New Seeds of Contemplation
- Apr 7
- 3 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
★★★☆☆
I first learned of Thomas Merton from the essay “On the Road with Thomas Merton” in Emergence Magazine. Written by Fred Bahnson (with an accompanying film by Jeremy Seifert), it chronicles Merton’s pilgrimage to the American West, retracing his journey across the landscape. Merton got me to Matsuo Bashō and two different translations of his travelogues, Travel Writings and The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, which eventually got me back to Thomas Merton. Not quite knowing where to start (he’s written over sixty books), I settled on New Seeds of Contemplation because it’s the most-read book of his on Goodreads that my local library had on the shelf. (On Goodreads, it’s a distant second to his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain.)
I have long been fascinated with contemplatives, of monks in abbeys, of a life of ora et labora—waking early, silence, and simple living. Fascination is probably not the right word. Neither is obsession, but, not infrequently, I’ve imagined a life lived this way. It’s a fantasy, to be sure, not least of which because I’m not an adherent of any of the monastic religions, surely a make-or-break for admission into one of their orders. So, it’s not about literally becoming a monk or a contemplative, but about embodying their ethos. It’s about paying attention to what matters, being drawn to meaning and purpose, seeking nourishment and refreshment over cheap thrills and easy escapes. In short, it’s about striving for a more profound plane of existence. If that all sounds rather sterile and bland and, well, a total killjoy, I couldn’t disagree more. To me, it feels vibrant and alive and necessary, and as Thomas Merton might say, to, at last, get back to him, it’s not about the arrival, it’s about the journey. As sure as my name is Ryan, I’ll never arrive, I’ll never be that ideal version of myself, but I can certainly spend my life becoming that Ryan.
So then: New Seeds of Contemplation. I found it to be as moving as I did maddening. I’d like to think I can adapt writings about the Christian God to an animist mind as well as anyone, but the first half of the book was so dense in its Roman Catholicness that I could scarcely catch my breath, let alone put the words through my own imperfect translation engine. These were not the broad, universal thoughts I’d hoped to find, and I nearly gave up on it. What was I hoping for? Unlike other texts I’ve picked up that I hadn’t expected to be instruction manuals, I think some part of me wanted to be told how to become a contemplative—even as I know it’s absurd to want and impossible to get.
I took a break, thinking I was done with the book, but I left it sitting on the nightstand unreturned. Either I wasn’t done with it (Goodreads tells me over the past nineteen years, I’ve only quit on two books while finishing 291), or it wasn’t done with me. In any case, after a few days, perhaps a week, I picked it back up and found it, if not exactly what I thought it would be, much closer to that ideal than it had been. Was there a shift in the narrative? Or me? Both, I think. While the deep Catholicism at the heart of the book never wavered, I found its focus expanding with each subsequent chapter. I, too, probably expanded my perception of what I was getting—and what I thought I needed, or wanted.
In the end, I’m glad to have read it. I’m also glad to be done with it. I didn’t find it quite as universal as the jacket makes it out to be, though, as already mentioned, it did trend that way from the last half or so through to the end. There are whole chapters, and even portions within chapters, of incredible wisdom and depth, but, for this non-Catholic anyway, it often felt like a burden to get to what most spoke to me. In its own way, New Seeds of Contemplation feels like something akin to the Tao Te Ching or The Art of Peace, two books whose power grows through subsequent readings, even though some aphorisms within them resonate not at all. I’m half tempted to go there again, but I think instead I’ll reach next for Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude, hoping it’s closer to what I’m hoping to find, even as I know what I’m looking for can’t be found in any text.
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