The Rapture of Being Alive: Thomas Merton & Mary Oliver on Gratitude for Life’s Hidden Holiness

Admission is free. All are welcome.
PLEASE PRE-REGISTER by phone or email (see below).

Jonathan Montaldo will host and present the poems of Thomas Merton and Mary Oliver as spiritual exercises to experience Nature nurturing, Holy Wisdom’s real work, to sustain our relationships with “the family of things.” We will celebrate their poetry and access their witness to Nature’s “hidden wholeness” through their disciplined discipleship in becoming lenses of attention. Their poems will be read as examples of their lyric art and their deep spiritual sensibility that questions our fears and too-narrow bandwidths for resonating with the “rapture of being alive.”

JONATHAN MONTALDO has served as director of the principal archive of the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, and as associate director of the Merton Institute for Contemplative Living, direct- ing Bethany Spring, the Institute’s retreat center. He created the ten-booklet series for small-group discussion, Bridges to Contemplative Living with Thomas Merton, and co-edited The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals. His many renditions of the monk’s writing include A Year with Thomas Merton and Dialogues with Silence. He has narrated five audiobooks and continues as co-general editor of the nine-volume series Thomas Merton & World Religions; he offers retreats internationally on Merton’s spiritual legacy.

The Saturday Vigil Mass at 5:00 P.M. will be offered in memory of Thomas Merton.

CORPUS CHRISTI CHURCH 529 West 121st Street (just east of Broadway)
(212) 666-9350 cchristinyc@gmail.com Subway: No. 1 train to 116th St.-Columbia University
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