Thomas Merton was born in France in 1915 of an American mother and a New Zealander father. He was converted to Christianity in 1938 and entered a Trappist monastery in Kentucky in 1941. His writings became world-renowned and at the end of his life he was exploring the links between the spiritual traditions of all the major religions. He died in 1968 in Bangkok after an accident.

Contemplation is the highest expression of man's intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being. It is a vivid realisation of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source. It knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes both beyond reason and beyond simple faith. For contemplation is a kind of spiritual vision to which both reason and faith aspire, by their very nature, because without it they must always remain incomplete