A Way to God: Thomas Merton's Creation Spiritual Journey - Softcover

Praise for A Way to God

"This wise and marvelous book will profoundly inspire all those who love Merton and want to know him more deeply."
-- Andrew Harvey, author of The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism

"Important. . . . Fox's powerful portrait will inspire readers to play and pray, love and labor, congregate and contemplate -- and create a community of beings bound by compassion, justice, and joy."
-- Charles Burack, Tikkun magazine

"A Way to God inscribes a profound intersection of lives -- Merton, Fox, and more -- in the history of Christianity, Catholicism, and the emerging Creation Spirituality so relevant to our globe's current cultural evolution. Perhaps Merton's lament on the 'lost art of listening' can be assuaged significantly by the profound potential impacts of this new book."
-- Kurt Johnson, PhD, coauthor of The Coming Interspiritual Age

"The future of Christianity itself will depend upon its ability to reinvent its forms and practices so that it might become a mutually enhancing presence within the dynamics of life. Among current spiritual theologians, no one has a more comprehensive vision of the necessary changes that must take place than Matthew Fox. In A Way to God he shows how Thomas Merton's work can be understood as a powerful current within the Creation Spirituality tradition that is so essential for this reimagining of Western religion."
-- Brian Thomas Swimme, professor of cosmology, California Institute of Integral Studies

Praise for the work of Matthew Fox

"Fox is a prophet of our own times. . . . His writing really sparkles and is frequently reminiscent of the early works of Thomas Merton."
-- Alan Jose, The Tablet: The International Catholic News Weekly

"Matthew Fox might well be the most creative, the most comprehensive, surely the most challenging religious-spiritual teacher in America."
-- Thomas Berry, author of The Great Work

In 2015 Matthew Fox was invited by the Thomas Merton Center in Louisville, KY, to give a lecture on "Thomas Merton and Myself" to honor the centennial year of the legendary Catholic monk and writer’s birth. Fox likes to say that all the trouble he got in being excommunicated from his Dominican Order by Cardinal Ratzinger (who later became Pope Benedict) in 1993 is due to Merton, since he is the one who sent Fox to Paris to study spirituality and eventually receive his Doctorate of Philosophy from the Institut Catholique de Paris.

In preparing for the talk, Fox revisited his frequent intersections with Merton and immersed himself in Merton’s writings. He read through Merton’s journals, poetry, and religious writings, realizing that this exploration was inspiring more than a talk. The result is A Way to God, a powerful work about Merton’s deep interfaith and ecumenical philosophies; about his contemplation, mysticism, and warriorhood; and about how Meister Eckhart inspired in Merton a long journey toward a spiritual understanding similar to the creation spirituality that Fox has long espoused and written about. (In Merton’s final Asian journal, written as he neared the end of his life, he wrote "Eckhart is my lifeboat, Eckhart is my lifeboat.").

A Way to God is personal and intellectual, semi-biographical and autobiographical. It presents Merton in a new light and with a direct link not only to Meister Eckhart but to the creation spirituality tradition that both Merton and Eckhart lived and taught. It creates a methodology for understanding the vast and deep contribution that Merton made to the history of spirituality: the hermeneutic of the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality, plus the Cosmic Christ (vs the Empire’s Christ), and other themes common in Merton, Eckhart, and Fox’s theologies. Readers will rediscover the beauty and depth of Merton’s thinking and his pioneering work in deep ecumenism, but will also discover a new dimension to Merton: his journey as a Creation Spirituality pilgrim.