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This chapter examines the influence of James Joyce's Catholic nostalgia on Anglo-American Catholic writer Thomas Merton. It explains that though Merton had no Catholic childhood, no Catholic mother, and no Catholic home to arouse nostalgia for the trappings of Catholicism, he became a cloistered monk, a priest, and, arguably, the most influential Catholic writer of the twentieth century. It describes the traces of Joyce's influence on Merton's works including his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain.

This chapter traces the steps of an emerging ecological consciousness—from Thomas Merton's letter to Rachel Carson in 1963 until his last published book review a few months before his death in 1968. The assortment of letters, journal entries, reading notebooks, and published book reviews written during these five years reveals Thomas Merton on the cutting edge of environmental thinking and developing what Aldo Leopold—and later Merton—called an ecological conscience. Embedded in Merton's letter to Carson are three strands of his deepening spirituality: awareness and a keen eye for the beauty and the holiness or “sacramentality” of nature, a deepening realization of kinship and harmony with nature, and a growing sense of compassion and responsibility for all creation. Although these strands have been looked at individually in a somewhat biographical way, it can also be discerned how they become part of the fabric of Merton's spirituality particularly in the last years of his life. In general, the letters and published book reviews during the last five years of his life document an evolving and more intensely felt commitment to environmental integrity—a new consciousness motivated by justice for all creatures.

This chapter focuses on Thomas Merton's inner and outer landscapes, investigating how love of nature overflowed into prayer; how prayer often expanded into celebration of nature; and how frequently, in his years of more intense solitude, inner and outer landscapes intertwined and merged into a new awareness that underpinned his poetry and his fascination with photography, and which prepared Merton for discovering his responsibility for justice for creation. In general, it explores some of the journal entries that witness the transformative process in action and discover how overwhelmingly influential nature is in Merton's spirituality and, indeed, in his full human development. Merton's poetry always moves beyond cursory lyrical imagery and traditional religious devotion to embody his experience of prayer. It specifically addresses “Fire Watch, July 4, 1952” and “Hagia Sophia”.

This chapter explores the passages from Thomas Merton's journals, spanning several years, to give ongoing evidence of the multiple ways nature and ordinary experiences influenced his writing, thinking, and praying. Noting the increasing frequency of such passages reveals how nature images function in several specific ways: the poetic eye that sees and celebrates the uniqueness of creation; extended metaphors that probe and attempt to explain the conundrums of life; weather reports that offer insight into both external and internal atmospheres; and the frequent merging of inner and outer landscapes, landscapes that mediate and to some degree articulate Merton's ineffable experience of prayer. All these experiences of immersion in nature create the foundation for Merton's evolution toward a new level of responsibility for the welfare of nature and his development of an ecological consciousness. Each of these clusters or categories is specifically investigated.

This chapter examines Thomas Merton's early life, looking for examples of seeds: influences and patterns that contributed to his predisposition for ecological thinking. It specifically concentrates on Merton's gift of awareness and sense of place—from his infant days in Prades, France, to his entrance into the Trappist monastery in Kentucky and the turning point of June 27, 1949, when the abbot permitted Merton to pray beyond the confines of the monastery cloister. Three French landscapes in particular—Prades, Saint-Antonin, Murat—as well as the city of Rome show how vulnerable Merton was to the influence of geography and how deeply these places contributed in later years to his love of wilderness and his evolving ecological consciousness. Generally, June 27, 1949, represents the abbot's wise recognition of Merton's need to be in nature, his recognition of the potential for deeper prayer that contact with the wilderness can stimulate, and an official invitation to savor a new awareness of both outer and inner landscapes.

This chapter applies the concept of “spots of time” to three graced moments that reveal Thomas Merton's increasing reliance on nature for his spiritual growth: his impetuous climb up a Kentucky knob on New Year's Day 1950; his encounter with a hawk on February 10, 1950; and his meditation in the 1960s on the awakening of the birds at le point vierge of the day. These two spots of time that nurture Merton's spiritual awakening are indicative of the power of nature to evoke prayer and effect ongoing spiritual growth. Moreover, these illustrations offer clues for understanding Merton's fascination with nature and his ability to see—be awake to—the spiritual lessons they impart. This brings a third poignant example that provides insight into Merton's response to spots of time and growth in spiritual richness. Published as Day of a Stranger, this journal section shows how Merton lives in the woods “out of necessity”, in a kind of “ecological balance” (DS 33).

This chapter explores in greater detail the interfaith reading and spiritual cosmopolitanism of the war and postwar years. The reading campaign of the National Conference of Christians and Jews called Americans to read across the boundaries of tradition, but it was the advancement of psychology and mysticism during the war years that made interfaith spirituality successful at the popular level. In particular, military service acculturated tens of millions of Americans to scientific psychology. The works and lives of three bestselling authors of the 1940s, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Joshua Loth Liebman, and Thomas Merton, illustrate the role of psychology and mysticism in facilitating interfaith reading and spiritual cosmopolitanism. The bestsellers of these authors, a Protestant, a Catholic, and a Jew, stand in contrast to the generic religiosity famously decried by the critic Will Herberg and exemplified by laissez-faire liberal Norman Vincent Peale. These authors instead remained rooted in their specific traditions, even as their works were read widely by members of other traditions. Letter from readers, both civilians and those in the military, demonstrate these developments, and give voice to the rising religious liberalism of the postwar period.

This chapter provides an analysis of Thomas Merton's letter to Rachel Carson and a brief clarification of how these two literary minds were prophets of both revelation and revolution. Rachel Carson was the author of the recently published Silent Spring. Merton's January 12, 1963, letter is a watershed moment, or “spot of time”, in his developing environmental consciousness. Merton's reading of Silent Spring was an epiphanic event akin to other well-known and powerful moments of spiritual insight in his life. Nearly fifty years later, it can verify that Silent Spring became the catalyst for the current environmental movement. In both writers, there is a sense of responsibility for environmental health that comes from attentiveness to their surroundings and commitment to a coherent vision of the cosmos. There is also what the ecocritic Jonathan Bate has called ecopoesis—a deep longing for belonging.

This chapter emphasizes three pivotal moments in Thomas Merton's life. The first, in the late 1950s, was his experience at Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, where he suddenly realized that “I loved all people and that they are a part of me”. The second, in 1963, was the experience that triggered his letter to Rachel Carson, an experience of his oneness with all of nature. The third, in 1968, was the experience at the Buddha statues in Ceylon, where he was drawn into oneness with all that is. This book explores the powerful impact of nature on Thomas Merton's spiritual development and budding ecological consciousness. It also explores Merton's commitment to seeing and increased awareness and explores some of the consequences of that commitment: his deepening sense of place and desire for solitude; his expanded love and responsibility for human and nonhuman life; and his evolving ecological consciousness. An overview of the chapters included in this book is presented.

This chapter provides a vignette or snapshot of Thomas Merton's spiritual journey—his story in miniature—as he learned to interact responsibly with the deer in the woods surrounding his hermitage. Emulating Merton's fondness for metaphor and analogy, the word symphony is deliberately used: his transformative interaction with deer follows the musical structure of the first movement of a symphony: exposition, development, and recapitulation or coda. In general, it is stated that humans need to develop an ecological conscience.

This chapter contains D. T. Suzuki's letter to the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton dated March 31, 1959. In the letter, Suzuki is requesting Merton to send the manuscript for his book The Wisdom of the Desert so that Suzuki can go over it. Suzuki also tells Merton that he is presently involved in writing more books on Zen, which he says is misunderstood by American and European writers. According to Suzuki, grasping Zen thoroughly requires a certain course of discipline as well as the reading knowledge of Japanese and Chinese literature on the subject. He also mentions his lectures in Mexico and his efforts to write his views on Christianity.

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the influence of Catholic nostalgia on the works of James Joyce. It highlights the differences between Joyce's depiction of Catholic rituals and iconography in his works and those of several other writers including Thomas Merton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Flannery O'Connor. It also describes the influence of Marian devotion on these writers, all having experienced a so-called Marian era which lasted from the 1850s to the 1960s.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the influence of Catholic nostalgia on the works of Irish author James Joyce. This book identifies the specific Catholic rituals and devotions that caused a nostalgic reaction in Joyce and suggests that his depiction of Catholic issues in his work has inspired in his readers an enduring admiration for institutional Catholicism. It also explores the influence of Joyce on subsequent writers, including Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Merton.

This chapter examines the influence of the Catholic service called benediction on the works of James Joyce. It suggests that benediction constituted for Joyce and other writers including Thomas Merton and F. Scott Fitzgerald an efficient, precise, and elegant practice by which individuals were led to focus their attention on themselves as subjects of desire. It also attempts to show how the political as well as the psychological pressures the devotion exerted seem to have become interanimated by the spiritualization and later the medicalization of female orgasm.

This chapter takes seriously the concept of Christian brotherhood, which emerged in the early civil rights years as a family language with the potential to undermine hierarchies involving racial difference. Brotherhood (and sometimes sisterhood) became a crucial idea for reformers hoping to get deeper inside human relationships than legal solutions to problems of discrimination seemed to promise. The chapter presents short intellectual studies of individual reformers who used the concept of brotherhood.

This chapter is devoted to discussion of three forms of solitude. The chapter is an epilogue rather than a main chapter because solitudes, in the author’s view, are relatively rare withdrawals from every day life that are far more extensive than any given solitary action. During such solitudes, spiritual, aesthetic, or emotional concerns take priority over the mundane events of ordinary routines. Three quite distinct realms of solitude are discussed. First, the solitude of the religious retreat which relies heavily on the reflections of Thomas Merton on his own spiritual experiences in solitude. Second, the solitude of refined retreat which has a long history dating from ancient Roman poets and dignitaries through the nuanced reflections of Montaigne to more contemporary aesthetes such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Third, the solitude of withdrawal in times of personal distress which draws heavily upon May Sarton’s reflections on her own retreats during episodes of personal turmoil.