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, Ruth Calver Jenkins, 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. A second son, John Paul, was born. Ruth died when Thomas was six years old.

Thomas was educated in the United States, Bermuda and [[France] as Thomas' father was a wanderer by nature and an artist by temperament. Owen became the boy's source of religious and aesthetic development. His study of Chinese painters no doubt influenced Thomas to later look eastward naturally as a source of further inspiration. 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. Owen met the American writer, Evelyn Scott in Bermuda in 1922, and lived with her until 1925. She incorporated him into several characters in her books. 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 athletics 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.

Being 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, Jacques Maritain 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 Catholicism. 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 illegitimate child. He taught at St. Bonaventure's College, in Olean, New York and then came to know of the Abbey of Gethsemane 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 persecution 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. Merton 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 Gethsemane 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. He was receiving visits at the Gethsemane Abbey from people like Boris Pasternak, James Baldwin, Erich Fromm and Joan Baez. Interestingly enough, many monks remained unaware of his impact on the world.

In the fifties, he suffered tremendous writers block. In his emergence, he changed from a passionately inward-looking young monk to a contemplative writer and poet known for dialog 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 Abbot James Fox, about not being allowed out of the monastery. Dom Fox is remembered as an intelligent and kind man, and it was not always Merton who showed the best example.

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

In the mid sixties, while at a Louisville 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 contemplated 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.

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 Gethsemane 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

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." It is very important to realize that these were works in process, and reflect that process rather than final resolutions.

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 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.

Merton felt he grew beyond the person who wrote his autobiography, but also felt that it ceased to belong to him and he could not change it. His political writing is both rash when viewed regarding specific incidents and times, and profound when viewed as a personal guide to balancing faith and action.

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 by his father and from the Medieval Catholicism he absorbed while in southern France. He has a great strain of Marian poetry, as well as some that is quite humanly sensual.

In the unpublished work entitled The Inner Experience, Merton expressed that the highest mysticism is quite simple: one must first journey to the soul's center and then move beyond self to God. Not only are we exiled from God, we are also exiled from our inmost selves! The Way to contemplation is still the Way to reality but that reality consists in human wholeness restored to the image of God. Merton succeeded in The Inner Experience in synthesizing the Scriptures, the Fathers of the Church, the Rhenish, English, and Spanish mystics with modern psychology and existential philosophy. Few have had such ability to integrate such seemingly diverse materials. Some view The Inner Experience as his best work.1

Merton's Zen Buddhist and Eastern thought is passionately integrated with Christian theology. This is because Merton's focus of the "experience" was not simply within the individual self, but in unifying Christ further "within" this indiviuality.

Political Activist

Probably because of advise and criticism from his order, the intensity of his feelings on political events are revealed mostly in post-humorous publications. The moderation and thoughtfulness he showed in his spiritual writings,however, rarely appears in his social commentary.

In the 1960's he was angry about the political and economic milieu and was forceful and somewhat rash in his commentaries. When Pope John XXIII wrote the encyclical, Pacem in Terris, Merton gained hope that there was a place within his calling to speak politically with passion. It was always a puzzlement to Merton how the church could be so adament about contraception and the destruction of one life, when it was so silent about things like the nuclear bomb that could destroy many lives.

Merton had worked in Harlem when young, and was interested in Jazz. It was natural that he became a strong supporter of the nonviolent civil rights movement. He called it "certainly the greatest example of Christian faith in action in the social history of the United States."2

Merton stated a number of mistaken or exaggerated political judgments. During the fifties he had accepted a theory of the moral equivalence of the United States and the Soviet Union. He also wrote that the United States could host the possible emergence of a Nazi-like racial regime in the United States. He got this view from observations of government action in the Vietnam War and domestically in the various civil rights struggles. When his friends Daniel and Philip Berrigan were convicted in Federal court, he exploded, "This is a totalitarian society in which freedom is pure illusion."3

However, Merton also saw serious contradictions within the "peace" movement. He rebuked those who claimed to be pacifist yet advocated armed revolution in the Third World. In 1965, as the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations were beginning to peak, a young member of the Catholic Peace Fellowship burned himself alive, causing Merton to observe that both the country and the peace movement had an air of absurdity and frenzy.

Merton never commented on St. Augustine's relationship to his work, probably because of 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.

Contemplative

Thomas Merton, or Father Louis by his monastic name, was cloistered at Gethsemane for 27 years. He took vows of chastity, poverty and silence with exception of praise to God and to his superior with permission. The chronicle of this difficult, painful journey inward was 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."

Merton's works helped a modern world re-work concepts of Contemplation in a World of Action, also the title of one of his good works. Merton was well rounded but not well educated in theological issues, and he was more strictly a popular writer than a theological one. All his works come from the intensely personal view of contemplation and all deal with the question, "how do I respond?" Perhaps this drove his enormous popularity and helped him gain such a useful and different perspective on secular issues.

He pioneered the inter-faith view of monasticism, contemplation and religious experience. Dalai Lama commented that he didn't know of any other Christian who understood Buddhism so well. He enjoyed much communication with D. T. Suzuki, the renowned expert on Zen Budhism, to write the introduction to the translation of his auto-biography into Japanese, but was prevented by his censors from doing that. In spite of these difficulties, Merton remained faithful to his discipline.

Legacy

In a world just recovering from World War I and the Great Depression, whereCommunism seemed to triumph and the Atom Bomb seemed ready to destroy the world, hope came from an unlikely source. The thought of a contemplative monk from a Medieval tradition bearing seeds of hope was just the crazy thing the world hungered for at that time. 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.

His natural spirituality and report of joyous religious experiences helped all re-gain credibility for a spiritual approach to life. His reports of ecstatic religious experience gave a generation soaked in alternative consciousness induced by drugs another way.

Perhaps his true greatness was in the ability Thomas Merton had in being transparent to us in his struggles of faith has acted as the catalyst for others to engage in the spiritual path as well, and to have the courage to struggle. Merton's struggles were as our own, he was very human and yet tasting the joy of the Divine give hope that this path was available for all.

He also was a pioneer in the inter-faith vision of God. He had ecstatic states of realization when viewing Bhudist statues in Sri Lanka/Ceylon, and near the end of his life said to someone that the goal of his life was to become a good Buudhist. Some claimed he was headed for a syncretism, and was journeying away from Christianity. Being a man of many contrasts, he has left many questions.

He was never in a politically correct "box." Though part of the anti-war movement, he was also highly critical of it. He held positions that were liberal and conservative, traditional and avant guard. In these things, he also taught us to think, not only with our intellect but with our heart and spiritual understanding and relationship with God.

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.

Footnotes

1 http://www.spiritualitytoday.org/spir2day/894123mates.html

2 http://www.merton.org/chrono.htm

3 http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9702/articles/revessay.html

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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