Thomas Merton on St Brendan

In a journal entry dated July 18th 1964 Thomas Merton mentions that he has received a copy of The Voyage of St. Brendan and that he has begun "studying it as a tract on monastic life. The myth of pilgrimage, the quest for the impossible island, the earthly paradise, the ultimate ideal. As a myth it is, however, filled with a deep truth of its own."  The Voyage of St. Brendan and Celtic Monasticism seemed very much to occupy Merton from that summer of 1964 onwards. He makes references to them in his journals, in a number of letters and says that he is both preparing notes on Celtic Monasticism to use with his novices and considering the possibilities for a book on the subject.

The Voyage of St. Brendan is neither strictly realistic nor strictly allegorical, it is somewhere in between. The same can be said of "The Promised Land of the Saints," it is found in "transfigured reality."  The Voyage has a "characteristically monastic orientation towards life, which expresses itself both in the destination of the journey and in the process through which the journey unfolds"  and it is an "exploration, not just of lands and places, but of the attempt to live, move and respond to the world out of a transfigured centre."  Merton would equate this centre with that centre where both the true self and God are to be found. Brendan's voyage to "The Promised Land of the Saints" in holding together the two tensions between the temporal and the eternal also holds together the tension between the external, geographical pilgrimage and the inner pilgrimage or journey.

From a very interesting article on the Thomas Merton Society's web site entiltled " Celtic Monasticism as a Metaphor for Thomas Merton's Journey." by Paul M Pearson.

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