Thomas Merton

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Thomas Merton (January 31, 1915 – December 10, 1968) was an American Trappist priest/monk, poet and author incorporating mystic vision with social action. He was recognized as the greatest monastic figure of the twentieth century. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, was a literary sensation and catapulted him to celebrity status. Merton wrote more than 50 books, 2000 poems, and scores of essays, reviews, book introductions, cartoons, translations and lectures. His personal struggles made him a symbol for our search for meaning in the modern world, his resolutions in joyful relationship with God gave renewed faith in the Divine.

Life

Thomas Merton was born in Prades in the Pyrénées-Orientales département of France to perpatetic Bohemian artists. Ruth, his mother, was born to a wealthy Long Island American Quaker family and Owen Merton, his father, was a New Zealandartist and musician from Christchurch. They met while studying art in Paris and had Thomas within the year. In 1916, Owen refused to join the military in France, and the family moved to the United States. Thomas was educated in the United States, Bermuda and [[France]. His mother died when he was six years old.

Thomas' father was a wanderer by nature and an artist by temperment, and became the boy's source of religious development. At times the two of them hiked many trails in nature and the boy's mystic sense of oneness with nature grew. It was difficult, however, for the wanderer in Owen to really take care of his son so Thomas spent his childhood between his father, grandparents, an aunt and uncle and being at boarding school. Thomas and his brother were in a dismal lycee in southern France absorbing the Medieval Catholicism of the region when Owen told them to pack up and move to England. Thomas was overjoyed. Thomas attended the Oakham School in England.

Thomas developed his writing while here and was quite popular, joining boys athlectics and student publications. Within a few years, his father developed brain cancer and suffered a long, painful death. During this time, Owen had a conversion experience. The death of his father weighed heavily on Thomas, and he and his brother moved to be with their grandparents in Long Island, New York.

Beign accustomed to traveling, after several months Thomas traveled to Rome, to St. Bonaventure in New York, and to Cuba. The he got a small scholarship to the Cambridge University, so under the direction of a guardian, Tom Bennet, he traveled and lived in England once again. He led a boisterous life that was no better or worse than most undergraduates, but he fathered an illegitimate child with a lower class girl at this time. He moved back to the United States to live with his grandparents and in 1935 enrolled in Columbia University, where he proceeded to take his bachelor's and master's degrees. Here he also became acquainted with a group of artists and writers who remained friends for life. They included Mark Van Doren, the poet Robert Lax, the publisher James Laughlin, and Robert Giroux. At Columbia he wrote for undergraduate publications and played sports. It was a much happier time.

When both grandparents died within a few months of each other, it was devastating for Merton. He turned to Catholocism. Enthralled by the mystic poets Blake, Hopkins, and St. John of the Cross, he did his Senior thesis on William Blake. The renewal of Catholic thought regenerated memories of France and the aesthetic beauty he had experienced there. Spiritual and sensual beauty became important in his literary style.

In the fall of 1938, a close friend, Sy Freedgood, had introduced Merton to a Hindu monk, Bramachari. The monk gave Merton one piece of advice: "There are many beautiful mystical books written by the Christians. You should read St. Augustine/St. Augustine's Confessions." He did, and later Merton was profoundly complimented when Dan Walsh, a part-time lecturer in medieval philosophy at Columbia, commented in class that he saw the spiritual, mystical way of St. Augustine in Merton.

Merton converted to Catholicism at The Church of Corpus Christi. He continued to feel a calling to give his life to God, but was denied by the Franciscans, allegedly because of the incident with his illegitamate child. He taught at St. Bonaventure's College, in Olean, New York and then came to know of the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky of the Trappist (Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance, O.C.S.O.). This order is sometimes known as the foreign legion of the Catholic church, and being founded in 1848 by French monks fleeing persucution in France, it was especially attractive to Merton. Easter, 1941, Merton was going to a retreat at the Abbey and someone warned him as he was leaving: "Don't let them change you." He responded, "It would be a good thing if they changed me." It was only days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Meton was called by God, and was also facing a crisis regarding the morality of military duty. Finally, he was accepted as a postulant to the choir (with the intention of becoming a priest) at Gethsemani on December 13th, 1941 (the Feast of Saint Lucy).

The monks were aware of Merton's talent, and wanted him to write so that they would be better understood by outsiders. in 1938, at 32 years of age, he wrote the religious autobiography of the century in The Seven Storey Mountain. The overwhelming success changed the monk bound to a vow of silence into a world-wide celebrity overnight. Interestingly enough, many monks remained unaware of his impact on the world.

Merton changed from a passionately inward-looking young monk to a contemplative writer and poet known for dialogue with other faiths and his stand on non-violence during the race riots and Vietnam War of the 1960s. He finally achieved the solitude he had long desired in a hermitage in 1965.

During these years he had many battles with his AbbotJames Fox, about not being allowed out of the monastery.

In the mid sixties, while at a Lousiville hospital for back surgery, Thomas Merton met a student nurse, and they began a correspondence. Under the title of "matter of conscience" to avoid monastic censors, he declared his love for her. He comtemplated a chaste marriage, though chastity was not really in his mind at that time. The Abbot came to know of these things, and Merton chose to keep his vows in the traditional cloister.

Merton had also translated many Latin poems, and was aware of liberation theology. He devloped a friendship with the poet and monk Ernesto Cardenal, who would later serve in the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicargaua. This tempted Merton to seek re-assignment in Latin America, which was denied.

A new Abbot allowed him the freedom to undertake a tour of Asia at the end of 1968, during which he met the Dalai Lama in India. He also made a visit to Polonnaruwa (in what was then Ceylon), where he had a religious experience while viewing enormous statues of the Buddha.

Merton was in Bangkok at a cross-faith conference on contemplation when his life was cut short, He died in on 10th December 1968, having touched a badly-grounded electric fan while stepping out of his bath. His body was flown back to Gethsemani where he is buried.

In recognition of his close association with Bellarmine University, the official repository for Merton's archives is the Thomas Merton Center on the Bellarmine campus in Louisville, Kentucky.

Work

Popular Author

The Seven Storey Mountain has been translated into all the world's major languages and remains the great work of Thomas Merton. His work, however,is diverse, varied, and uneven. Many of his other works rather leaves one wondering if the same talent could have produced such mediocrity.

It is important to realize the purpose of most his writing was in service to the Monastery as well as to his Lord. Merton has said that he believed business could be a valid spiritual path and so he must have felt it consistent and in the greater good that he keep writing, even if each were not exactly masterpieces. He suffered tremendous writers block in the fifties, and suffered spritually as well from that difficulty.

His poetry can provide great spiritual depth, and often is quite beautiful. Spiritual and sensual beauty are important in his literary style, both prose and poetry. Much of his aesthetic was influenced from the Medeival Catholocism he absorbed while in southern France. He has a great strain of Marian poetry, as well as some that is quite humanly sensual.

Political Activist

Merton never commented on the impact of St. Augustine on his work, nor on the similarity of his autobiography. This may have been related to his objection to Augustine's notion of right intention that was expressed inThe Seeds of Destruction. Merton was very much in the sixties world of action, and "right -intention" could become rationalization. He suggested that Christians should get rid of "Augustinian assumptions and take a new view of man, of society, and of war itself." Merton was clear that this was theologically sound, and a core teaching of Pacem in Terris.

Merton stated a number of mistaken or exaggerated politcal judgments. During the fifties he accepted a theory of the moral equivalence of the United States and the Soviet Union. He wrote that the United States could host the possible emergence of a Nazi-like racial regime in the United States. This was from his observations of government action in the Vietnam War and domestically in the various civil rights struggles.

Merton put a ban on publishing much of his work until 25 years after his death. After that time most his diaries and correspondence were published. Some of these were made into compilations such as "The Asian Journals." These post-humorously published works also reveal more intense focus on social justice issues, including the civil rights movement and proliferation of nuclear arms. Of course, it must be understood that Merton was working issues out, and these were not the final drafts of the author and so must be taken with some reservations.

Comtemplative

Thomas Merton, or Father Louis as his monastic name, was cloistered at Gethsemani for 27 years. He took vows of chastity, poverty and silence with exception of praise to God and to his superior with permission. Th chronicle of this difficult, painful journey inward was a great legacy that would bore the fruit of joy. He wrote, "The only true joy is to escape from the prison of our own selfhood... and enter by love into union with the life who dwells and sings within the essence of every creature and in the core of our minds."

to some later speculations on the part of his son about the relationship to suffering and spiritual development.

Legacy

A series of books on mysticism ?Aldous Huxley뭩 Perennial Philosophy, Alan Watts?Behold the Spirit and so on, were appearing around that time, and also doing quite well. What they suggest is that people were desperately looking for something different from the contemporary world, and understandably so, when you consider the terrible Great Depression, the horrors of World War II, the anxiety that people felt over the apparent triumph of Communism in much of Europe, the fact that although the war had ended, the world hardly seemed secure with the atomic bomb as a new player on the world scene, all of this created a kind of feeling that the modern world as we had understood it, had somehow really gotten out of control.

Opinion polls of young people around that time show that often the majority of young people did not expect to live a normal, full life, they were convinced that they would die in war, atomic holocaust or something like that.

So it was a time when the modern world seemed to have little appeal. In the midst of this I think the appeal was not so much to some future vision, because the future seemed pretty bleak indeed to those who thought about it, but rather looking back at the past. Was there a civilisation in the past that seemed to work better? And were there institutions in the world that preserved the values of that past, despite everything the world had been through. And in this context I think the Roman Catholic church and its vision, however idealised it may

It is also important to note that his limited theological training gave him fresh eyes to view the world from his contemplative perspective, but also probably failed to give him adequate framework to really solve his own spiritual dilemas. However, he was a pioneer in a field few had worked before, and much is owed to him in that respect.

Chronicled his religious experiences ecstatic

He argued that he needed this in order to effectively pray for those outside. He regarded these battles as a representation of his own battles between flesh and faith, individuality and community. His deep and sincere desire to work out the joyful response to these issues is precisely what gained him such fame, as the era itself suffered such questions and desperately needed to find some answers.

Dalai Lama commented that he didn't know of any other Christian who understood Bhudism so well.

Merton was a man of immense and diverse talent, but was also preeminently humble and dedicated to the service of his Lord and to all humankind as his brothers. It seemed to him proper then, that his brothers that shared his monastic life were mostly unaware of his enormous impact on the world outside the cloister. Merton himself often wondered if it was the business of a monk to be concerned with things like the Atom Bomb.

This ability of him to be transparent to us in his struggles of faith is precisely what the world was hungering for, and what created the need of many readers to hear more from him. His struggles were as their own, he was very human and yet could taste the joy of the Divine and thus give hope to the rest of us that we could, too.

In recognition of his close association with Bellarmine University, the official repository for Merton's archives is 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, USA.

Since his death, his influence has continued to grow and he is considered by many to be an important twentieth century Catholic mystic and thinker. .

Selected bibliography

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

  • Forest, Jim, "Living With Wisdom" (ISBN 088344755X) A profusely illustrated biography of Thomas Merton.
  • Mott, Michael, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (ISBN 015680681) A comprehensive biography.
  • Shannon, William H., Christine M. Bochen, Patrick F. O'Connell The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia (ISBN 1570754268) published by Orbis Books


External links


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