To “Be a Mountain Diviner!”: Thomas Merton’s Ecological Consciousness

David Odorisio
Jun 21
4 min read

Updated: Jun 23

Presented at the 19th General Meeting of the International Thomas Merton Society

Regis University, Denver, Colorado

June 20, 2025

“We are all secrets. But now, where there are suggested gaps, one can divine rocks and

snow. ‘Be a mountain diviner!’” (Thomas Merton, May 6, 1968).

1. In a February 1968 letter to futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard, Merton outlines two different types of ethical consciousness: millennial and ecological. To Merton, millennial consciousness is eschatological in outlook – “always already” anticipating “the coming of the Kingdom” or “the withering away of the State.” This type of consciousness “repudiate[s] the past” in order to open “up to the future,” and is found, for example, in revolutionary upheaval, but also (for Merton) in ecclesiastical renewal. Ecological consciousness, on the other hand, whispers, “We are not alone in this thing. We belong to a community of living beings.” Merton summarizes: “we must not try to prepare the millennium by immolating our living earth.”[1]

2. At Redwoods Monastery in May of 1968, Merton would further develop his notion of an ecological consciousness. Drawing on his rich anthropological research into the Cargo Cults of the South Pacific and his soon-to-be published essay, “The Wild Places,” Merton develops his own “contemplative ecology” (Christie) that harkens back to the desert monastic tradition of late antiquity yet points towards the kind of mycelial thinking about human and more-than-human interconnectedness that would come to dominate contemporary systems theory, environmentalism, and the study of human consciousness.

3. In the section of Merton’s conference notes on mystical theology entitled “Contemplation and the Cosmos,” he outlines a patristic “contemplation of God in and through nature.”[2] Merton defines this ancient tradition of theoria physikē as the “reception of the mysterious, silent revelation of God in [the] cosmos.”[3] Kim Haines-Eitzen’s (2022) deep listening into desert spaces offers a contemporary translation: “place and belonging…hearing and listening…can reveal our deepest longing, fear, and sense of wonder” (xxviii). In other words: how humans divine depths in the dark mirror of nature. Natura naturans. Silence. Attention. Listening. Participation. Core components of desert monastic divination.

4. Divination is a practice that restores connection to the natural world.

In the ancient world, Roman haruspicy taught practitioners to learn the language of the liver and therefore the language of life. Examining animal innards taught one to read (into) one’s own animal nature. West African cowry shell prophecy. Tea leaves tasting horizon’s future. Augurs of innocence. Divination offers the opportunity to read into the natural world; begs its own creative eisegesis.

Diviners learn to prophesy through the natural world. Divination invites practitioners to participate with nature in a creative, embodied, relational, and imaginal capacity. A “deep ecology” that re-centers the inherent unboundedness (bondedness) of psyche in nature; nature as psyche.

5. For Merton his own contemplation of the natural world “out West” led him organically to the development of a finely attuned ecological consciousness – capable of reading “the calligraphy of snow and rock” and sky – or in the case of California’s Lost Coast – the black sand beaches, crashing waves, soaring birds, and wide-open horizons that led to a “radical change” in Merton’s thinking. Merton invites us to shift from “climate denial” to encountering “climate grief” only to “re-wild” our psyche’s contemplative landscape. A coming-alive-ness – a saying “yes” to life in its abundant fullness - even in the midst of often catastrophic exhaustion and paralysis in the face of yet another “unprecedented” “unnatural” disaster. Merton encourages us to plant a garden.

6. Two weeks after Merton’s death, the photograph known as “Earthrise” was taken during the Apollo 8 lunar landing: Dec. 24, 1968. Author Frank White coined the term “Overview Effect” to describe the “shift in worldview reported by astronauts…while viewing the Earth from orbit…the experience of witnessing firsthand the reality that the Earth is, in space, a tiny, fragile ball of life, ‘hanging in the void.” What might we “divine” from this image? Visionary theologian Ewert Cousins prophesied an emergent “global spirituality” that would catalyze a slow yet pronounced transformation towards trans-cultural, trans-national consciousness. This type of collective “monastic therapy” might be a long time in the making.

7. And yet Julian of Norwich, the 14/15th c. English anchoress, experienced her own version of the “overview effect.” When offered a vision of a hazelnut in the palm of her hand, she divined that it represented all of creation. In the face of near-death at 30 ½ yrs. old, Julian speaks to us across six centuries to remind us that: “God made it, God loves it, God keeps it” (Ch 4). Ultimately, questions of eschatology are “God’s business.” But for myself, I can choose this “one degree shift” towards hope. To become a tiny carrier of ecological consciousness as we inch-worm away from the violent and escapist future fantasy of millennial consciousness. Ecological consciousness might just serve as one “little way” to “redeem” these times. This is Merton’s invitation to us today.