A Search for Solitude

June 3, 1996
A Cistercian monk and author of the bestselling The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton records in his plain journal voice the struggles of a soul wrestling with both his vocation and his location, the Abbey of Our Lady of Gesthsemani near Bardstown,Ky. The journal pages are filled with spiritual ruminations, catalogues of Merton's correspondences and his reaction to them, lists of encounters with his fellows constrained by the discipline of the Abbey, his hopes for relocation to a mountaintop hermitage and all the day-to-day froth thst sits atop the deep currents of Merton's spiritual life. Part commonplace book, part spiritual journal, part diarist's discipline, the journal is both the sediment of his spiritual development and the tool he used to watch himself watching himself. Few readers who encounter this remarkable book will come away unchanged.