Essential to the Christian Contemplative

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	• Raids on the Unspeakable Thomas Merton New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1966 - 1 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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Essential to the Christian Contemplative

Merton is regarded as one of the few prophets of the 2oth century by the Catholic Church, and Raids makes it clear why. A series of essays and drawings, Raids on the Unspeakable provides valuable insight into the cultural phenomenon known as the 60s. While some of Mertons essays are hard to understnad, on a whole the book is well written and provides interesting philosophies on life. Merton's prophecies also seem to deal wiht many present day problems. Some highlights of the boke are Rain and the Rhinoceros', and Meditations in the Memory of Adolf Eichelman.

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Best book I ever read!

This was Merton's favorite book (of his own writing), and my favorite book as well. He was a scholar and a poet, and his essays reflect that: he does not write down to his audience. Merton was that great rarity: an existential mystic. He had incredible insights; his writing had a profound influence on ME. These essays are meant to be disturbing. Written in the Sixties, they are as meaningful today as then.

This small collection of Merton's essays presents the Trappist monk at his most bracing. Among other things, it sheds great light on that phenomenon we call the 1960s, which is when this book was first published. Even while writing about topics as diverse as Adolf Eichmann, Flannery O'Conner, and Prometheus, the essays engage the complicated history of those days head on, even while they explore the underlying spiritual issues. Above all, the essays celebrate the vigorous energy of life itself, uncontrolled, spontaneous, and natural--what Merton here calls the festival of rain: "all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees." Idiosyncratic, full of humor and poetic energy, these raids, as Merton himself says, "are not so much concerned with ethical principles and traditional answers ... but in difficult insights at a moment of human crisis." --Doug Thorpe

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