“MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am
going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it
will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following
your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the
desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in
all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that
desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though
I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may
seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever
with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.” Prayer
of Poet & Mystic, Thomas Merton
“The biggest human temptation is to
settle for too little.” Thomas Merton
“The greatest need of our time is to
clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our
minds.” Thomas Merton
“A man knows when he has found his
vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.” Thomas
Merton
“Learn how to meditate
on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate
works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to
meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting
for a bus or riding in a train.” Thomas Merton
“Living is not thinking. Thought is
formed and guided by objective reality outside us. Living is the constant
adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are
always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the
new. Thus life is always new.” Thomas Merton, from Thoughts in Solitude.
“Every man becomes the image of the God
he adores.
He whose worship is directed to a dead
thing becomes dead.
He who loves corruption rots.
He who loves a shadow becomes, himself,
a shadow.
He who loves things that must perish
lives in dread of their perishing.”
Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
The rush and pressure of modern life
are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow
oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender
to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help
everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is
cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist…destroys his own inner
capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it
kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.” Thomas Merton
“If you find God with great ease,
perhaps it is not God you have found.”
Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton, O.C.S.O. (January 31, 1915 – December 10, 1968) was an
American Catholic writer and mystic. A Trappist monk of the Abbey of
Gethsemani, Kentucky, he was a poet, social activist, and student of
comparative religion. In 1949, he was ordained to the priesthood and given the
name Father Louis.
Merton wrote more than 70 books, mostly on
spirituality, social justice and a quiet pacifism, as well as scores of essays
and reviews. Among Merton's most enduring works is his bestselling
autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), which sent scores of World War
II veterans, students, and even teenagers flocking to monasteries across the
US, and was also featured in National Review's list of the 100 best non-fiction
books of the century.
Merton was a keen proponent of
interfaith understanding. He pioneered dialogue with prominent Asian spiritual
figures, including the Dalai Lama, the Japanese writer D.T. Suzuki, the Thai
Buddhist monk Buddhadasa, and the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and authored
books on Zen Buddhism and Taoism. In the years since his death, Merton has been
the subject of several biographies.
Thomas Merton was born in Prades, Pyrénées-Orientales, France, on
January 31, 1915 to Owen Merton, a New Zealand painter active in Europe and the
United States, and Ruth Jenkins, an American Quaker and artist.He was baptized
in the Church of England, in accordance with his father's wishes. Merton's
father was often absent during his son's upbringing.
In August 1915, with World War I raging, the Merton family left France
for the United States. They settled first with Ruth's parents on Long Island,
New York, and then near them in Douglaston, New York. In 1917, the family moved
into an old house in Flushing, New York, where Merton's brother, John Paul, was
born on November 2, 1918
The family was considering returning to
France when Ruth was diagnosed with stomach cancer, from which she died on
October 21, 1921, in Bellevue Hospital. Merton was six years old.
In 1922, Merton and his father traveled to Bermuda, having left John
Paul with his in-laws, the Jenkins family, in Douglaston.[11] While the trip
was short, Merton's father fell in love with the American novelist Evelyn
Scott, then married to Cyril Kay-Scott. Still grieving for his mother, Merton
never quite warmed to Scott. Her son, Creighton, later said that she was
verbally abusive to Merton during their stay.[citation needed]
Happy to get away from Scott, Merton
returned to Douglaston in 1923 to live with the Jenkins family and his brother
John Paul. Owen Merton, Scott, and her husband Cyril Kay-Scott set sail for
Europe, traveling through France, Italy, England and Algeria. Merton later
half-jokingly referred to this odd trio as the "Bermuda Triangle”
During the winter of 1924, while in Algeria, Merton's father became ill
and was thought to be near death. In retrospect, the illness could have been an
early symptom of the brain tumor that eventually took his life. The news of his
father's illness weighed heavily on Merton. The prospect of losing his sole
surviving parent filled him with anxiety.
By March 1925, Owen Merton was well enough to organize a show at the
Leicester Galleries in London. He later returned to New York and took Merton
with him to live in Saint-Antonin, France. Merton returned to France with mixed
feelings, as he had lived with his grandparents for the last two years and had
become attached to them.
During their travels, Merton's father and Evelyn Scott had discussed
marriage on occasion. After the trip to New York, his father realized that it
could not work, as Merton would not be reconciled to Scott. Unwilling to
sacrifice his son for the romance, Owen Merton broke off the relationship.
In 1926, when Merton was eleven, his father enrolled him in a boys' boarding
school in Montauban, the Lycée Ingres. The stay brought up feelings of
loneliness and depression for Merton, as he felt deserted by his father. During
his initial months of schooling, Merton begged his father to remove him. As
time passed, however, he gradually became more comfortable with his
surroundings there. He made friends with a circle of young and aspiring writers
at the Lycée and came to write two novels.
Sundays at the Lycée offered a nearby Catholic Mass, but Merton never
attended, instead often taking an early train home. A Protestant preacher would
come to teach on Sunday at the Lycée for those who did not attend Mass, but
Merton took little interest. During the Christmas breaks of 1926 and 1927, he
spent his time with friends of his father in Murat, a small town in the
Auvergne. He admired the devout Catholic couple, whom he saw as good and decent
people, but religion only once came up as a topic between them.
Merton expressed his belief that all religions "lead to God, only
in different ways, and every man should go according to his own conscience, and
settle things according to his own private way of looking at things." He
wanted them to argue with him, but they did not. As he came to understand
later, they realized that his attitude "implied a fundamental and utter
lack of faith, and a dependence on my own lights, and attachment to my own
opinion"; furthermore, since "I did not believe in anything,...
anything I might say I believed would be only empty talk."
Meanwhile, Merton's father was traveling and painting and attending an
exhibition of his work in London, but in the summer of 1928 he took Merton out
of the Lycée Ingres, informing him that they were headed together to England.
Merton and his father moved to the home of Owen's aunt and uncle in
Ealing, West London. Merton was soon enrolled in Ripley Court Preparatory
School, another boarding school, this one in Surrey. Merton enjoyed his studies
there and benefited from a greater sense of community than had existed at the
lycée. On Sundays, all students attended services at the local Anglican church.
Merton began routinely praying, but discontinued the practice after leaving the
school.
During his holidays, Merton stayed at his great-aunt and uncle's home,
where occasionally his father would visit. During the Easter vacation, 1929,
Merton and Owen went to Canterbury. Merton enjoyed the countryside around
Canterbury, taking long walks there. When the holiday ended, Owen returned to
France, and Merton to Ripley. Towards the end of that year, Merton learned that
his father was ill and living in Ealing. Merton went to see him and together
they left for Scotland, where a friend had offered his house for Owen to
recover in. Shortly after, Owen was taken to London to the North Middlesex
Hospital. Merton soon learned his father had a brain tumor. He took the news
badly, but later, when he visited Owen in hospital, the latter seemed to be
recovering. This helped ease some of Merton's anxiety.
In 1930, Merton was sent to Oakham School, a boarding school in Rutland,
England. At the end of the first year, his grandparents and John Paul visited
him. His grandfather discussed his finances, telling him he would be provided
for if Owen died. Merton and the family spent most of that summer visiting the
hospital to see his father, who was so ill he could no longer speak. This
caused Merton much pain.
On 16 January 1931, just as the term at Oakham had restarted, Owen died.
Tom Bennett, Owen Merton's physician and former classmate in New Zealand,
became Merton's legal guardian. He allowed Merton to use his unoccupied house
in London during the holidays. That year, Merton visited Rome and Florence for
a week and also saw his grandparents in New York. Upon his return to Oakham,
Merton became joint editor of the school magazine, the Oakhamian.
At this period in his life, Merton was an agnostic. In 1932, on a
walking tour in Germany, he developed an infection under a toenail. He ignored
it, and it developed into a case of blood poisoning so severe that at one point
he thought he was going to die. But "the thought of God, the thought of
prayer did not even enter my mind, either that day, or all the rest of the time
that I was ill, or that whole year. Or if the thought did come to me, it was
only as an occasion for its denial and rejection." His declared
"creed" was "I believe in nothing."
In September he learned he had passed the entrance exam for Clare
College, Cambridge. On his 18th birthday, and tasting new freedom, he went off
on his own. He stopped off in Paris, Marseilles, then walked to Hyères, where
he ran out of money and wired Bennett for more. Scoldingly, Bennett granted his
request, which may have shown Merton he cared. Merton then walked to Saint Tropez,
where he took a train to Genoa and then another to Florence. From Florence he
left for Rome, a trip that in some ways changed the course of his life.
Two days after arriving in Rome in February 1933, Merton moved out of
his hotel and found a small pensione with views of the Palazzo Barberini and
San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, two magnificent pieces of architecture rich
with history. In The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton remarks:
I had been in Rome before, on an Easter vacation from school, for about
a week. I had seen the Forum and the Colosseum and the Vatican museum and St.
Peter's. But I had not really seen Rome. This time, I started out again, with
the misconception common to Anglo-Saxons, that the real Rome is the Rome of the
ugly ruins, the hills and the slums of the city.
Merton began going to the churches, not quite knowing why he felt so
drawn to them. He did not participate in Mass but simply observed and
appreciated them. One day, he happened upon a church near the Roman Forum. In
the apse of the church, he saw a great mosaic of Jesus Christ coming in
judgement in a dark blue sky and was transfixed. Merton had a hard time leaving
the place, though he was unsure why. Merton had officially found the Rome he
said he didn't see on his first visit: Byzantine Christian Rome.
From this point on in his trip he set about visiting the various
churches and basilicas in Rome, such as the Lateran Baptistery, Santa Costanza,
the Basilica di San Clemente, Santa Prassede and Santa Pudenziana (to name a
few). He purchased a Vulgate (Latin Bible), reading the entire New Testament.
One night in his pensione, Merton had the sense that Owen was in the room with
him for a few moments. This mystical experience led him to see the emptiness he
felt in his life, and he said that for the first time in his life he really
prayed, asking God to deliver him from his darkness. The Seven Storey Mountain
also describes a visit to Tre Fontane, a Trappist monastery in Rome. While
visiting the church there, he was at ease, yet when entering the monastery he
was overtaken with anxiety. That afternoon while alone he remarked to himself,
"I should like to become a Trappist monk." He would eventually become
a Trappist, and although they are known for silence, Merton was always very
vocal and expressive about his beliefs, especially in his writings.
Merton took a boat from Italy to the United States to visit his
grandparents in Douglaston for the summer, before entering Clare College. Initially
he retained some of the spirit he had had in Rome, continuing to read his Latin
Bible. He wanted to find a church to attend, but had still not quite quelled
his antipathy towards Catholicism. He went to Zion Episcopal Church in
Douglaston, but was irritated by the services there, so he went to Flushing,
New York, and attended a Quaker Meeting. Merton appreciated the silence of the
atmosphere but did not feel at home with the group. By mid-summer, he had lost
nearly all the interest in organized religion that he had found in Rome. At the
end of the summer he returned to England.
In October 1933, Merton entered Clare College as an undergraduate.
Merton, now 18, seems to have viewed Clare College as the end-all answer to his
life without meaning. In The Seven Storey Mountain, the brief chapter on
Cambridge paints a fairly dark, negative picture of his life there but is short
on detail.
Some of Merton's Oakham schoolmates, who had gone up to Cambridge at the
same time, recalled that Tom drifted away and became isolated there. He started
drinking excessively, hanging out in the local pubs (public houses) and bars
rather than studying. He was also very free with his sexuality during this
period, some friends going so far as to call him a womanizer. He also spent
freely—far too freely in Bennett's opinion—and he was summoned for the first of
what was to be a series of stern lectures in his guardian's London consulting
rooms. Although details are sketchy—they appear to have been excised from a
franker first draft of the autobiography by the Trappist censors—most of
Merton's biographers agree that he fathered a child with one of the women he
encountered at Cambridge and there was some kind of legal action pending that was
settled discreetly by Bennett. By any account, this child has never been
identified.
By this time Bennett had had enough and, in a meeting in April, Merton
and his guardian appear to have struck a deal: Merton would return to the
States and Bennett would not tell Merton's grandparents about his
indiscretions. In May Merton left Cambridge after completing his exams.
In January 1935 Merton enrolled as a sophomore at Columbia University in
Manhattan. He lived with the Jenkins family in Douglaston and took a train to
the Columbia campus each day. Merton's years at Columbia matured him, and it is
here that he discovered Catholicism in a real sense. These years were also a
time in his life where he realized others were more accepting of him as an
individual. In short, at 21 he was an equal among his peers. At that time he
established a close and long-lasting friendship with the proto-minimalist
painter Ad Reinhardt.
Merton began an 18th-century English literature course during the spring
semester taught by Mark Van Doren, a professor with whom he maintained a
friendship until death. Van Doren did not teach his students in any traditional
sense; instead he engaged them, sharing his love of literature. Merton was also
interested in Communism at Columbia, where he briefly joined the Young
Communist League; however, the first meeting he attended failed to interest him
further, and he never went back.
During summer break, John Paul returned home from Gettysburg Academy in
Pennsylvania. The two brothers spent their summer breaks bonding with each
other, claiming later to have seen every movie produced between 1934 and 1937.
When the fall semester arrived, John Paul left to enroll at Cornell University
while Tom returned to Columbia. He began working for two school papers, a humor
magazine called the Jester and the Columbia Review. Also on the Jester's staff
were the poet Robert Lax and the journalist Ed Rice. Lax and Merton became best
friends and kept up a lively correspondence until Merton's death; Rice later
founded the Catholic magazine Jubilee, to which Merton frequently contributed
essays. Merton also became a member of Alpha Delta Phi that semester and joined
the Philolexian Society, the campus literary and debate group.
In October 1935, in protest of Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, Merton
joined a picket of the Casa Italiana. The Casa Italiana, established in 1926,
was conceived of by Columbia and the Italian government as a "university
within a university". Merton also joined the local peace movement, having
taken "the Oxford Pledge" to not support any government in any war
they might undertake.
In 1936 Merton's grandfather, Samuel Jenkins, died. Merton and his
grandfather had grown rather close through the years, and Merton immediately
left school for home upon receiving the news. He states that, without thinking,
he went to the room where his grandfather's body was and knelt down to pray
over him.
In February 1937, Merton read a book that opened his mind to
Catholicism. It was titled The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy by Étienne Gilson,
and inside he encountered an explanation of God that he found both logical and
pragmatic. Tom purchased this book because he was taking a class on medieval
French literature, not seeing the nihil obstat in the book denoting its
Catholic origin. This work was pivotal, paving the way for more encounters with
Catholicism. Another author Merton began reading at this time was Aldous
Huxley, whose book Ends and Means introduced Merton to mysticism. In August of
the same year, Tom's grandmother, Bonnemaman, died.
In January 1938, Merton graduated from Columbia with a B.A. in English.
After graduation he continued at Columbia, doing graduate work in English. In
June, a friend, Seymour Freedgood, arranged a meeting with Mahanambrata
Brahmachari, a Hindu monk in New York visiting from the University of Chicago.
Merton was very impressed by the man, seeing that he was profoundly centered in
God, and expected him to recommend his beliefs and religion to them in some
manner. Instead, Brahmachari recommended that they reconnect with their own
spiritual roots and traditions. He suggested Merton read The Confessions of
Augustine and The Imitation of Christ. Although Merton was surprised to hear
the monk recommending Catholic books, he read them both. He also started to
pray again regularly.
For the next few months Merton began to consider Catholicism as
something to explore again. Finally, in August 1938, he decided he wanted to
attend Mass and went to Corpus Christi Church located near to the Columbia
campus on West 121st Street in Morningside Heights. Mass was foreign to him,
but he listened attentively. Following this experience, Merton's reading list
became more and more geared toward Catholicism. While doing his graduate work,
he was writing his thesis on William Blake, whose spiritual symbolism he was
coming to appreciate in new ways.
One evening in September, Merton was reading a book about Gerard Manley
Hopkins' conversion to Catholicism and how he became a priest. Suddenly he
could not shake this sense that he, too, should follow such a path. He grabbed
his coat and headed quickly over to the Corpus Christi Church rectory, where he
met with a Fr. George Barry Ford, expressing his desire to become Catholic. The
next few weeks Merton started catechism, learning the basics of his new faith.
On November 16, 1938, Thomas Merton underwent the rite of baptism once again at
Corpus Christi Church and received Holy Communion. On February 22, 1939, Merton
received his M.A. in English from Columbia University. Merton decided he would
pursue his Ph.D. at Columbia and moved from Douglaston to Greenwich Village.
In January 1939, Merton had heard good things from friends of his about
a part-time teacher on campus named Daniel Walsh, so he decided to take a
course on Thomas Aquinas with Walsh. Through Walsh, Merton was introduced to
Jacques Maritain at a lecture on Catholic Action, which took place at a
Catholic Book Club meeting the following March. Merton and Walsh developed a
lifelong friendship, and it was Walsh who convinced Merton that Thomism was not
for him. On May 25, 1939, Merton received Confirmation at Corpus Christi, and
took the confirmation name James.
In October 1939, Merton invited friends back to sleep over at his place
following a long night out at a jazz club. Over breakfast, Merton told them of
his desire to become a priest. Soon after this epiphany, Merton visited Fr.
Ford at Corpus Christi to share his feeling. Ford agreed with Merton, but added
that he felt Merton was suited for the priesthood of the diocesan priest and
advised against joining an order.
Soon after, Merton met with his teacher Dan Walsh, whom he trusted to
advise him on the matter. Walsh disagreed with Ford's assessment that Merton
was suited to a secular calling. Instead, he felt Merton was spiritually and
intellectually more suited for a priestly vocation in a specific order. So they
discussed the Jesuits, Cistercians and Franciscans. Since Merton had appreciated
what he had read of Saint Francis of Assisi, he felt that might be the
direction in which he was being called.
Walsh set up a meeting with a Fr. Edmund Murphy, a friend at the
monastery of St. Francis of Assisi on 31st Street. The interview went well and
Merton was given an application, as well as Fr. Murphy's personal invitation to
become a Franciscan friar. However, he noted that Merton would not be able to
enter the novitiate until August 1940 because that was the only month in which
they accepted new novices. Merton was very excited, yet disappointed that it
would be another year before he would fulfill his calling.
By 1940 Merton began to have doubts about whether he was fit to be a
Franciscan. He felt he had never truly been upfront about his past with Fr.
Murphy or Dan Walsh. It is possible some of this may have concerned his time at
Cambridge, though he is never specific in The Seven Storey Mountain about
precisely what he felt he was hiding. Merton arranged to see Fr. Murphy and
tell him of his past troubles. Fr. Murphy was understanding during the meeting,
but told Tom he ought to return the next day once he had time to consider this
new information. That next day Fr. Murphy delivered Merton devastating news. He
no longer felt Merton was suitable material for a Franciscan vocation as a
friar, and even said that the August novitiate was now full. Fr. Murphy seemed
uninterested in helping Merton's cause any further, and Merton believed at once
that his calling was finished.
In early August 1940, the month he would have entered the Franciscan
novitiate, Merton went to Olean, New York, to stay with friends, including
Robert Lax and Ed Rice, at a cottage where they had vacationed the summer
before. This was a tough time for Merton, and he wanted to be in the company of
friends. Merton now needed a job. In the vicinity was St. Bonaventure
University, a Franciscan university he had learned about through Bob Lax a year
before. The day after arriving in Olean, Merton went to St. Bonaventure for an
interview with then-president Fr. Thomas Plassman. Fortuitously, there was an
opening in the English department and Merton was hired on the spot. Merton
chose St. Bonaventure because he still harbored a desire to be a friar; he
decided that he could at least live among them even if he could not be one of
them. St. Bonaventure University holds an important repository of Merton
materials.
In September 1940, Merton moved into a dormitory on campus. (His old
room in Devereux Hall has a sign above the door to this effect.) While Merton's
stay at Bonaventure would prove brief, the time was pivotal for him. While
teaching there, his spiritual life blossomed as he went deeper and deeper into
his prayer life. He all but gave up drinking, quit smoking, stopped going to
movies and became more selective in his reading. In his own way he was
undergoing a kind of lay renunciation of worldly pleasures. In April 1941,
Merton went to a retreat he had booked for Holy Week at the Abbey of Our Lady
of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky. At once he felt a pull to the place,
and he could feel his spirits rise during his stay.
Returning to St. Bonaventure with Gethsemani on his mind, Merton
returned to teaching. In May 1941 he had an occasion where he used his old
Vulgate, purchased in Italy back in 1933, as a kind of oracle. The idea was
that he would randomly select a page and blindly point his finger somewhere,
seeing if it would render him some sort of sign. On his second try Merton laid his
finger on a section of The Gospel of Luke which stated, "Behold, thou
shalt be silent." Immediately Merton thought of the Cistercians. Although
he was still unsure of his qualifications for a religious vocation, Merton felt
he was being drawn more and more to a specific calling.
In August 1941, Merton attended a talk at the school given by Catherine
de Hueck. Hueck had founded the Friendship House in Toronto and its sister
house in Harlem, which Merton visited. Appreciative of the mission of Hueck and
Friendship House, which was racial harmony and charity, he decided to volunteer
there for two weeks. Merton was amazed at how little he had learned of New York
during his studies at Columbia. Harlem was such a different place, full of
poverty and prostitution. Merton felt especially troubled by the situation of
children being raised in the environment there. Friendship House had a profound
impact on Merton, and he would speak of it often in his later writing.
In November 1941, Hueck asked if Merton would consider becoming a
full-time member of Friendship House, to which Merton responded cordially yet
noncommittally. He still felt unfit to serve Christ, and even hinted at such in
a letter to Hueck that same month, in which he implied he was not good enough
for her organization. In early December Merton let Hueck know that he would
definitely not be joining Friendship House, explaining his persistent
attraction to the priesthood.
On December 10, 1941, Thomas Merton arrived at the Abbey of Gethsemani
and spent three days at the monastery guest house, waiting for acceptance into
the Order. The novice master would come to interview Merton, gauging his
sincerity and qualifications. In the interim, Merton was put to work polishing
floors and scrubbing dishes. On December 13 he was accepted into the monastery
as a postulant by Dom Frederic Dunne, Gethsemani's Father Abbot since 1935.
Merton's first few days did not go smoothly. He had a severe cold from his stay
in the guest house, where he sat in front of an open window to prove his
sincerity. But Merton devoted himself entirely to adjusting to the austerity,
enjoying the change of lifestyle. During his initial weeks at Gethsemani,
Merton studied the complicated Cistercian sign language and daily work and
worship routine.
In March 1942, during the first Sunday of Lent, Merton was accepted as a
novice monk at the monastery. In June, he received a letter from his brother
John Paul stating he was soon to leave for war and would be coming to
Gethsemani to visit Merton before leaving. On July 17 John Paul arrived in
Gethsemani and the two brothers did some catching up. John Paul expressed his
desire to become Catholic, and by July 26 was baptized at a church in nearby
New Haven, Kentucky, leaving the following day. This would be the last time the
two saw each other. John Paul died on April 17, 1943 when his plane's engines
failed over the English Channel. A poem by Merton to John Paul appears at the
end of The Seven Storey Mountain.
Merton kept journals throughout his stay at Gethsemani. Initially he had
felt writing to be at odds with his vocation, worried it would foster a
tendency to individuality. Fortunately his superior, Father Abbot Dom Frederic,
saw that Merton had a gifted intellect and talent for writing. In 1943 Merton
was tasked to translate religious texts and write biographies on the saints for
the monastery. Merton approached his new writing assignment with the same
fervor and zeal he displayed in the farmyard.
On March 19, 1944, Merton made his temporary profession of vows and was
given the white cowl, black scapular and leather belt. In November 1944 a
manuscript Merton had given to friend Robert Lax the previous year was
published by James Laughlin at New Directions: a book of poetry titled Thirty
Poems. Merton had mixed feelings about the publishing of this work, but Dom
Frederic remained resolute over Merton continuing his writing. In 1946 New
Directions published another poetry collection by Merton, A Man in the Divided
Sea, which, combined with Thirty Poems, attracted some recognition for him. The
same year Merton's manuscript for The Seven Storey Mountain was accepted by
Harcourt Brace & Company for publication. The Seven Storey Mountain,
Merton's autobiography, was written during two-hour intervals in the monastery
scriptorium as a personal project.
By 1947 Merton was more comfortable in his role as a writer. On March 19
he took his solemn vows, a commitment to live out his life at the monastery. He
also began corresponding with a Carthusian at St. Hugh's Charterhouse in
England. Merton had harbored an appreciation for the Carthusian Order since
coming to Gethsemani in 1941, and would later come to consider leaving the
Cistercians for that Order. On July 4 the Catholic journal Commonweal published
an essay by Merton titled Poetry and the Contemplative Life.
In 1948 The Seven Storey Mountain was published to critical acclaim,
with fan mail to Merton reaching new heights. Merton also published several
works for the monastery that year, which were: Guide to Cistercian Life,
Cistercian Contemplatives, Figures for an Apocalypse, and The Spirit of
Simplicity. That year Saint Mary's College (Indiana) also published a booklet
by Merton, What Is Contemplation? Merton published as well that year a
biography, Exile Ends in Glory: The Life of a Trappistine, Mother M. Berchmans,
O.C.S.O. Merton's abbot, Dom Frederic Dunne, died on August 3, 1948 while
riding on a train to Georgia. Dunne's passing was painful for Merton, who had
come to look on the abbot as a father figure and spiritual mentor. On August 15
the monastic community elected Dom James Fox, a former U.S. Navy officer, as
their new abbot. In October Merton discussed with him his ongoing attraction to
the Carthusian and Camaldolese Orders and their eremitical way of life, to
which Fox responded by assuring Merton that he belonged at Gethsemani. Fox
permitted Merton to continue his writing, Merton now having gained substantial
recognition outside the monastery. On December 21 Merton was ordained as a
subdeacon.
On January 5, 1949, Merton took a train to Louisville and applied for
American citizenship. Published that year were Seeds of Contemplation, The
Tears of Blind Lions, The Waters of Siloe, and the British edition of The Seven
Storey Mountain under the title Elected Silence. On March 19 Merton became a
deacon in the Order, and on May 26 (Ascension Thursday) he was ordained a
priest, saying his first Mass the following day. In June the monastery
celebrated its centenary, for which Merton authored the book Gethsemani
Magnificat in commemoration. In November Merton started teaching mystical
theology to novices at Gethsemani, a duty he greatly enjoyed. By this time
Merton was a huge success outside the monastery, The Seven Storey Mountain
having sold over 150,000 copies. In subsequent years Merton would author many
other books, amassing a wide readership. He would revise Seeds of Contemplation
several times, viewing his early edition as error-prone and immature. A
person's place in society, views on social activism, and various approaches
toward contemplative prayer and living became constant themes in his writings.
In December a fellow monk allowed Merton to take the monastery jeep out
on the property for a drive. Merton, having never learned to drive, wound up
hitting some trees and running through ditches, flipping the jeep halfway over
in the middle of the road. He never used the jeep again.
During his long years at Gethsemani, Merton changed from the
passionately inward-looking young monk of The Seven Storey Mountain to a more
contemplative writer and poet. Merton became well known for his dialogues with
other faiths and his non-violent stand during the race riots and Vietnam War of
the 1960s.
By the 1960s, he had arrived at a broadly human viewpoint, one deeply
concerned about the world and issues like peace, racial tolerance, and social
equality. He had developed a personal radicalism which had political implications
but was not based on ideology, rooted above all in non-violence. He regarded
his viewpoint as based on "simplicity" and expressed it as a
Christian sensibility. His New Seeds of Contemplation was published in 1962. In
a letter to Nicaraguan Catholic priest, liberation theologian and politician
Ernesto Cardenal (who entered Gethsemani but left in 1959 to study theology in
Mexico), Merton wrote: "The world is full of great criminals with enormous
power, and they are in a death struggle with each other. It is a huge gang
battle, using well-meaning lawyers and policemen and clergymen as their front,
controlling papers, means of communication, and enrolling everybody in their
armies."
Merton finally achieved the solitude he had long desired while living in
a hermitage on the monastery grounds in 1965. Over the years he had occasional
battles with some of his abbots about not being allowed out of the monastery
despite his international reputation and voluminous correspondence with many
well-known figures of the day.
At the end of 1968, the new abbot, the Reverend Flavian Burns, allowed
him the freedom to undertake a tour of Asia, during which he met the Dalai Lama
in India on three occasions, and also the Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen master,
Chatral Rinpoche, followed by a solitary retreat near Darjeeling, India. In
Darjeeling, he befriended Tsewang Yishey Pemba, a prominent member of the
Tibetan community. Then, in what was to be his final letter, he noted, "In
my contacts with these new friends, I also feel a consolation in my own faith
in Christ and in his dwelling presence. I hope and believe he may be present in
the hearts of all of us."
According to The Seven Storey Mountain, the youthful Merton loved jazz,
but by the time he began his first teaching job he had forsaken all but
peaceful music. Later in life, whenever he was permitted to leave Gethsemani
for medical or monastic reasons, he would catch what live jazz he could, mainly
in Louisville or New York.
In April 1966, Merton underwent a surgical procedure to treat
debilitating back pain. While recuperating in a Louisville hospital, he fell in
love with Margie Smith, a student nurse assigned to his care whom he referred
to in his personal diary as "M." He wrote poems to her and reflected
on the relationship in "A Midsummer Diary for M." Merton struggled to
maintain his vows while being deeply in love. He remained chaste, never
consummating the relationship.[note 1] After ending the relationship, he
recommitted himself to his vows.
On December 10, 1968, Merton had gone to attend an interfaith conference
between Catholic and non-Christian monks in suburban Bangkok, Thailand,
intending to go on to Japan and explore Zen (a form of Buddhism). After
speaking at the conference, while stepping out of his bath, it is generally
concluded, he was accidentally electrocuted by an electric fan. However, his
associate, Dom Jean Leclercq, OSB, contends that: "We will never know
exactly and with certitude... On the evening of his death, two different
versions were already being put forth by the media of Thailand and of the
United States. Papers in the United States only made mention of electrocution;
those in Thailand spoke only of a heart attack," and notes that:
"Some have begun spreading the rumor that the last moments of his life
were in the presence of a statue of the Buddha. Others have suggested that he
was assassinated like Martin Luther King had been."
He died 27 years to the day after his entrance into the Abbey of
Gethsemani in 1941. His body was flown back to the United States on board a
U.S. military aircraft returning from Vietnam. He is buried at Gethsemani Abbey
in Trappist, Kentucky.
Merton was first exposed to and became interested in Eastern religions
when he read Aldous Huxley's Ends and Means in 1937, the year before his
conversion to Catholicism. Throughout his life, he studied Buddhism, Taoism,
Hinduism, Jainism and Sufism in addition to his academic and monastic studies.
While Merton was not interested in what these traditions had to offer as
doctrines and institutions, he was deeply interested in what each said of the
depth of human experience. This is not to say that Merton believed that these
religions did not have valuable rituals or practices for him and other
Christians, but that, doctrinally, Merton was so committed to Christianity and
he felt that practitioners of other faiths were so committed to their own
doctrines that any discussion of doctrine would be useless for all involved.
He believed that for the most part, Christianity had forsaken its
mystical tradition in favor of Cartesian emphasis on "the reification of
concepts, idolization of the reflexive consciousness, flight from being into
verbalism, mathematics, and rationalization." Eastern traditions, for
Merton, were mostly untainted by this type of thinking and thus had much to
offer in terms of how to think of and understand oneself.
Merton was perhaps most interested in—and, of all of the Eastern
traditions, wrote the most about—Zen. Having studied the Desert Fathers and
other Christian mystics as part of his monastic vocation, Merton had a deep
understanding of what it was those men sought and experienced in their seeking.
He found many parallels between the language of these Christian mystics and the
language of Zen philosophy.
In 1959, Merton began a dialogue with D.T. Suzuki which was published in
Merton's Zen and the Birds of Appetite as "Wisdom in Emptiness". This
dialogue began with the completion of Merton's The Wisdom of the Desert. Merton
sent a copy to Suzuki with the hope that he would comment on Merton's view that
the Desert Fathers and the early Zen masters had similar experiences. Nearly
ten years later, when Zen and the Birds of Appetite was published, Merton wrote
in his postface that "any attempt to handle Zen in theological language is
bound to miss the point", calling his final statements "an example of
how not to approach Zen." Merton struggled to reconcile the Western and
Christian impulse to catalog and put into words every experience with the ideas
of Christian apophatic theology and the unspeakable nature of the Zen
experience.
In keeping with Merton's idea that non-Christian faiths had much to
offer Christianity in terms of experience and perspective and little or nothing
in terms of doctrine, Merton distinguished between Zen Buddhism, an expression of
history and culture, and Zen.[34] What Merton meant by Zen Buddhism was the
religion that began in China and spread to Japan as well as the rituals and
institutions that accompanied it. By Zen, Merton meant something not bound by
culture, religion or belief. In this capacity, Merton was influenced by the
book Zen Catholicism. With this idea in mind, Merton's later writings about Zen
may be understood to be coming more and more from within an evolving and
broadening tradition of Zen which is not particularly Buddhist but informed by
Merton's monastic training within the Christian tradition
Marker commemorating Thomas Merton in Downtown Louisville, Kentucky
Merton's influence has grown since his
death and he is widely recognized as an important 20th-century Catholic mystic
and thinker. Interest in his work contributed to a rise in spiritual
exploration beginning in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. Merton's
letters and diaries reveal the intensity with which their author focused on
social justice issues, including the civil rights movement and proliferation of
nuclear arms. He had prohibited their publication for 25 years after his death.
Publication raised new interest in Merton's life.
The Abbey of Gethsemani benefits from the royalties of Merton's writing.
In addition, his writings attracted much interest in Catholic practice and
thought, and in the Cistercian vocation.
In recognition of Merton's close association with Bellarmine University,
the university established an official repository for Merton's archives at the
Thomas Merton Center on the Bellarmine campus in Louisville, Kentucky.
The Thomas Merton Award, a peace prize, has been awarded since 1972 by
the Thomas Merton Center for Peace and Social Justice in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania.
An annual lecture in his name is given at his
alma mater, Columbia University.
The campus ministry building at St. Bonaventure University, the school
where Merton taught English briefly between graduating from Columbia University
with his M.A. in English and entering the Trappist Order, is named after him.
St. Bonaventure University also holds an important repository of Merton
materials worldwide.
Bishop Marrocco/Thomas Merton Catholic Secondary School in downtown
Toronto, Canada, which was formerly named St. Joseph's Commercial and was
founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph, is named in part after him.
Some of Merton's manuscripts that include correspondence with his
superiors are located in the library of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in
Conyers, Georgia.
Merton is honored with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of some
church members of the Anglican Communion.