“The great work of life and death”: Merton and Zen confront mortality

A piece I wrote for the blog ccsignum.wordpress.com in October before I started this blog.

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by Matthew Kizior ’11

My spiritual life is a complicated mess, and I like it that way. Raised Catholic, I embrace the more mystical aspects of the Catholic part of my life, as you may have been able to figure out if you read my earlier piece on Thomas Merton. Ever since I was fourteen, Merton has captured my imagination, and I’ve read exactly fourteen of his works over the past eight years. It was the Trappist monk’s exploration of Zen Buddhism in his books that led me to the path of practicing it myself. Buddhism and Catholicism have a lot in common, which I could not even begin to get into here.

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