I walked down the path to see it well. It was splendid. I interrupted reading Isaac of Stella's Fourteenth Sermon on God's light and His joy in His creation."

Photo: "Comet C2023 P1 Nishimura before dawn" by Manolo Gómez, Wikimedia Commons.

(that is not light yet) makes one suspect the sun will rise. Precisely the _point vierge_ [virgin point]! This great sweep of pure silent light points to the sun that will come—it takes a good area of sky right out over the valley in front of the hermitage...

Thomas Molnar wrote in opposition to Merton’s statement. Witness to Freedom follows Merton’s open letter with his published response to Molnar that Worldview published in the November issue alongside Molnar’s letter: web.archive.org/web/20240620...

Worldview magazine of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs published Merton’s open letter in September 1965: web.archive.org/web/20240621.... It was published in one of Merton’s volumes of correspondence, Witness to Freedom (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux): 88-92.

Schema 13 was promulgated by Pope Paul VI at Vatican II as “Gaudium et Spes,” on the closing day of the council, December 7, 1965. Merton hoped that in promoting the gospel in the modern world, it would strengthen declarations made in “Pacem in terris,” Pope John XXIII's final encyclical.

Other names: Jim Forest, Martin Corbin, Tom Cornell, Eileen Egan, Howard Everngam.

Scan: merton.bellarmine.edu/s/Merton/ite...

A transcript can be found on page 312 of All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day, ed. by Robert Ellsberg (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2010).

Day references the writer Karl Stern. Merton had written praise of Stern’s Flight from Woman. Day mentions that another writer, Caroline Gordon Tate, liked it as well. Most others mentioned in the letter are peacemakers connected to the CW. Of those mentioned, only Jim Douglass is still living.

..This directive Merton received from his own Abbot in April of 1962." The condemnations of modern war from the popes of the time & Vatican II later gave Merton a theological justification from the teaching authority of the Catholic Church for the stance he took on modern warfare and atomic weapons.

As William H. Shannon notes in The Passion for Peace, "It was this article, which never got published in Merton's lifetime, that more than any other brought the directive from the Abbot General, the highest authority in the Order, that Merton was to write nothing more on the issue of war and peace..

Merton had mimeographed the article and sent it to the circle of friends receiving his "Cold War Letters." He didn't help his own cause by sending a mimeographed version to a Trappist censor, further emphasizing that Merton had already shared this piece.

having entrusted himself gladly to sleep and to night? Him the gentle voice will awake, all that is sweet in woman will awaken him. Not for conquest and pleasure, but for the far deeper wisdom of love and joy and communion…”

Covers of two books by Christopher Pramuk with artwork by Merton

We do not hear the soft voice, the gentle voice, the feminine voice, the voice of the Mother: yet she speaks everywhere and in everything. Wisdom cries out in the market place—‘if anyone is little let him come to me.’

Who is more little than the helpless man, asleep in bed,..

“At 5:30, as I was dreaming, in a very quiet hospital, the soft voice of the nurse awoke me gently from my dream—and it was like awakening for the first time from all the dreams of my life—as if the Blessed Virgin herself, as if Wisdom had awakened me.

The devil wears Prada, but these Kate Spade bags are cool, right?