RSS FEEDThomas Merton
(January 31, 1915 – December 10, 1968)
Thomas Merton was a paradox: as a contemplative Trappist monk cloistered in an austere Roman Catholic brotherhood that required of him a vow of silence and being cut off completely from the world, Merton, nevertheless, became a world-wide bestselling writer, social activist, promoter of dialogue between different faiths, and an important bridge between Western and Eastern religious thought.
His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, has been translated into over twenty languages, has sold more than three million copies, and continues to sell steadily. It was on National Review’s list of the 100 best nonfiction books of the twentieth century.[1]
He also wrote over sixty other books and hundreds of poems and articles on topics ranging from spiritual meditation to civil rights, nonviolence, and the nuclear arms race.
At the time of his accidental death in 1968, he left an estimated 800,000 words of unpublished writings, mainly journals and letters, as well as hundreds of taped talks, much of which has by now been published posthumously.[2]
Merton’s writings became important not only to Christians and Catholics, but also to people of every spiritual tradition and to people with none. Christopher Pramuk, writer and theologian, has written:
“The Seven Storey Mountain struck a deep chord in a generation trying to make sense of things in the devastating wake of World War II. Where is God? What is humanity? What reasons can we give for the hope that remains in us? For the next twenty years Merton navigated such questions of faith and the search for meaning in dozens of books and hundreds of essays across a dizzying range of genres: spiritual meditations, journals, poetry, letters, literary criticism, and social essays appearing in journals both sacred and secular.”[3]
Generations of readers would find in Merton meaning and the inspiration to act for social justice, noting Merton’s own engagement with the things he cared deeply about despite being cloistered. With special permission from his abbot, Merton was able to bring people to visit him at the monastery and to instruct the other monks.
“At the height of the Vietnam War, he welcomed a Vietnamese Buddhist monk to speak at the abbey, met with peace activist Joan Baez, corresponded with Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, and planned a retreat for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that was halted by King’s assassination. [4]
Daniel Berrigan later called Merton the “pastor of the peace movement.”[5]
Merton had not sought such fame or prominence. He had entered the monastery to find solitude, hoping in contemplation to find deeper meaning in his own life. This was important to him, probably because from the beginning his life had been marked by world events.
It was, as he wrote, “On the last day of January 1915, in the second year of the Great War, down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into this world.” The shadows of that war and the next, and of much personal loss shaped Merton.
“Merton was the son of a New Zealand-born father, Owen Merton, and a Quaker American-born mother, Ruth Jenkins, who were both artists living in France. He was baptized in the Church of England but otherwise received little religious education. The family moved to the United States during World War I, and his mother died of stomach cancer a few years later, in 1921, when Merton was six years old. He lived variously with his father and his grandparents before he was finally settled with his father in France in 1926 and then in England in 1928. As a youth, he largely attended boarding schools in England and France. After a year at the University of Cambridge, he entered Columbia University in New York City, where he earned B.A. (1938) and M.A. (1939) degrees…Following years of agnosticism, Merton converted to Catholicism during his time at Columbia and began exploring the idea of entering religious life. After teaching English at Columbia (1938–39) and at St. Bonaventure University (1939–41) near Olean, New York, he entered the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani near Louisville, Kentucky…He took Louis as his monastic name, and he was ordained a priest in 1949, becoming Father Louis to the community at Gethsemani.[6]
Merton’s voluminous writing and activism are remarkable considering that when he entered the Trappist monastery in Kentucky in 1941, monks were allowed to write only two half-page letters four times a year and nothing more.[7]
Life at the Abbey at the time involved silence, manual labor, fasting, and prayer. Monks rose in the middle of the night for the first hours of prayer in the unheated chapel, and met again in the church roughly seven times a day to chant the psalms in Latin. Otherwise, strict silence was observed across the monastery for most of the day and night. Monks used an elaborate system of specialized sign language to communicate necessary practical tasks, as talking was generally forbidden. And contact with the outside world was virtually cut off.
Reform of these rules eventually occurred, in fact in part because of the success of the publication of Merton’s 1948 autobiography. Many young men, some fresh home from the Second World War, having read Merton’s book, were drawn to the monastery at Gethsemani. The monastery had to be enlarged and modernized, with electricity, basic indoor heating, and actual mattresses. And, after the Second Vatican Council in 1960, monks were finally permitted to speak without sign language when necessary.
But these new noisier conditions at the more crowded monastery, along with the bombardment of mail Merton increasingly received, greatly effected Merton with his ongoing desire for quiet contemplation and study. Finally, in 1965, his Abbot granted him historic permission to live full-time in a small, isolated hermitage on the monastery grounds.
Merton initially had tried to give up writing. However, his superiors ordered him to keep writing to benefit the Church, and despite frequent conflicts with religious authorities about the subject of his writing, he was encouraged by his clerical superiors to publish.
Merton’s early writings focused on contemplation in isolation from society as the answer to the question of how a Christian should respond to the chaos of the world. But his writing soon changed, stating the need to deal with social injustice through activism. He began to write about race relations, war, economic injustice, and other issues.
In Best Sellers, Sister Joseph Marie Anderson wrote that in Merton’s Contemplation in a World of Action, the monk stresses “that the contemplative is not exempt from the problem of the world nor is the monastic life an escape from reality.”
Merton himself wrote:
“Contemplation in the age of Auschwitz and Dachau, Solovky and Karaganda is something darker and more fearsome than contemplation in the age of the Church Fathers. For that very reason, the urge to seek a path of spiritual light can be a subtle temptation to sin. It certainly is sin if it means a frank rejection of the burden of our age, an escape into unreality and spiritual illusion, so as not to share the misery of other men.”[8]
Referring to race and peace as the two most urgent issues of our time, Merton was a strong supporter of the nonviolent civil rights movement, which he called “certainly the greatest example of Christian faith in action in the social history of the United States.” [9]
He called on each of us to act, even in the face of discouragement. He wrote: “You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.”
For his social activism Merton endured severe criticism, from Catholics and non-Catholics alike.
“Merton’s increasing concern with racial injustice, the immorality of war—particularly of the Vietnam conflict—and the plight of the world’s poor caused increasing conflict with the monastic censors at Gethsemane. When originally confronted with the manuscript version of The Seven Storey Mountain, for instance, the censors rejected it because of the numerous references to sex and drinking it contained. Although the debate over The Seven Storey Mountain was eventually resolved, monastic censors once again grew concerned about Merton’s writings on war and peace. Frustrated, Merton circulated some of his work in mimeographed form that came to be known as the “Cold War Letters.” In 1962, Merton was forbidden by his superiors to write about war, but was allowed to write about peace. [10]
Merton was also especially interested in opening a dialogue about the common ground between Western and Eastern and other spiritual traditions. Throughout his life, he studied and wrote not only about Christian theology, but also about Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Sufism, Jainism, Sikhism, and more. His writings helped introduce Eastern spirituality to American readers.
In 1968, the Dalai Lama praised Merton as having a more profound understanding of Buddhism than any other Christian he had known.[11]
In emphasizing the importance of such increased understanding, Merton said: ‘If the West continues to underestimate and to neglect the spiritual heritage of the East, it may well hasten the tragedy that threatens man and his civilization.” [12]
Merton carried on voluminous correspondence with many people, including D. T. Suzuki, noted Zen scholar, about the meaning of consciousness and the effects of meditation and contemplation. Merton never blends the two ways of thinking—Zen and Roman Catholic—but he does in his writing show the common ground each shares. His book Zen and the Birds of Appetite’: A Dialogue Between East and West explores these ideas.
Pope Francis, in a speech to a joint meeting of the United States Congress on September 24, 2015 said: “Merton was above all a man of prayer, a thinker who challenged the certitudes of his time and opened new horizons for souls and for the Church. He was also a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions.”
Merton wrote : “Literature, contemplation, solitude, Latin America, Asia, Zen, Islam, etc. All these things combine in my life. It would be madness to make a “monasticism” by simply excluding them. I would be less a monk. Others have their own way, I have mine.”[13]
Merton had deepened his spiritual understanding to include not only the monastic life but also he could embrace all of the world outside the monastery as utterly filled with the presence of what we call the divine. He recorded:
“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness … This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud … Thank God, thank God that I am like other [human beings], that I am only a [human being] among others.[14]
At the end of 1968, the new abbot at the monastery, Flavian Burns, allowed Merton to undertake a tour of Asia, his first extended journey outside the monastery walls since his entry in 1941. During this trip 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.[15]
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 his in-dwelling presence. I hope and believe he may be present in the hearts of all of us.”[16]
Merton died on that trip while attending an ecumenical conference in Bangkok, Thailand. Ironically, his death came 27 years to the day from when he first became a member of the Gethsemane community. The cause of death was listed as heart failure, although the most-repeated explanation is that he was fatally electrocuted by a faulty wire. He is buried at Gethsemani.[17]
Christopher Pramuk, theologian and writer, has recently written of Merton:
“During an informal talk in Calcutta in October 1968, just over a month before his death, Merton described the character of our primordial communion in God, Earth, and one another across boundaries of race, culture, nation, and religion:
“It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear brothers, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.”
“For Merton as for Pope Francis, it is not enough to preach “tolerance” at a safe distance from the other, without listening, without transformation, without risk, without growth. To build what Francis calls a “culture of encounter” is to risk learning something new and essential on the path to God. It is to lay down stepping stones, cor ad cor loquitur, on the hard road to peace. For generations of readers Thomas Merton has been a kind of fulcrum, making a little more possible in our lives the movement between heaven and earth, matter and spirit, freedom and grace. As Pope Francis intimates, Merton dares us to imagine what is possible for God and for human beings under the horizon of faith in the twenty-first century.[18]
The Thomas Merton Studies Center at Bellarmine College in Louisville, Kentucky, contains over 10,000 items related to Merton and some 3,000 of his manuscripts. The Merton Legacy Trust, devoted to gathering all future Merton scholarship, is also located at Bellarmine. The International Thomas Merton Society was founded in 1987 and reports a membership of over fifteen thousand.[19]
A bibliography, with a lengthy list of his writings, can be found here at Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Merton_bibliography#Biographies
“We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”
Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain
“The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds.”
Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.”
Thomas Merton, Disputed Questions
“It’s important to be heroic, ambitious, productive, efficient, creative, and progressive, but these qualities don’t necessarily nurture soul. The soul has different concerns, of equal value: downtime for reflection, conversation, and reverie; beauty that is captivating and pleasuring; relatedness to the environs and to people; and any animal’s rhythm of rest and activity.”
Thomas Merton, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life
[1] https://www.collectedmiscellany.com/2004/05/12/national-reviews-100-best-non-fiction-books-of-the-century/
[3] https://themarginaliareview.com/thomas-merton-future-faith-christopher-pramuk/#:~:text=During%20his%20historic%20address%20before,souls%20and%20for%20the%20church.
[4] . https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/thomas-merton
[5] ttps://themarginaliareview.com/thomas-merton-future-faith-christopher-pramuk/#:~:text=During%20his%20historic%20address%20before,souls%20and%20for%20the%20church.
[5] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/thomas-merton
[6] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Merton
[7] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/thomas-merton
[8] Thomas Merton, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation
[9] Thomas Mereton, Seeds of Destruction, section titled “The Black Revolution: Letters to a White Liberal.”
[10] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/thomas-merton
[12] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/thomas-merton
[13] A Year with Thomas Merton
[14] Thomas Moore, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
[15] A Year with Thomas Merton
[16] “Religion: Mystic’s Last Journey”. TIME. August 6, 1973
[17] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Merton
[18] Thomas Merton and the Future of Faith – By Christopher Pramuk, https://themarginaliareview.com/thomas-merton-future-faith-christopher-pramuk/#:~:text=During%20his%20historic%20address%20before,souls%20and%20for%20the%20church.
