The article explores metaphorical language to illustrate contemplation's challenges, highlighting its significance in Merton's work.
The article explores the rhetoric and poetics of contemplation in The New Seeds of Contemplation and Thomas Merton's use of the metaphor of "wilderness" for the inability to engage in contemplative prayer in "Journey Through the Wilderness" (Chapter 33). Drawing upon the rhetorical poetic tradition of metaphor, I show how Merton's metaphor invents an imaginative place and one's journey through it in order to persuade the reader to exercise the virtues of faith, hope, and love when one's efforts at contemplation fail and one experiences only "expectancy" of the "promised land."
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Scott Crider (2026) studied this question.
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