Robert Ellsberg - 'It's the Direction that Matters': How Sister Wendy Beckett Changed Her Mind about Merton

During the last three years of her life, Sr. Wendy Becket, an English hermit and art historian, shared an intimate, daily correspondence, largely about holiness and the life of faith. Throughout, the figure of Thomas Merton loomed large. Sr. Wendy held ambivalent feelings on the subject of Merton. Yet in the course of our correspondence she came to a startling reassessment, comparable in some ways to Merton’s own “awakening from a dream of separateness.”   Robert Ellsberg is the long-time publisher of Orbis books. He is the author of many books on saints and holiness, including All Saints; Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time, and A Living Gospel: Reading God’s Story in Holy Lives. He contributes the daily entry, “Blessed Among Us” in Give Us This Day. His presentation is based on Dearest Sister Wendy: A Surprising Story of Faith and Friendship.

Thomas Merton’s death in 1968 at the age of just 53 was tragic and sudden, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that he was unprepared for the end. What does it mean to be prepared? Sophfronia will examine Merton’s writings to see how he can take us beyond society’s “having one’s affairs in order” way of thinking about death to a way of living as a full expression of the life in abundance that Christ offers in the New Testament. Sophfronia Scott is a novelist, essayist, and contemplative thinker whose book The Seeker and the Monk: Everyday Conversations with Thomas Merton won the 2021 Thomas Merton “Louie” Award from the International Thomas Merton Society. She holds a BA in English from Harvard and an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Sophfronia is the founding director of Alma College’s MFA in Creative Writing, a low-residency graduate program based in Alma, Michigan.

Leslye Colvin weaves a tapestry that provides a fresh perspective of Thomas Merton  interwoven with glimpses of her journey as a child of the Civil Rights Movement era, and the systems that bind us all. Leslye Colvin is a writer, spiritual companion, and contemplative activist. She has extensive experience in promoting mission and expanding outreach of a variety of sectors including faith-based non profit, government, corporate, and academia. Inspired by the Catholic social justice tradition, she is passionate about encouraging diversity of thought especially as it relates to those often marginalized within the community.

Anne Pearson is a graduate of Bellarmine University, where she earned a degree in political science and psychology and studied the encroachment of prisons into the public school system through disciplinary alternative schools. While at Bellarmine, she completed a thesis on Thomas Merton and racism and has since presented her research at multiple national and international conferences and as a TEDx talk. She currently lives in Washington, DC where she provides resources to graduate nursing students across the country and advocates for more equitable higher education. Thomas Merton's writings on racism, most prominently those found in his "Letters to a White Liberal", have continued to ring true as the racial inequalities of his lifetime persist in the 21st century. This presentation will briefly outline his criticisms and solutions for white liberals before exploring an all-important question: what role should Merton, a cloistered white monk, have in speaking on racism? The answer will investigate how his imperfect approach impacts his continued relevance and reveal the example he sets for white individuals working towards racial justice in 2024.

Thomas Merton’s epiphany on the corner of Fourth and Walnut Streets was a significant breakthrough into Christ consciousness and the opening up of what Raimon Panikkar calls, “Christophany.”  This new consciousness propelled an inversion of Merton’s monastic life toward ever deepening relationships with a world of complexity. Relying on insights from Carl Jung, Raimon Panikkar and Teilhard de Chardin, I will explore Merton’s Christophany as a radical theology, a mutational disruption of the Neoplatonic quest, and the ushering in of a new monastic consciousness reflective of the second axial age, marked by the hyperpersonal monk of planetary consciousness. Ilia Delio, OSF, PhD is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC and American theologian specializing in the area of science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics and neuroscience and the import of these for theology. Ilia currently holds the Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology at Villanova University, and is the author of twenty books including Care for Creation (coauthored with Keith Warner and Pamela Woods), The Emergent Christ and The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution and the Power of Love (Orbis, 2013).

Dr. Shannen Dee Williams is Associate Professor of History at the University of Dayton. She is an award-winning scholar of the African American experience and Black Catholicism with research and teaching specializations in women's, religious, and Black freedom movement history. Dr. Williams holds a B.A. in history with magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors from Agnes Scott College, a M.A. in Afro-American studies from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University. The first Black woman elected to the Executive Council of the American Catholic Historical Association, Dr. Williams is a co-founder the Fleming-Morrow Endowment in African American History at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. In 2020, Williams also submitted successful proposals to establish the Mother Mary Lange Lecture in Black Catholic History at Villanova University and the Cyprian Davis, O.S.B. Prize through the American Catholic Historical Association and the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. A lifelong Catholic, Dr. Williams authored the award-winning column, The Griot's Cross, for the Catholic New Service from 2020 to 2022. For most people, Whoopi Goldberg's performance as Sister Mary Clarence in Sister Act is the dominant interpretation of an African American nun and the desegregation of white Catholic sisterhood in the United States. In this presentation, Dr. Shannen Dee Williams will explore the story of America's real sister act: the story of how generations of Black women and girls called to the sacred vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience fought against racism, sexism, and exclusion to become and minster as consecrated women of God in the Roman Catholic Church. In so doing, she will turn attention to women's religious life as a stronghold of white supremacy and racial segregation, and thus an important battleground in the long African American freedom struggle. Dr. Williams will also illuminate Thomas Merton's connections to Black sisters' largely suppressed history.

Cassidy S. Hall (She/Her), MA, MDIV, MTS, is an author, award-winning filmmaker, podcaster, and leading voice in contemplative spirituality. She is the cohost of the Encountering Silence podcast and the creator of the Contemplating Now and Queering Contemplation podcasts. Her films include In Pursuit of Silence and Day of a Stranger. Cassidy is widely published and currently resides in Indianapolis, where she is studying for her DMin degree.   What Would it Look Like to Queer Thomas Merton? What is queer theory and queer theology and how can they be used as a lens to better understand Merton—and ourselves? In our time together, Cassidy, a cis queer white woman, will examine the ways the traditional western Christian contemplative canon has left out far too many voices from the conversation. She will share a part of her own contemplative journey which led her to traveling to all 17 Trappist Monasteries of the US, Directing a film about Thomas Merton’s hermitage years, and writing the forthcoming book Queering Contemplation: Finding Queerness in the Roots and Future of Contemplative Spirituality.

In our time rife with political division and worry about our democracy, the contemplative practice does not allow us to be idle spectators. Rather, our spiritual practice is a gift for the Body as a whole. Let us explore together the demands of a contemplative life to face and heal the world around us. Sister Simone Campbell (Roman Catholic Sister of Social Service) is a religious leader, attorney, author and the recipient of a 2022 Presidential Medal of Freedom (the United States' highest civilian honor). She has extensive experience in public advocacy and is currently a leader of "Understanding US," a grassroots program to promote political healing in our nation. She is a member of the Auburn Seminary Senior Fellows. For 17 years she was executive director of NETWORK, Lobby for Catholic Social Justice and leader of Nuns on the Bus. In 2010, she wrote the "nuns' letter" that was seminal in passage of the Affordable Care Act. She has twice spoken at the Democratic National Conventions, appeared on numerous television and radio programs. She has received numerous other awards including the "Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award" and the "Defender of Democracy Award" from the Parliamentarians for Global Action. Prior to Washington, this native Californian led interfaith advocacy in Sacramento and for 18 years was the founder and lead attorney at the Oakland Community Law Center. Her two books, A Nun on the Bus (2014) and Hunger for Hope (2020), are award winning reflections on the substance of her life of justice seeking.

Thomas Merton—an eternal seeker, dislocated immigrant, and sojourner—left his mark on an Asian woman who was seeking a spiritual adventure. In many borderlands, the virgin points, Merton's hidden yet honest struggle inspire a deep connection with the immigrant woman in exile. Through a personal narrative of sojourning, an emphasis begins to manifest that her religious life began in Korea and found home in the US, contrasting Merton's journey of finding a home in Asia. Dancing with Thomas Merton led the woman to see her true self, beyond the East and West. Transformation occurs at the borderland, a space of encounter, struggle, writing, and contemplation. Jung Eun Sophia Park, SNJM, is associate professor at Holy Names University in California. She loves to give retreats, spiritual directions, and workshops in U.S. and other countries. Her academic interests are global justice and spirituality, shamanism, postcolonial feminism, and mysticism. Sophia has authored many books, including A Hermeneutic on Dislocation as Experience: Creating a Hybrid Identity, Constructing a Borderland Community, Conversations at the Well: Emerging Religious Life in the 21st Century Global World, Border-Crossing Spirituality: Transformation in the Borderland, and An Asian Woman's Religious Journey with Thomas Merton: Journey to the East/Journey to the West. She also wrote books in Korean, including Thoughtful Chats: How the Story Changed Women, Time Jor Sorrow, Beauty of the Broken, Seasons that I loved, Joy of Life, and For the Broken Humanities. She also writes articles on ordinary spirituality at the Korean Catholic News and offers women's spirituality lessons through YouTube.  

Thomas Merton had, in his life, important experiences with women. His life and writings are impregnated by those feminine presences and influences who provoked strong reactions and emotions in his heart and mind. We will examine some aspects of his experience with the feminine, including his mother's premature death, the multiple girlfriends of his youth (whose names he would not even remember), as well as some friendships which were important in his Christian journey, such as Naomi Burton, Dorothy Day, and Catherine de Hueck. Merton's life as a monk was also configured by important feminine spiritual figures, including Mary, the mother of Jesus, Julian of Norwich, and others. We will also examine carefully the epiphany that represented Merton's love for the young nurse M., and conclude with a theological reflection about how Merton's experiences with the feminine influenced his writings and provide new insights into mystical experience and service to the Church.       Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer holds a degree in Social Communication from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (1975), a Master's degree in Theology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (1985) and a PhD in Systematic Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University (1989). She is currently a full professor in the Department of Theology at PUCRio. For ten years she ran the Loyola Faith and Culture Center at the same University. For four years, she was an evaluator of graduate programs at the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES). For six years, she was dean of the Center for Theology and Human Sciences at PUC-Rio. She has experience in the area of Theology, with an emphasis on Systematic Theology, focusing mainly on the following themes: God, otherness, woman, violence and spirituality. In the last few years, she has been researching and publishing on the thought of the French philosopher Simone Weil. Nowadays, her studies and research are primarily directed towards the thinking and writing of contemporary mystics and the interface between Theology and Literature.