Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton (January 31, 1915 – December 10, 1968) was an American Trappist monk, poet, and author, incorporating mystic vision with social action. A prolific writer, he was recognized as the greatest monastic figure of the twentieth century. His autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain, was a literary sensation and catapulted him to celebrity status. He remained true to the vows of his order, despite personal struggles which made him a symbol for humanity's search for meaning in the modern world.

Life

Thomas Merton was born in Prades in the Pyrénées-Orientales département of France to Bohemian artists. His mother, Ruth Calver Jenkins, was born to a wealthy Long Island American Quaker family and Owen Merton, his father, was an artist and musician from Christchurch, New Zealand. 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, since his father was a wanderer by nature and an artist by trade. Owen became the boy's source of religious and aesthetic development. His study of Chinese painters no doubt influenced Thomas to naturally look eastward as a source of further inspiration. At times, the two of them hiked nature trails and the boy's mystic sense of oneness with nature grew. It was difficult, however, for the wandering spirit in Owen to really take care of his son, so Thomas spent his childhood between his father, grandparents, an aunt and uncle, and at boarding school.

Owen Merton 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 Lycée in southern France, absorbing the medieval Catholicism of the region when Owen told them to pack up and move to England. Thomas was overjoyed. In England, he attended the Oakham School.

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

Being accustomed to traveling, after several months Thomas took trips to Rome, to St. Bonaventure in New York, and to Cuba. He received a small scholarship to Cambridge University, so under the direction of a guardian, Tom Bennet, he lived in England once again. He led a boisterous life that was no better or worse than most undergraduates. However, he fathered an illegitimate child with a lower class girl at that 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. There, he became acquainted with a group of artists and writers who remained his friends for life. They included Mark Van Doren, the poet Robert Lax, the publisher James Laughlin, and philosopher Jacques Maritain. At Columbia, he wrote for undergraduate publications and played sports. This was a much happier time.

When both grandparents died within a few months of each other, Merton was devastated. He turned to Catholicism. Enthralled by the mystic poets William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and St. John of the Cross, he did his senior thesis on 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, introduced Merton to a Hindu monk, Bramachari. This monk gave Merton one piece of advice: "There are many beautiful mystical books written by the Christians. You should read Saint 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 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, known as the "foreign legion" of the Catholic Church, being founded in 1848, by French monks fleeing persecution in France, was especially attractive to Merton. On 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." Finally, he was accepted as a postulant to the choir (with the intention of becoming a priest) at Gethsemani on December 13, 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 1948, at 32 years of age, he wrote the religious autobiography of the century in The Seven Story Mountain. This overwhelming success changed the monk, bound to a vow of silence, into a world-wide celebrity overnight. He was receiving visits at the Gethsemani Abbey from people such as Boris Pasternak, James Baldwin, Erich Fromm, and Joan Baez. Many of the monks, however, 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 dialogue with other faiths, and his stand on non-violence during the race riots and Vietnam War of the 1960s. In 1965, he finally achieved the solitude he had long desired in a hermitage.

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, although 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, Thailand, at a cross-faith conference on contemplation when his life was cut short. He died on December 10, 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.

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 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 other 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.

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 with the greater good that he keep writing, even if each was not exactly a masterpiece.

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 can be viewed as rash regarding specific incidents and times, and profound when viewed as a personal guide to balancing faith and action.

His poetry contains 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 sense was influenced by his father as well as the Medieval Catholicism he absorbed while in southern France. He has a great strain of Marian poetry, as well as some that is quite physically sensual.

A famous example of his poetry is as follows:

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 understand myself.

And the fact that I think I am following

Your will does not mean I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you

Does in fact please you.

And I hope I have the 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 will I 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 troubles alone.

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 is humanity exiled from God, it is also exiled from its 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.

In The Inner Experience Merton succeeded 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 an ability to integrate such seemingly diverse materials, leading some to view The Inner Experience as his best work.

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 individuality.

Political activist

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

In the 1960s, 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 puzzle to Merton how the church could be so adamant about contraception and the destruction of one life, when it was so silent about things like the nuclear bomb, which 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 American civil rights movement. He called it "certainly the greatest example of Christian faith in action in the social history of the United States."

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 racist regime in the United States. He obtained 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."

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 Saint Augustine's relationship to his work, probably because of his objection to Augustine's notion of right intention, expressed in The Seeds of Destruction. Merton was very much in the sixties world of action, and "right-intention" could become rationalization. He suggested that Christians should rid themselves of "Augustinian assumptions and take a new view of man, of society, and of war itself." Merton was clear in his mind 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 the exception of praise to God and to his superior with permission. The chronicle of this difficult, painful journey inward 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. The Dalai Lama commented that he knew of no other Christian who understood Buddhism so well. He enjoyed much communication with D.T. Suzuki, the renowned expert on Zen Buddhism, asking him to write the introduction to the translation of his auto-biography in Japanese, but was prevented by his censors from doing that. In spite of these and other difficulties, Merton remained faithful to his discipline.

Legacy

In a world just recovering from World War II and the Great Depression, where Communism seemed to triumph and the atomic bomb seemed ready to destroy the world, hope came from an unlikely source—a contemplative monk from a Medieval tradition bearing seeds of hope. Merton's natural spirituality and report of joyous religious experiences helped all regain credence in a spiritual approach to life. His reports of ecstatic religious experience gave a generation soaked in alternative consciousness induced by drugs another way.

Perhaps Merton's true greatness was his ability to be transparent in his struggles of faith. This has acted as a catalyst for others to engage in the spiritual path, having the courage to face struggles. Merton's struggles were universal. He was very human and yet tasted the joy of the divine, thus giving 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 Buddhist statues in Sri Lanka. Near the end of his life, he is reported to have said that the goal of his life was to become a good Buddhist.

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 garde. In these things, he also taught one to think, not only with his intellect but with his heart, spiritual understanding, and relationship with God.

In 1967, one year before his death, Merton established the Merton Legacy Trust, naming Bellarmine College as the repository of his manuscripts, letters, journals, tapes, drawings, photographs, and memorabilia. Since 1972, The Thomas Merton Award, a peace prize, has been awarded by the Thomas Merton Center for Peace and Social Justice in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Selected bibliography

• A Man in the Divided Sea, 1946
• The Seven Storey Mountain, 1948
• Waters of Siloe, 1949
• Seeds of Contemplation, 1949
• The Ascent to Truth, 1951
• Bread in the Wilderness, 1953
• The Last of the Fathers, 1954
• No Man is an Island, 1955
• The Living Bread, 1956
• The Silent Life, 1957
• Thoughts in Solitude, 1958
• The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton, 1959
• Disputed Questions, 1960
• The Behavior of Titans, 1961
• The New Man, 1961
• New Seeds of Contemplation, 1962
• Emblems of a Season of Fury, 1963
• Life and Holiness, 1963
• Seeds of Destruction, 1965
• Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 1966
• Raids on the Unspeakable, 1966
• Mystics and Zen Masters, 1967
• Cables to the Ace, 1968
• Faith and Violence, 1968
• Zen and the Birds of Appetite, 1968
• My Argument with the Gestapo, 1969
• The Climate of Monastic Prayer, 1969
• The Way of Chuang Tzu, 1969
• Contemplation in a World of Action, 1971
• The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, 1973
• Alaskan Journal of Thomas Merton, 1988
• The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals, 1999
• Peace in the Post-Christian Era, 2004
• The Merton Annual, Fons Vitae Press
• Merton and Hesychasm-The Prayer of the Heart, Fons Vitae
• Merton and Sufism: The Untold Story, Fons Vitae Press
• Merton and Judaism - Holiness in Words, Fons Vitae Press
• Cold War Letters, 2006. Orbis Books
• Signs of Peace: The Interfaith Letters of Thomas Merton by William Apel, 2006. Orbis Books

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Forest, Jim. 1991. Living With Wisdom: A Life of Thomas Merton. Orbis Books. ISBN 088344755X
• Mott, Michael. 1993. The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton. Harvest Books. ISBN 0156806819
• Shannon, William H., Christine M. Bochen, and Patrick F. O'Connell. 2006. The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia. Orbis Books. ISBN 1570754268

External links

• The Abbey of Gethsemani Home Page. Retrieved May 7, 2008.
• Thomas Merton in Auschwitz—Poetry about Merton. Retrieved May 7, 2008.
• Thomas Merton Center and International Thomas Merton Society. Retrieved May 7, 2008.
• Thomas Merton Center for Peace and Justice—Pittsburgh, PA. Retrieved May 7, 2008.
• Thomas Merton Foundation. Retrieved May 7, 2008.
• Thomas Merton in Auschwitz—Poetry about Merton. Retrieved May 7, 2008.
• Thomas Merton Series—Books and Resources. Retrieved May 7, 2008.
• The Thomas Merton We Knew—biographical essay by Jim Wright. Retrieved May 7, 2008.

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