From the Monastery to the World by Thomas Merton

Author:Thomas Merton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Nonfiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2017-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

Letter 47

September 15, 1963

Dear Father Louis:

I received your letter of August 1st with the copy of the latter for Cintio [Vitier], which I sent to him. He is a friend of mine and we had been writing to each other beforehand. He has just replied to me, telling me that he had received your letter before receiving the copy that I sent him, and that he was extremely grateful for it. I suppose that he has already responded to you. It seems that they have not personally bothered him yet and he continues at his job, which I think is as the director in a library. However, he has not sided with Castro, and he tells me that he will not collaborate with any official newspaper; since they are all official, he will not collaborate with any of them or publish anything. In any case, his life must be very difficult. When he was in Mexico, he used to tell me that they [did] not impose any religious persecution on adults, but they

gave the children an obligatory atheist indoctrination, and this was harder for the Christian parents than if they had been personally persecuted.

He feared much for his small children, and I think that this is what makes him suffer the most on the personal level regarding the current situation in Cuba. In his letters, he has always asked for many prayers, and they reveal a situation of anguish. Naturally, he had been with the revolution at the beginning, but he told me that the current regime in Cuba was actually Soviet and Stalin-like.

I received The Fire Next Time, which the editors sent me, and I have not read it yet, but I think that I might write something about the book. I have also been receiving the pro-peace publications that you have been sending me, and I wish that you would continue sending me all these publications, because I plan to write several poems about this subject; I am already starting to do so. Laughlin has also written to me, and [Henry] Miller wrote to me to send The Wisdom of the Heart.

Sudamericana has written to me to say that they are now publishing La torre de Babel. [They said] that they will pay me $70 for the translation and that the royalties would be divided between the two of us, of which they will send me half of the first payment of 50 dollars. Is this all right? Thank you very much for participating in this. I was hoping to publish the edition of my Salmos here in Colombia, but I have to pay for the edition and I did not have the money to do it. I will do so with this [La torre], which Sudamericana is sending.

I am discovering very good things regarding the religion of the Indians in America. The book is going to be extensive and with surprising material. It seems to me that the Holy Spirit is helping me in these discoveries. There

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