Bonnie B. Thurston - Shaped by the End You Live For: Thomas Mertons Monastic Spirituality

There are so many aspects to Bonnie Thurston that the author of this study, like Thomas Merton, is hard to fit into one category. Of all the encounters I have had with her over many years, I retain an image of one moment that seems to sum up her profile. It was at one of the Thomas Merton international conferences where I was seated high enough to see the floor of the stage. After her introduction, in strides Bonnie Thurston, fully confident in the midst of academics, experts, scholars from across the country, and every kind of Merton reader. She wore a plain blouse, skirt, gardening shoes, and light gray socks. That said it all. Here was a woman who cultivates a solitary life, tills a garden at her hermitage back in my home state of West Virginia. Of course, she wore no religious habit, but the plain outfit and practical shoes spoke of monastic simplicity. Her tone was as one attending to business, and her content reached to the depths.

This book achieves those qualities both explicitly and implicitly, in the sense that she knows of what she speaks and speaks by experience. Bonnie is precise, nuanced, and profound, yet writes simply and directly. She meets the highest standards of scholarship and has published widely and often in New Testament studies. In her scholarly work, her personal life remains out of sight, but nevertheless it informs her spiritual understanding. As a thinker she can be one tough-minded West Virginia gal and I remember her taking down the chair of theology from a Catholic university after his lecture, offering him nine points of criticism. His brief and humble response was he agreed with every point. I am glad it did not break out into a squabble because the audience was held in the abbey church here at Gethsemani.

While being a lecturer and author or editor of twenty-two theological books, she is also a poet. I once gave her an argument that her poetry reflects too much of the pedagogue in her. She said that is because she is a pedagogue. Since then I have seen nothing of the likes in her poetry. Her poetic sequence on ancient Irish sites and churches are so sensitive you can feel you are there, even though youve never been.

She has put it in her own words: Writing is my authentic prayer, an attempt to articulate the glimpsed

In those poetic works more of the profile and history of her personal life emerges, and how it informs her writing. I am not a monastic, and have no vocation to cenobitic life, knowing only too well the nightmare I would be to a novice mistress and my sisters. But for nearly thirty years of widowhood, I have experimented with living more or less as a solitary in the old Celtic mode. Without formal vows, I try in a quiet way to conduct my ordinary life monastically.

This small volume is focused on the core of Mertons writing, in terms of themes readers are familiar withsilence, prayer, Gods call, renunciation, contemplation. This is a deftly written handbook on the salient points of monastic spirituality fundamental to Mertons writing. By all evidence it is a synopsis of a wide and continuous reading on Merton that began with Bonnies doctoral dissertation. But in a less obvious way it also springs from a life of solitude lived in the old Celtic mode.

I am thoroughly familiar with Mertons themes and writings, beginning with my days with him in the novitiate, but nevertheless I find in reading through these pages a lucidity and balance, an engaging counterpoint of themes that does justice to Mertons multifaceted thought yet retains basic simplicity. It is an excellent work for beginners as well as for seasoned readers, helping to refresh the air and regain orientation. Merton had such broad interests and was such a pioneer on many frontiers, you can easily lose the central motifs that were driving his expansive energy. Namely, the search for God in monastic life, the love of the place and the brethren, all of which grew and spread beyond the enclosure walls. It is in the deep roots of this solitude and silence that we find one another, whether friend or stranger, whether Christian or of another faith and practice altogetheror of a faith that cannot name itself.