
“How great it is to be faithful to a little thing,” I remember contemplative psychotherapist Jim Finley reminding me when my phone again randomly selected a track on a walk earlier in the day: “It’s not measurable.

The very indication of what it means to live a contemplative life is “to have faith that our own heart in its most childlike hour did not deceive us.”

Although the hunt for more solitude was a pattern in Merton’s life, the sense of “arrival” was palpable for him in rat-infested toolshed