Book Review from David Jackson

Thomas Merton: When the Trees Say Nothing – writings on nature.
Ed: Kathleen Deignan. Sorin Books, Notre Dame 2003. ISBN 1-893732-60-6.

“Thomas Merton is now revealed as a man whose spirituality is rooted in nature, an environmentalist ahead of his time. His nature writings serve as a primer on eco-spirituality, and his gift to us is what will save us – a sense of the sacred in nature.”
For once a publisher’s blurb lives up to expectation. Kathleen Deignan is a Sister of the Congregation of Norte Dame and she acknowledges that the book is ‘the harvest of many seeds planted over decades by the women of that Congregation”. The foreword is written by Thomas Berry (of “The Universe Story” fame) This is a moving but sharp collection of Merton’s reflections on nature collected under chapters entitled: Seasons, Elements, Firmament, Creatures, Festivals and Presences. In her Introduction, entitled ‘The Forest is My Bride’, (Merton’s words) Kathleen describes Merton as the ‘Landscape’s painter’s Son’ with a Franciscan soul, a Cistercian heart, a Celtic spirit and a Zen mind. These together led him to ‘recover paradise’. 
Just one quote to set the scene: ‘I want not only to observe but to know living things, and this implies a dimension of primordial familiarity which is simple and primitive and religious and poor. This is the reality I need, the vestige of God in his creatures.’ (p 45)

To link Merton to Greta Thunberg: ‘A phenomenal number of species of animals and birds have become extinct in the last fifty years – due of course to man’s irruption into ecology.’ (p 46)

This is a book which celebrates in prose poetry ‘our common home’ now at risk in ways Merton could not have envisaged. It can help to offset our helplessness, spur us on to celebrate the gift of our shared creation and ground our action to care for the planet in a sense of the Divine.