Bonnie B. THURSTON. Shaped by the End You Live For: Thomas Merton’s Monastic Spirituality. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2020. pp. xix + 166. $19.95, pb. Reviewed by John T. FORD, Logansport, IN 46947.

This small size paperback (5x7 inches) publishes ten of Thurston’s conferences on Merton’s monastic spirituality. After a brief biography of Merton, the author treats such topics as creation, spiritual listening, fleeing the world, obedience, solitude, prayer, searching for meaning in life, and creative consent—saying “yes to the divine.” All of these topics are meaningful not only for monastics, but for every spirituality.

Each topic is developed with appropriate quotations not only from Merton, but from other spiritual writers—biblical, patristic, medieval and modern. For example, Chapter 3, “Merton’s Presuppositions,” is particularly insightful: in contrast to a world overloaded with technological data, Merton emphasized “listening with our hearts for God within”; instead of becoming subservient to external persuasion and pressure, Merton recommended living from inside out. Such an approach allows a person to discern one’s “true self”—the person God wants each of us to be—in contrast to the “false self’ that society often tries to impose upon us.

Chapters 7 and 8, treating “Merton’s Principles of Prayer,” raise the pointed question: why does anyone of us try to be religious if we really don’t want to pray? In practice, Merton preferred “wordless prayer” and emphasized that reciting prayers is not always praying. However true this observation may be, such advice seems somewhat incongruous for monastics who spend a major portion of each day in reciting the divine office: how then can verbal prayer be “wordless”?

This book concludes with a select and well annotated bibliography (155-162) that should be helpful to those who want a guide to reading more of Merton’s writings, as well as the abundance of material about him and his spirituality.  One caveat: this book is not really suitable for beginners; it presupposes a basic familiarity with spirituality in general and some acquaintance with Merton in particular. Readers will find that the text is clearly, indeed engagingly, written; however, there are quite a few asides referring to previous/coming chapters and an overabundance of notes—close to three hundred—which are somewhat distracting.