Merton (click here) used his photography, not to capture pre-conceived notions of God, but to be open to receive the present-moment revelation of God in the world around him. This often led him away from conventionally beautiful objects to those, such as the hook in the sky, upon which God chooses to hang the divine riddle – It is as if God is saying to the eager photographer, “Search For Me And You Will Find Me, But Not Necessarily Where You Expected To!”

Photography doesn't lie.

April 7, 2015
By George Kilcourse
 
Thomas Merton (click here) was born on the morning of Jan. 31, 1915, in the quaint and remote French town of Prades. Newspapers across France were reporting excitedly about this tiny place on the border of the Pyrénées Mountains and its surprising happening on the last day of January in 1915. Alas, it was not Merton's birth that made the news but the event of a significant snowfall that occurred on that day, so far to the south and near the Spanish border. Perhaps the coincidence proves an ironic harbinger of Merton's tireless efforts to avoid celebrity.
To the many Kentucky readers of Merton's works this extraordinarily gifted monk was the commonwealth's unofficial Spirituality Laureate. He spent half of his almost 54 years of life at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Central Kentucky. John Howard Griffin, his first biographer, described him as the person who restored intellect to Trappist monks....