoned! I will continue to contribute to my ongoing commentary on New Seeds just as soon as I am able. In the meantime, thank you for your continued interest and patience. More to come soon!

Daniel P . Horan, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy, Religious Studies and Theology and Director of the Center for the Study of Spirituality at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. He is also Affiliated Professor of Spirituality at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. A columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, he is the author or editor of sixteen books.

Admittedly, it has been a while since I last published an essay or reflection to this page. So, given the widespread tradition of sending personal and family updates during the holiday season, I thought it might be nice to offer a few updates and highlights packaged within this virtual Christmas greeting.

First, let me say that I wish everyone who reads this a blessed Christmas! For those who are Christian like me, this is a sacred time of year that celebrates the incarnation of the Word of God, the cosmically significant event in which the Divine not only enters but becomes part of this finite, historical, material world. God does this not in a manner befitting royalty or power, but in humility and poverty—a stance that demands of Christ’s followers recognition of and service to the poor and marginalized today.

For my readers of other religious traditions or no tradition at all, I want to express my warm affection and desire that you experience joy and peace during this time as well. Regardless of one’s particular faith, this remains a universal time of transition as we conclude one calendar year and prepare for another—I wish you all blessings and joy.

This transition from one year to another brings me back to my original intention of sharing some updates and highlights from the past year.

Professionally, it has been a good and busy year. Although I have been intentional about pulling back from travel for speaking events over the last few years in order to focus more on longer-term research projects and other initiatives, I still find myself on the road speaking at universities and other institutions, and delivering papers at conferences. All that is to say, while I have reduced my travel significantly, I haven’t exchanged my itinerant character for an eremitical life just yet.

In addition to my regular column in National Catholic Reporter, which won a first-place Catholic Media Award this year, I continue to publish both scholarly and general-audience articles, book chapters, and reviews. I was happy that my small book on the spirituality of fear, Fear and Faith: Hope and Wholeness in a Fractured World, was published in the Spring by Paulist Press. While rooted in scholarly research, I wrote it with intention that it could be read by a broader audience. Additionally, a little book of reflections for the 2025 Lenten Season was published by Liturgical Press, which is intended as a personal devotional and parish resource.

At the Center for the Study of Spirituality at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Ind., where I serve as Director, we hosted an array of programming, events, lectures, and research endeavors. Some highlights included two academic conferences: one on Teresa of Avila and Peacemaking, and the other on the life and legacy of Madeleva Wolff, CSC; the annual Thomas Merton Lecture in Spirituality and Madeleva Lecture; numerous lectures and book events; the continuation of the Women Shaping Theology research workshop; and the development and launch of a new academic fellowship program for women doctoral candidates in the fields of theology, spirituality, and other specializations in religious studies. You can read about all the great events at the CFSS last academic year in the 2023–2024 annual report, which was published this Fall. And check back to see updates about Spring 2025 events on our website after the New Year.

Teaching continues to be a highlight for me as it has ever since I began nearly fifteen years ago when I taught my first undergraduate course. This past year included teaching courses on Queer Theology and Environmental Studies and Theology at the undergraduate level, as well as master’s courses on “Spirituality and Justice” and the spirituality of Thomas Merton on the themes of Racism, Nonviolence, and Justice; and a doctoral seminar on Twelfth Century Spirituality and the School of Saint Victor in Paris. I’m looking forward to the courses in theology and spirituality I’m slated to teach in the Spring semester.

On the personal level, the biggest news is something I shared publicly in October. After a long period of discernment, reflection, prayer, and conversation, I decided to leave the Franciscan Order and retire from public ministry as a Catholic priest. As I explained in my NCR column announcing the news and in subsequent interviews, this is not a decision I made lightly or quickly but it is one that felt guided by the Holy Spirit and it has been grace-filled at each step of the journey. I am grateful for the fraternal support the Franciscan community has extended during my vocational discernment and beyond.

I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of support, encouragement, and prayers that reached me from all over the world, beginning early the morning of October 3rd when the news was published. While I know there are people who are disappointed (and even a handful of folks who, inexplicably, seemed to celebrate), the warm and loving support of so many people—laity, religious, ordained, friends, colleagues, family, strangers—has been uplifting. I am happy to share that since I first shared this news, I continue to feel that this is the right direction for me. I have also felt renewed in my spiritual life as I embark on this new chapter after nearly twenty years in a religious community.

The other exciting personal news I have to share is about adopting a dog earlier this year. Her name is Rahner (after the German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner) and the vet at the rescue shelter estimated that she was about two-years old when I adopted her. Remarkably, she had been in the shelter for six weeks before I met her. Despite not knowing the details of her pre-adoption life, she was remarkably sweet and warm, loving and even potty-trained from the start.

I have long wanted a dog, as many family, friends, and friars have known about me. However, between living in religious communities that included a lot of turnover among those living in the house from year-to-year and the extreme travel schedule I had maintained for the better part of a decade, such an option was never feasible. But the transition to living primarily on my own and intentionally scaling back my travel, combined with the arrival of this beautiful and sweet husky at the shelter (in addition to several other providential circumstances, which is a story for another time), aligned to create the condition for the possibility of this 2024 miracle.

As I look ahead to 2025, there are a lot of exciting things on the horizon, even as our country and the world continues to face some daunting challenges and understandable anxiety. Rahner and I, accompanied by those dear to me near and far, will venture into the New Year in a spirit of gratitude and hope, while advocating for justice in our communities and seeking the peace that only Christ can give.

I’m looking forward to the energizing and life-giving work ahead such as ongoing research projects, teaching my courses, and serving the academic guild in leadership positions in professional societies and on a university board of trustees.

I’m looking forward to new horizons and unknown possibilities as I continue to follow the Spirit’s lead along my journey of life.

I’m looking forward to the creative ways communities can come together to respond to the “joys and hopes, griefs and anxieties” (Gaudium et Spes, no. 1) of all people, especially those who find themselves excluded and marginalized, particularly in such a time of political, social, and even ecclesial precarity.

But today is a time for family and friends, celebrating the unsurpassable joy of divine love that wants nothing more than to draw near to us and all creation in the most intimate way. I am grateful for all the joy and blessings, as well as those who continue to accompany me and those dear to me on this journey of life when challenges also arise. Blessings to all of you and to your loved ones this day.

Merry Christmas!

Daniel P . Horan, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy, Religious Studies and Theology and Director of the Center for the Study of Spirituality at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. He is also Affiliated Professor of Spirituality at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. A columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, he is the author or editor of more than fourteen books.

This is part of an ongoing, occasional series of essays offering commentary on Thomas Merton’s classic book New Seeds of Contemplation (1961)

Background and Context

As with the previous chapter, “Seeds of Contemplation,” chapter four, “Everything That is, Is Holy” (NSC 21–28), also appeared in the 1949 edition of Seeds of Contemplation, albeit in a different and shorter form. While these versions bear the same title, and the New Seeds version includes substantive sections of the Seeds edition, a substantial revision and expansion took place between the two publications.

In addition to the content itself that varies, as we saw with the last chapter, Donald Grayston observes that in Merton’s subsequent revisions of Seeds into the revised version of Seeds (December 1949) and then in New Seeds (1961) his tone is noticeably tempered from a stricter, more harsh sense of asceticism in the earliest versions to a more inclusive and inviting style.

Another facet of the development of New Seeds from the earlier versions is the addition of more material related to the “True Self” and “False Self,” with particular attention given to unpacking the meaning of the “False Self.” For example, in the text known as “Typescript 2” (TS2) that Merton developed between the 1949 revision of Seeds and the eventual publication of New Seeds, Merton adds a lengthy reflection that begins on the bottom of page 26 and closes the published version of New Seeds on page 28. It opens with the line: “The ‘False Self’ must not be identified with the body. The body is neither evil or unreal…” (NSC 26).

The earlier version of this chapter in Seeds places greater emphasis on sainthood and the means by which canonized saints throughout Christian history used, engaged, or saw (uti) the created things of the world as a means to draw closer to God and appreciate God’s proximity to creation (frui). This bears a distinctly Augustinian notion of the ordered and disordered love, which importantly does not view the created world as bad or evil (as some Gnostic and other traditions might). However, created things, Augustine insisted, were meant to be used (uti) as a means to loving or, literally, “enjoying” (frui) God for God’s own sake. This is a way of thinking about the difference between means and ends; the things of the world could be rightly loved as a means to a greater love, but God is to be loved for God’s own sake as an end in itself.

This Augustinian framing appears in an especially stark way in the last few lines of this chapter in Seeds:

The fulfillment we find in creatures belongs to the reality of the created being, a reality that is from God and belongs to God and reflects God. The anguish we find in them belongs to the disorder of our desire which looks for a greater reality in the object of our desire than is actually there: a greater fulfillment than any created thing is capable of giving. Instead of worshipping God through His creation we are always trying to worship ourselves by means of creatures.

But to worship ourselves is to worship nothing. And the worship of nothing is hell (7).

A revision of these lines appears near the middle of the chapter in New Seeds, with an interesting edit made to what is the final line in the Seeds edition. New Seeds reads: “But to worship our false selves is to worship nothing. And the worship of nothing is hell.”

While the structure, and to some degree sentiment, remains in tact, the emphasis is placed now on the concept of the “False Self,” which is a major theme in this chapter of New Seeds. It also anticipates the next two chapters in New Seeds that focus attention on the meaning of the “True Self” in important ways.

Commentary: “Everything That Is, Is Holy”

This is quite an extraordinary chapter in New Seeds. While the text remains as accessible as the other parts of New Seeds, there is a density to this chapter that invites a slow reading and sufficient reflection. It includes several important theological and spiritual insights, which draw from resources dating back to the Patristic era such as the insights of Irenaeus of Lyons and Augustine of Hippo, as well as resonances with medieval influences like Bonaventure. Merton masterfully weaves these threads of spiritual wisdom together in a manner to which contemporary seekers can relate.

I love this chapter and could spend weeks unpacking the insights from it for further consideration. But for our purposes here, I want to highlight three key themes: the goodness of creation, reading the book of nature, and the introduction of the “false self.”

The Goodness of Creation

Merton, channeling the early Christian apologists of the first Christian centuries—here I think of Ireaneus of Lyons first of all—puts a significant amount of effort in this chapter toward affirming the goodness of creation against those who would adopt something of a Gnostic or anti-materialist spirituality over an authentic Christian spirituality.

“There is no evil in anything created by God, nor can anything of His become an obstacle to our union with Him,” Merton writes. “We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God” (NSC 21).

Later he makes this point again:

The saint knows that the world and everything made by God is good, while those who are not saints either think that created things are unholy, or else they don’t bother about the question one way or another because they are only interested in themselves (NSC 24).

This is clearly the reflection of a maturing Merton, who is concerned about naïve attempts by some Christians to embrace a distorted spirituality of fuga mundi, or “fleeing the world.” While Merton regularly notes the importance of not becoming “of the world,” he is mindful of the fact, especially later in his monastic career, that even the monastery is never fully “out of the world.”

God does not call us to abandon the “joys and hopes, griefs and anxieties” (Gaudium et spes, 1) of people of this world, but to engage them in mutual love and support. Jesus himself makes this point in John’s Gospel, when he tells his disciples that they must be “in the world” but not “of the world” (John 17:14–17).

Reading the Book of Nature

Once Merton affirms the inherent goodness of creation, undoubtedly inspired by early Christian theologians as noted above, he deepens his Augustinian reflections on the place of creation—what he collectively describes as “created things”—in the spiritual life. Chastising those Christians who would dismiss both the goodness of created things and their capacity to assist us in knowing God, and by extension ourselves and others, Merton makes the point that saints do not avoid created things but have eyes to see their goodness and God’s presence as Creator and Sustainer of all.

Merton writes: “It was because the saints were absorbed in God that they were truly capable of seeing and appreciating created things and it was because they loved Him alone that they alone loved everybody” (NSC 23).

An interesting point Merton makes about the ability to see God in and through created things (something Bonaventure explicitly outlines in his Itinerarium, which Merton read and from which he included dozens of excerpts in his original typescript for Seven Storey Mountain before Bob Giroux—correctly—edited them out) is that one does not have to be explicitly “pious” or “Christian” about it. In fact, Merton explains, “A saint is capable of loving created things and enjoying the use of them and dealing with them in a perfectly simple, natural manner, making no formal references to God, drawing no attention to his own piety, and acting without any artificial rigidity at all” (NSC 24).

Here we are reminded of Augustine’s famous contribution to the concept of a natural theology, specifically calling to mind what Augustine calls the “book of nature” or “book of creation.” Like the book of scripture, by reading the “book of nature” properly, one can ascertain some insight about God and God’s presence in creation. God discloses Godself as Creator and Sustainer, but also because all of creation comes from the same divine source, all aspects of creation have the capacity to point back to the Creator in some way.

In his Expositions on the Psalms, Augustine writes: “It is the divine page that you must listen to; it is the book of the universe that you must observe. The pages of Scripture can only be read by those who know how to read and write, while everyone, even the illiterate, can read the book of the universe” (no. 45).

While reading scripture requires literal literacy, the book of nature is open to all, provided they have “eyes to see” what it says about God.

Similarly, in his Sermon 68, Augustine says: “Some people, in order to discover God, read a book. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above and below, note, read. God whom you want to discover, did not make the letters with ink; he put in front of your eyes the very things that he made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that?”

Building on the same thread of natural theology, Merton makes the case that one does not need to use overt theological or Christian language, or even reference God as such, in recognizing the divine or transcendent in the world.

Hence a saint is capable of talking about the world without any explicit reference to God, in such a way that his statement gives greater glory to God and arouses a greater love of God than the observations of someone less holy, who has to strain himself to make an arbitrary connection between creatures and God through the medium of hackneyed analogies and metaphors that are so feeble that they make you think there is something the matter with religion (NSC 24).

Here I am reminded of Karl Rahner’s famous proposal of “the anonymous Christian,” which suggests that there are ways one may in fact be more attuned to the divine in the world and more aligned with the gospel message of action in the world as a non-Christian than many Christians who purport to be followers of Christ and yet do little to demonstrate that concretely in their lives and through their views.

This theme of natural theology or reading the book of nature might be threatening to some triumphalist Christians who view their faith as something held in reserve and exists in a zero-sum contest against others. But the truth is, Merton is encouraging us to look at the very condition of the possibility for contemplation and communion with God, and that is a fundamental human characteristic shared by all people.

The ‘False Self’

Finally, perhaps the most famous theme Merton introduces in chapter four is that of the “false self.” In the following few chapters Merton will begin to layout what he means by the “true self,” but it is here that its counter concept is presented. Merton mentions either the “false self” or, synonymously, the “illusory self” seven times in this short chapter.

Building on his cautionary reflections about false fuga mundi attitudes in the spiritual life, Merton invites readers to shift their focus away from “evil” or “bad” things in the created world and attend to a critical interiority, examining their own hearts and minds. He contrasts the false belief that created things are themselves the problem from which we should flee with the true stumbling block we face, our “false self” (or better, selves, as there is never only one).

The obstacle is in our “self,” that is to say in the tenacious need to maintain our separate, external, egotistic will. It is when we refer all things to this outward and false “self” that we alienate ourselves from reality and from God. It is then the false self that is our god, and we love everything for the sake of this self. We use all things, so to speak, for the worship of this idol which is our imaginary self (NSC 21).

There is only one “true self,” who it is that we are before God. God loves each of us into existence, knows each of our full identities completely, and calls us by name. Anything that is other than that is what Merton refers to as “false” or “illusory,” which is an identity—truly a fiction or “mask”—that is unreal and unknown to God.

The “false self” finds a number of impetuses: sometimes it is our own skewed perception of ourself or desire to be someone other than whom we are; sometimes it is the external social or ecclesial pressure to likewise be different; and sometimes it is rooted in a basic sense of insecurity, resulting in a belief that we must not be good enough as we are and therefore we must “create ourselves” anew.

For some people, this creation of a “false self” is an exercise in freedom. But Merton believes that this is part of the distorting worldview that is the condition of such a creation.

Merton explains: “The only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our own false self, and enter by love into union with the Life Who dwells and sings within the essence of every creature and in the core of our own souls” (NSC 25).

He also makes clear that the “false self” is not to be identified with our bodies or with creation as such, as if, again, the only thing that matters is our “souls.” Merton calls this mistaken view “angelism.” Such a view is itself false and “consequently an illusion” (NSC 27) as Merton later explains. We must never lose sight of the truth that we are body and soul, corporeal and open to the transcendent, finite and yet called to eternal life.

There is much more to say about the false self, which will continue to surface as we move through New Seeds, as this is one of the most important and central themes of this book.

Works Cited

Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, ed. John E. Rotelle, vol 2 (New York: New City Press, 2000)

Augustine, Sermons: 51–94, ed. Edmund Hill, vol. 3 (New York: New City Press, 1991).

Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, ed. Zachary Hayes and Philotheus Boehner (St. Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2002).

Irenaeus of Lyons, Against the Heresies: Books 4 & 5, trans. Dominic Unger (New York: The Newman Press, 2024).

Donald Grayston, Thomas Merton: The Development of a Spiritual Theologian (Toronto: Edwin Mellin Press, 1985).

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1961).

Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1978).

Daniel P. Horan, PhD, is a Franciscan, Professor of Philosophy, Religious Studies and Theology and Director of the Center for the Study of Spirituality at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Ind., and Affiliated Professor of Spirituality at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He is a columnist for National Catholic Reporter, and the author of many books, including Engaging Thomas Merton: Spirituality, Justice, and Racism (2023) and A White Catholic’s Guide to Racism and Privilege (2021). Follow him on Facebook.

New Seeds 4: Everything That Is, Is Holy was originally published in Journal of Everyday Mysticism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is part of an ongoing, occasional series of essays offering commentary on Thomas Merton’s classic book New Seeds of Contemplation (1961)

Background and Context

Chapter Three in New Seeds, “Seeds of Contemplation” (14–20), is, at least nominally, the first chapter to appear in the 1961 text that also appeared in the original Seeds of Contemplation (1949). I say “nominal” because the titles remain the same but the function and content vary between the two. In Seeds, the earlier version of this chapter functioned more like an introduction than a discrete chapter. In fact, it is not numbered, whereas every chapter that follows in the book is. That makes sense if one treated this section as introductory or as some kind of preface. Additionally, that the heading and the content speak directly to the title of the book, it follows that readers might expect a more expository presentation rather than a constructive, stand alone chapter.

The content of the original version in Seeds also differs from the significantly revised and expanded chapter that appears in New Seeds. In terms of simple word count, this same-titled section of Seeds lasts a mere three pages in the published edition, whereas the chapter in New Seeds weighs in at 6 and 1/2 pages. A substantial amount of material was added to the already twice-revised (from the 1948 original typescript; (1) the first printing of Seeds in March 1949 and (2) the “revised” edition of Seeds in seventh printing in December 1949) manuscript. Most of the revisions between the original Seeds and the “revised” edition were notably minor. Corrections, clarifications, minimal changes in word choice, and so on. But what we see in New Seeds is virtually a new text.

We can count among the consistencies between Seeds and New Seeds, beyond the retention of the original title, the introduction of the concept of the seeds and the discussion of contemplation as a means to align with the will of God. But even these two foci are substantially developed in New Seeds. For example, while the opening lines of the opening paragraph discussing the metaphor of seeds remains largely unchanged, Merton adds several paragraphs in New Seeds that build on the metaphor and make explicit scriptural connections (e.g., reference to the Parable of the Sower).

Even though scholars — and Merton himself — note a tonal shift between the two editions, the original three-page version in Seeds does not read as harsh or judgmental, curt or clinical, in the way that it is sometimes caricatured (especially in retrospect as read against New Seeds). The brevity is noticeable, and the examples are fewer and explication is lighter but, at the risk of being too cute with imagery, the “seed” we read in Seeds appears to have blossomed into a more hearty plant in New Seeds, by which I mean the theme grows in complexity and richness rather than shifts as if it were some kind of departure.

Commentary: “Seeds of Contemplation”

After two introductory chapters that laid out some preliminary parameters about contemplation, chapter three begins with a constructive reflection on the central metaphor of the book: “seeds.” Merton contends that every moment of our lives “plants something in [our] soul.” A reflection on our embodiment and historical situatedness, Merton presumes the universality of human openness to the transcendent, to what Christians call the God of Jesus Christ. Channeling the wisdom of the 4th Century Augustine of Hippo, who said that God is the one who is closer to us than ourselves and that our hearts are restless until they rest in God, Merton believes that God’s self-disclosure and invitation to response is always everywhere present. Like the Parable of the Sower in the gospels, God is steadily casting “seeds” our way, the question is whether or not they take root, are nurtured, and grow.

Because of the persistence of God and the omnipresence of this divine invitation, one of the things we need to attend to is our spiritual sight and our contemplative minds. It is not a matter of us going out to “find God,” but rather attune ourselves to the divine presence in our midst, even while our surroundings can be full of distractions. Merton writes: “The ever-changing reality in the midst of which we live should awaken us to the possibility of an uninterrupted dialogue with God” (14). He later adds: “We must learn to realize that the love of God seeks us in every situation, and seeks our good. His inscrutable love seeks our awakening” (15).

While there is much more to lift up in this chapter, I want to focus my reflections on three themes Merton engages.

The first is the theme of idolatry. While Merton does not use that word explicitly, he does spend a good amount of time unpacking the subject as part of the problem for contemporary believers. He describes commonplace stereotypes that Christians harbor about God (“a domineering and insensible Father”), noting that this sort of imagining runs counter to revelation and what the tradition affirms about God. In a telling line, Merton writes: “So much depends on our idea of God! Yet no idea of Him, however pure and perfect, is adequate to express Him as He really is. Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him” (15).

Contemplation helps us to overcome this temptation to idolatry. It is about entering into the silence of “dialogue” with God, which Merton explains, “I do not mean continuous ‘talk’ or a frivolous conversational form of affective prayer which is sometimes cultivated in convents, but a dialogue of love and of choice” (14). The question we are left to ponder is how do we form our understanding of God? Is it what God reveals to us or is it a false image we construct according to our desires or fears?

The second theme is what I like to call “becoming a living prayer.” Again, Merton doesn’t use this language explicitly, but it is reminiscent of a theme found within the Franciscan theological tradition that was so influential in his own spiritual life and theological outlook. In an extended meditation, Merton reflects on how God’s presence—nurtured in the budding seeds of contemplation—is found in the divine love offered to him at all times.

For it is God’s love that warms me in the sun and God’s love that sends the cold rain. It is God’s love that feeds me in the bread I eat and God that feeds me also by hunger and fasting. It is the love of God that sends the winter days when I am cold and sick, and the hot summer when I labor and my clothes are full of sweat: but it is God who breathes on me with light winds off the river and in the breezes out of the wood. His love spreads the shade of the sycamore over my head and sends the water-boy along the edge of the wheat field with a bucket from the spring, while the laborers are resting and the mules stand under the tree (16–17).

Along with his opening reflection on “the possibility of an uninterrupted dialogue with God,” passages such as this lend themselves to an interpretation that prayer, in the form of contemplation, is not something merely for isolated, discrete instances that accord with traditional times and spaces for meditation (such as at liturgy in a designated church), but also at all times and places. What is necessary is that we have “eyes to see and ears to hear” (Matt 13:9–16). In this way, the insights about contemplation—not merely contemplatio but also speculatio—that Bonaventure discussed in his medieval treatises beckon us out of our narrowly defined categories for when and where to find God in order to recognize the divine presence among and within us at all times and places.

Finally, Merton discusses God’s will as true freedom. Like the theologian Karl Rahner who often wrote about the direct and proportionate relationship between authentic human freedom and dependence on God, as opposed to the commonsense view of these as inversely related or even antithetical, Merton explains that our freedom and authenticity arises from our conformity to God’s will. “If these seeds would take root in my liberty, and if His will would grow from my freedom, I would become the love that He is, and my harvest would be His glory and my own joy” (17). He continues:

My chief care should not be to find pleasure or success, health or life or money or rest or even things like virtue and wisdom—still less their opposites, pain, failure, sickness, death. But in all that happens, my one desire and my one joy should be to know: “Here is the thing God has willed for me. In this His love is found, and in accepting this I can give back HIs love to Him and give myself with it to Him. For in giving myself I shall find Him and He is life everlasting” (17–18).

Taken a step further, Merton asks “How am I to know the will of God?” and answers, in part, “For whatever is demanded by truth, by justice, by mercy, or by love must surely be taken to be willed by God. To consent to His will is, then, to consent to be true, or to speak truth, or at least to seek it” (18).

This failure to recognize authenticity, justice, and truth in conformity to God’s will impedes our ability to see and nourish the “seeds” of contemplation sown by God. “The mind that is the prisoner of conventional ideas, and the will that is the captive of its own desire cannot accept the seeds of an unfamiliar truth and a supernatural desire,” Merton writes. “For how can I receive the seeds of freedom if I am in love with slavery and how can I cherish the desire of God if I am filled with another and an opposite desire?” (16).

The metaphor of “seeds” may or may not be an appealing way of conceptualizing of God’s proximity to us at all times, calling us to follow God’s will and love one another as we have first been loved. But the core of Merton’s points about the consistency and gratuity of God’s love and gift of the divine self offer spiritual seekers much to consider, especially when reflecting on images of God, prayer at all times, and authentic human freedom.

Works Cited

Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Daniel P. Horan, “Prayer in the Franciscan Tradition,” in Prayer in the Catholic Tradition: A Handbook of Practical Approaches, ed. Robert J. Wicks (Cincinnati: Franciscan Media, 2016), 177–208.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1961).

Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1978).

Daniel P. Horan, PhD, is a Franciscan friar, Professor of Philosophy, Religious Studies and Theology and Director of the Center for the Study of Spirituality at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Ind., and Affiliated Professor of Spirituality at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He is a columnist for National Catholic Reporter, and the author of many books, including Engaging Thomas Merton: Spirituality, Justice, and Racism (2023) and A White Catholic’s Guide to Racism and Privilege (2021). Follow him on Facebook.

New Seeds 3: Seeds of Contemplation was originally published in Journal of Everyday Mysticism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is part of an ongoing, occasional series of essays offering commentary on Thomas Merton’s classic book New Seeds of Contemplation (1961)

Background and Context

This chapter, like the previous one (“What is Contemplation?”), was an original addition that appeared in New Seeds but not in its predecessor. As other scholars have noted, these two chapter offer a substantive introduction to the revised and expanded text that follows. As William Shannon explains, “In Chapter 2, and in a number of other places in the book, Merton develops more fully an approach to spirituality that he had hinted at in Seeds of Contemplation and expanded somewhat in “The Inner Experience”: the distinction between the true self and the false self” (325).

And here we see what has, in large part, made New Seeds the “spiritual classic” that is remains today. Without a doubt, Merton’s introduction of the concept of the “True Self” and “False Self” continues to be the most influential and significant contribution Merton made to the field of Christian spirituality. It has not only taken hold within faith communities, in discussions related to spiritual direction, and has played a central role in thousands of spiritual retreats over the decades, but other fields like that of psychology and pastoral counseling have studied, engaged, critiqued, and appropriated the concept. Subsequently, other great spiritual writers, like Franciscan friar Richard Rohr and Merton’s former novice James Finley, have made the concept even more popular and accessible.

The origin of Seeds (and, by extension, New Seeds) can be traced back to early conversations Merton had within the context of confession and spiritual direction while still a monk in formation. One example of this sort of encouragement appears in a journal entry dated December 29, 1946 in which Merton is encouraged to “teach contemplation, and especially to let people know, in what I write, that the contemplative life is quite easy and accessible and does not require extraordinary or strange efforts, just the normal generosity required to strive for sanctity” (34). A version of the passage appeared later in Merton’s 1953 book The Sign of Jonas.

Perhaps it was precisely this encouragement that led Merton to respond favorably to a request from a student at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, for information explaining the meaning of contemplation. This short 25-page booklet had eight sections that represent Merton’s first quasi-public attempt to teach about contemplation. One of the key themes that will remain constant in Merton’s writings about the contemplative life, and go back to that 1946 conversation with his confessor, is the conviction that contemplation is a divine gift open to everyone.

At the same time, Merton was continuing to read the works of Medieval Franciscan theologians, especially John Duns Scotus, with whom he had been introduced by his Columbia University professor Dan Walsh. In a December 10, 1946 entry in his journal, Merton remarks:

I have been reading Dun Scotus Oxoniense III, distinction 18, on Christ’s will and His love. Scotus is really simple once you get through the barricade of distinctions that are so hard to understand. His underlying thought is beautiful, coherent, and he is always working for simplicity, elimination of non-essentials. Sometimes I get a glimpse of the unity that underlies all his discussions and I find it lucid and easy to see and wonderful to contemplate, once I get the whole perspective. And the contemplation of it fills me with love for God and makes me praise Him. Nevertheless, it is sometimes brutally hard to crack through the shell and get into Scotus’s thought!

Earlier that Fall, in a September 1946 letter to another one of his former Columbia professors, Mark Van Doren, Merton wrote:

Duns Scotus and Bonaventure are tremendous. A book on that Scotus is brewing, I can see that: it will take time, though, and God will have to give me a lot of special graces if [I] am going to do it well, because Scotus is something big. The thing is: while St. Thomas got off with Aristotle and tended to be intellectual and systematizing, Scotus knew how to take Aristotle and leave him alone and he keeps the full tradition of St. Augustine and St. Anselm—which keeps love in the first place all the way down the line—in its purity. Also, he is the one who most glorifies Christ, that is gives the Incarnate Word, the Man-God, the full limit of everything that can be given Him.

Merton scholars, including myself and George Kilcourse, have suggested that what eventually became Seeds and New Seeds began as this “book on Scotus” that Merton conveyed to Van Doren was “brewing.” It’s true that Merton never authored a monograph explicitly on the Subtle Doctor, but as I demonstrate in my 2014 book The Franciscan Heart of Thomas Merton, Scotus was clearly a major inspiration and influence in Merton’s thinking not only in Christology but also on the development of his concept of the “True Self.” We will return to this line of influence with commentary on later chapters of New Seeds

But it is clear from journey entries at the time that Merton connected the reading of Scotus and other sources to his deepening appreciation for and reflection on contemplation.

Finally, there is one historical note worth highlighting that is not widely known. It appears that Merton’s original title for Seeds was “The Soil and Seeds of Contemplation.” He relayed this working title to his then-literary agent Naomi Burton Stone in a letter dated March 8, 1948.

Also, [Jay] Loughlin is interested in another project that is underway, a book of more or less random thoughts about the contemplative life called THE SOIL AND SEEDS OF CONTEMPLATION. That will be ready I suppose about midsummer.

She responded three days later expressing her interest in hearing more about this project. It’s worth noting that this exchange about this work-in-progress that would become Seeds later that year, occurred seven months before The Seven Storey Mountain would be published.

What Contemplation Is Not

As noted above, this chapter plays a key role in setting the thematic stage for what follows in the rest of the book. Notably, the introduction of the “True Self” (in contrast to the “external” or “false” self) provides us with an important thread to trace throughout the text. While the appearance of these categories is significant, substantively, the question of how contemplation relates to one’s identity plays a more immediate role in Chapter 2.

There are two ways this theme unfolds in the present section. First, in describing what contemplation is not (a clever theological approach and literary device), Merton explains that authentic contemplation does not arise from the “false” (or “external”) self. And, second, when we talk about contemplation we are not talking about an action so much as a way of being.

Merton is skeptical about aspects of ostensible contemplative experiences that are, in his description, external or exceptional “manifestations” or phenomena. He writes:

Contemplation is not trance or ecstasy, nor the hearing of sudden unutterable words, nor the imagination of lights. It is not the emotional fire and sweetness that come with religious exaltation. It is not enthusiasm, the sense of being “seized” by an elemental force and swept into liberation by mystical frenzy. These things may seem to be in some way like a contemplative awakening in so far as they suspend the ordinary awareness and control exercised by our empirical self. But they are not the work of the “deep self,” only of the emotions, of the somatic unconscious…Such manifestations can of course accompany a deep and genuine religious experience, but they are not what I am talking about here as contemplation (10–11).

For Merton, these sorts of experiences or apparent religious phenomena tend to be superficial, fleeting, or wholly unrelated to the deeper contemplative life God calls all people to experience. As he says directly, “Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self.” He also explains that “Our external, superficial self is not eternal, not spiritual. far from it” (7). We will see as we progress through New Seeds that Merton will return frequently to this challenge of the false self in the contemplative life.

This theme leads to the second point Merton makes in this chapter; namely, that contemplation is not a thing but a way of being. He opens the chapter with a clear assertion of the experiential nature of true contemplation. “The only way to get rid of misconceptions about contemplation is to experience it” (6).

That contemplation is experiential, embodied, and not merely a “thing” among others to be studied or “explained,” makes it a subject that is difficult to describe (hence the proliferation of “misconceptions” about it). For Merton, the experience of contemplation is a response to God’s initiative, love, and disclosure of the divine self in relationship. It is not something that we can conjure at will nor is it something we are in control of, as he explains, “contemplation can never be the object of calculated ambition. It is not something we plan to obtain with our practical reason, but the living water of the spirit that we thirst for, like a hundred deer thirsting after a river in the wilderness” (10).

It is always and everywhere the work of grace, of God’s presence in our lives. This is why Merton can say “It is not we who choose to awaken ourselves, but God Who chooses to awaken us” (10). The issue then is not a matter of our determination or exercise of some honed skill. In fact, Merton goes to great lengths in New Seeds and in his other writings on contemplation to prescind from offering any explicit guidebook or regimen for how to contemplate.

Contemplation is about the experience of God through which we concurrently come to a deeper encounter with our true self, which is who we are before God in our totality, particularity, and authenticity. “Contemplation does not arrive at reality after a process of deduction, but by an intuitive awakening in which our free and personal reality becomes fully alive to its own existential depths, which open out into the mystery of God” (9). The experience of contemplation is an experience of relationship.

Merton’s emphasis on the need for Christians to be disabused of false notions about contemplation, the need to surrender the fictions of our false or external selves, and the affirmation that contemplation is fundamentally about the encounter with God in relationship, leads not only to a kind of “myth busting” about our identity (exposing the false selves) but also a deconstruction of false notions of God. At the end of the chapter, Merton explains how authentic contemplation troubles whatever preconceived notion of God we have constructed.

In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing the he no longer knows what God is. He may or may not mercifully realize that, after all, this is a great gain, because “God is not a what,” not a “thing.” That is precisely one of the essential characteristics of contemplative experience. It sees that there is no “what” that can be called God. There is “no such thing” as God because God is neither a “what” nor a “thing” but a pure “Who,” He is the “Thou” before whom our inmost “I” springs into awareness. He is the I AM before whom with our own most personal and inalienable voice we echo “I am” (13, emphasis in original).

Taken out of context, one might mistake Merton’s reflections here for an apologia on behalf of atheism. However, Merton is in no way denying the reality or existence of God. On the contrary, he is calling out the many Christians who replace the living God of Jesus Christ, who calls us into real and subjective relationship, with idols of their own making. For this reason, contemplation can be scary because the experience of contemplation radically unsettles our assumed notions about who we are (“false self”) and who God is (idols, things, what and not who).

When we find ourselves attuned to the mystery of grace present in our lives, attend to that loving invitation to divine encounter extended to all of us by God, then we begin to let go of the static, false, propositional, and self-constructed images and notions we have of the Creator. Our hearts and minds then open up, not to the need to control, label, or categorize, but to experience transcendence and dwell in divine love.

Works Cited

Donald Grayston, Thomas Merton: The Development of a Spiritual Theologian(Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1985).

Daniel P. Horan, The Franciscan Heart of Thomas Merton: A New Look at the Spiritual Inspiration of His Life, Thought, and Writing (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 2014).

George Kilcourse, Ace of Freedoms: Thomas Merton’s Christ (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).

Thomas Merton, Entering the Silence: The Journals of Thomas Merton, 1941–1952, ed. Jonathan Montaldo (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996).

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1961).

Thomas Merton, “September 19, 1946, Letter to Mark Van Doren,” unpublished letter, Mark Van Doren Collection, Butler Library of Columbia University.

Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1953).

Thomas Merton, What is Contemplation? (Notre Dame: Saint Mary’s College, 1948).

William H. Shannon, “New Seeds of Contemplation,” in The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia, eds. William H. Shannon, Christine Bochum, and Patrick F. O’Connell (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2002), 324–325.

Daniel P. Horan, PhD, is a Franciscan friar, Professor of Philosophy, Religious Studies and Theology and Director of the Center for the Study of Spirituality at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Ind., and Affiliated Professor of Spirituality at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He is a columnist for National Catholic Reporter, and the author of many books, including Engaging Thomas Merton: Spirituality, Justice, and Racism (2023) and A White Catholic’s Guide to Racism and Privilege (2021). Follow him on Facebook.

New Seeds 2: What Contemplation is Not was originally published in Journal of Everyday Mysticism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For several years now, I have been preoccupied by the subject of fear and how it functions across an array of social, educational, political, cultural, and religious contexts. As a theologian and scholar of spirituality, I have been particularly interested in the way fear operates in the faith lives of individuals, especially those within the Christian tradition. Subsequently, I have used some opportunities, such as in lectures and my columns, to begin exploring questions related to this theme. The result of this initial foray into fear and faith has been a small book titled Fear and Faith: Hope and Wholeness in a Fractured World (Paulist Press, 2024), which is scheduled for publication in early summer.

This is a book aimed a broad audience. While it is grounded in substantive research and theory, it’s written with the widest readership in mind because I believe these themes touch the lives of most if not all people. I thought I might share a brief excerpt from the Introduction.

While I continue to develop my thinking about the intersection of fear and faith, the chapters in this book offer a preliminary glimpse at some of the key themes and issues. What follows is organized into three main chapters followed by a brief conclusion.

In the first chapter, we draw on the work of philosophers, social scientists, and theologians to consider the nature of fear in everyday experience. To this end, I have titled this chapter in such a way as to signal that we can qualify and understand the reality of fear as being either natural or unnatural. The experience of fear is not only a universal attribute of the human family, but science reveals that nonhuman animals also experience fear — it is, in a natural sense, a necessary evolutionary phenomenon that can save as much as it debilitates. What is the appropriate response to fear? In the Christian tradition — as we’ll see, elsewhere too — the antidote to fear is hope. Hope is often viewed as Pollyannish, naïve, or worse. This is often the case because of centuries of misunderstanding around what constitutes hope, leaving it vulnerable to perceptions of irrationality in the post-Western-Enlightenment age. But as philosophers, theologians, and spiritual guides demonstrate, authentic hope is indeed quite rational and an essential disposition in the face of unnatural fear.

In the second chapter, we explore some of those Christian and non-Christian prophets, especially those of the last century, who offer us guidance, insight, and inspiration in the face of fear. We need models and guides to respond to fear with an embrace of Christian hope. We will look to several such spiritual models in that great cloud of witnesses that we call the communion of saints, to which we also belong.

The last chapter highlights the importance of responding to a culture of fear by developing a robust pneumatology, that overlooked yet chief component of our Christian faith. Any substantive Christian spirituality depends on a foundational theology of the Holy Spirit, and this is even more pressing in a time of crisis that many of us experience today. Drawing on the insights of theologians and spiritual writers, I will argue that we need a renewed understanding of the Holy Spirit as the anchor of a contemporary spirituality that is resilient to the perennial enemy of Christian discipleship: fear.

And, finally, the book closes with a short conclusion. As mentioned earlier, this book is not a definitive theological assessment of fear, but a modest attempt to contribute to an ongoing conversation. It is my hope that what follows might inspire and challenge those who are interested in engaging the topic of fear and faith within a contemporary Christian life.

Daniel P. Horan, PhD, is a Franciscan friar, Professor of Philosophy, Religious Studies and Theology and Director of the Center for the Study of Spirituality at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Ind., and Affiliated Professor of Spirituality at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He is a columnist for National Catholic Reporter, and the author of many books, including Engaging Thomas Merton: Spirituality, Justice, and Racism (2023) and A White Catholic’s Guide to Racism and Privilege (2021). Follow him on Facebook.