The Sign of Jonas

by Thomas Merton

Begun five years after he entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, The Sign of Jonas is an extraordinary view of Merton’s life in a Trappist monastery, and it serves also as a spiritual log recording the deep meaning and increasing sureness he felt in his vocation: the growth of a mind that finds in its contracted physical world new intellectual and spiritual dimensions.

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Paperback, 384 pages

Published November 18th 2002 by Mariner Books (first published January 1st 1953)

tags: religion, spirituality, biography, christianity, theology, christian, faith, memoir, autobiography, nonfiction, catholic

Book Quotes

“Keeping a journal has taught me that there is not so much new in your life as you sometimes think. When you re-read your journal you find out that your latest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the same ideas and the same experiences.”

― Thomas Merton

“I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me.”

― Thomas Merton

topics: Self Awareness

“God makes us ask ourselves questions most often when He intends to resolve them. He gives us needs that He alone can satisfy, and awakens capacities that He means to fulfill. Any perplexity is liable to be a spiritual gestation, leading to a new birth and a mystical regeneration.”

― Thomas Merton

“I once thought that would be the consummation of all joy—to be united by a bond of love—to be lost in His presence there as if nothing else mattered. "And now—there is much more. Instead of myself and my Christ and my love and my prayer, there is the might of a prayer stronger than thunder and milder than the flight of doves rising up from the Priest who is the Center of every priest, shaking the foundations of the universe and lifting up—me, Host, altar, sanctuary, people, church, abbey, forest, cities, continents, seas and worlds to God and plunging everything into Him.”

― Thomas Merton

topics: Eucharist, Ordination

“It does no good to use big words to talk about Christ. Since I seem incapable of talking about him in the language of a child, I have reached the point where I can scarcely talk about him at all. All my words fill me with shame.”

― Thomas Merton

“Concerning solitude: most of the accidents of community life need not seriously concern me—differences of opinion, other people’s ideas of the spiritual life, the kind of organ music that seems to please many. Why should I bother about all that? It is none of my business.”

― Thomas Merton

“cenobitic”

― Thomas Merton

“We tend to think of “the martyrs” as men of a different stamp from ourselves, men of another age, bred in another atmosphere, men somehow stronger and greater than we. But it turns out that we too are expected to face the same sufferings and confess Christ and die for Him. We who are not heroes are the ones God is choosing to share the lot of His great warriors. And one look into our own souls tells us that there is nothing there that invites the combats of the mighty saints. There is nothing magnificent about us. We are miserable things and if we are called upon to die we shall die miserably. There is nothing of grandeur about us. We are null. And perhaps we are already marked for sacrifice—a sacrifice that will be, in the eyes of the world, perhaps only drab and sorry and mean. And yet it will end by being our greatest glory after all. Perhaps there is no greater glory than to be reduced to insignificance by an unjust and stupid temporal power, in order that God may triumph over evil through our insignificance.”

― Thomas Merton

“Sooner or later the world must burn, and all things in it—all the books, the cloister together with the brothel, Fra Angelico together with the Lucky Strike ads which I haven’t seen for seven years because I don’t remember seeing one in Louisville. Sooner or later it will all be consumed by fire and nobody will be left—for by that time the last man in the universe will have discovered the bomb capable of destroying the universe and will have been unable to resist the temptation to throw the thing and get it over with. And here I sit writing a diary. But love laughs at the end of the world because love is the door to eternity and he who loves God is playing on the doorstep of eternity, and before anything can happen love will have drawn him over the sill and closed the door and he won’t bother about the world burning because he will know nothing but love.”

― Thomas Merton

“It was when Jonas was traveling as fast as he could away from Nineveh, toward Tharsis, that he was thrown overboard, and swallowed by a whale who took him where God wanted him to go.”

― Thomas Merton

“The perfection of twelfth-century Cistercian architecture is not to be explained by saying that the Cistercians were looking for a new technique. I am not sure that they were looking for a new technique at all. They built good churches because they were looking for God. And they were looking for God in a way that was pure and integral enough to make everything they did and everything they touched give glory to God.”

― Thomas Merton

“Concupierunt concupiscentiam in deserto. . . . Numquid poterit parare mensam populo suo?”

― Thomas Merton

“March 1 FIRST EMBER SATURDAY IN LENT Last night it snowed again and there is a fairly thick blanket of snow on the ground and on the trees. The sky looks like lead and seems to promise more. It is about as dark as my own mind. I see nothing, I understand nothing. I am sorry for complaining and making a disturbance. All I want is to please God and to do His will.”

― Thomas Merton

“pallets.”

― Thomas Merton

“Gethsemani.”

― Thomas Merton

“They seem too technical, and I need not literature but the living God. Sitivit anima mea. The strong living God. I burn with the desire for His peace, His stability, His silence, the power and wisdom of His direct action, liberation from my own heaviness. I carry myself around like a ton weight.”

― Thomas Merton

“basilica.”

― Thomas Merton

“The simplest and most effective way to sanctity is to disappear into the background of ordinary everyday routine.”

― Thomas Merton

“One reason why we are less fervent than we ought to be is that we cripple our own spirit by taking ourselves too seriously. We expect too much from ourselves when we ought to expect everything from God on Whom we utterly depend.”

― Thomas Merton

“There are different kinds of fear. One of the most terrible is the sensation that you are likely to become, at any moment, the protagonist in a Graham Greene novel: the man who tries to be virtuous and who is, in a certain sense, holy, and yet who is overwhelmed by sin as if there were a kind of fatality about it.”

― Thomas Merton

topics: Holiness, Sin

Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton wrote more than 70 books, mostly on spirituality, as well as scores of essays and reviews. Merton was a keen proponent of interfaith understanding.

Interest in his work contributed to a rise in spiritual exploration beginning in the 1960s and 1970s in the US. Merton's letters and diaries, reveal the intensity with which their author focused on social justice issues, including the civil rights movement and proliferation of nuclear arms. He had prohibited their publication for 25 years after his death. Publication raised new interest in Merton's life.
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