I write these words on the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Thomas Merton, one of the greatest spiritual writers of the 20th century and a man who had a decisive influence on me and my vocation to the priesthood.
I first encountered Merton's writing in a peculiar way. My brother and I were both working at a bookstore in the Chicago suburbs. One afternoon, he tossed to me a tattered paperback with a torn cover that the manager had decided to discard. My brother said, "You might like this; it's written by a Trappist monk." I replied, with the blithe confidence of a sixteen year old, "I don't want to read a book by some Buddhist."
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