IN OCTOBER 1968, the renowned Trappist monk and spiritual writer Thomas Merton set out for Asia on what would be his final pilgrimage, desiring “to drink from [the] ancient sources of monastic vision and experience.” From his monastery in Kentucky, he had long dreamed of meeting with Buddhist teachers face to face, close to the sources of Eastern mysticism, and fulfilling what he believed to be the vocation of every Christian: to be an instrument of unity.
Three times during his journey Merton met with the young Dalai Lama, who would later say, “This was the first time that I had been struck by such a feeling of spirituality in anyone who professed Christianity. ... It was Merton who introduced me to the real meaning of the word ‘Christian.’”
After Merton’s sudden death in Bangkok on Dec. 10, 1968—the result of an accidental electrocution—his body was returned to the U.S. in a military transport plane that carried the bodies of soldiers killed in Vietnam, a war he had condemned forcefully. His body was laid in the earth on a hillside behind the monastery, overlooking the Kentucky woods where he lived as a hermit the last years of his life. Pilgrims from all over the world continue to visit the Abbey of Gethsemani and pray before the simple white cross that marks Merton’s grave. Why? One hundred years after his birth, the question is well worth asking. What particular magic draws seekers of every generation and of such remarkably diverse backgrounds to Thomas Merton?
SON OF A CENTURY
Merton’s appeal to postmodern sensibilities may be explained in part by his own renaissance background. Born in France in 1915 to an American mother and a New Zealand father, itinerant artists who had met in Paris, Merton spent much of his youth traveling between Europe and America. By the time he was 16, both of his parents were dead. He enrolled at Cambridge, but his raucous behavior there quickly prompted his godfather to send Merton back to the U.S., where he enrolled at Columbia University and soon thrived among an avant-garde group of friends.
More and more he found himself drawn to Catholic authors, devouring works by William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Joyce, and Jacques Maritain. As he later described this period, something deep “began to stir within me ... began to push me, to prompt me ... like a voice.” To the shock of his friends, Merton announced his desire to become a Roman Catholic and was baptized on Nov. 16, 1938, in New York. Two years later Merton began teaching English at St. Bonaventure. After spending Holy Week of 1941 on retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani in the hills of rural western Kentucky, Merton decided to become a Trappist monk, part of a Catholic religious order of cloistered contemplatives who follow the 1,500-year-old Rule of St. Benedict.
It was the publication in 1948 of his autobiography,The Seven Storey Mountain, set against the shadow of World War II, that established Merton as a “famous” monk and a wholly unexpected literary phenomenon. In addition to publishing spiritual meditations, journals, and poetry, during the 1960s he published penetrating essays in both religious and secular venues on the most explosive social issues of the day, the religions of the East, monastic and church reform, and questions of belief and atheism.
As a model for Christian holiness, Merton was far from perfect. In fact he took pains to distance himself from his early, more pious writings, and insisted on his right not to be turned into a myth for Catholic school children. He was a restless monk, and often chafed against his vows of stability and obedience. In 1966, during a hospital stay in Louisville, Ky., he fell in love with a young student nurse, and for some six months they had a kind of clandestine affair. With considerable anguish Merton finally broke it off, though the relationship was clearly transformative, reshaping his understanding and experience of God. Indeed, what emerges from the broad tapestry of Merton’s life is a beautifully human journey before God, an embodied spirituality that is both mystical and prophetic, offering a rare model for reconciling two strands in the Christian tradition still commonly assumed to be opposed and even mutually exclusive.
EVERYWHERE HAUNTED BY GOD
Perhaps the simplest and most direct explanation of Merton’s enduring appeal can be borrowed from a description of St. Benedict, his monastic forebear: “He was a God-oriented man leading like-minded people on the way of the gospel.” As Emeritus Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams writes, “The great Christian is the man or woman who can make me more interested in God than in him or her.” Merton is a great Christian, suggests Williams, because he “will not let me look at him for long: he will, finally, persuade me to look in the direction he is looking,” toward a world and a diverse human family everywhere haunted by God. To be “bitten by Merton” is to be initiated into a world of revelation, heightened expectation, and Presence. In a world crippled by violence, made weary and despairing by “the politics of the self-enclosed world,” this is no small gift.
Everywhere his writings are suffused with an eschatological sensibility—from eschaton, or the “last things”—that fertile paradox in Christian life between our pilgrimage in history now, on this side of death, and our hope for an all-embracing fulfillment yet to come. Among Merton’s most celebrated passages, it would be hard to find a single one that did not reflect that tensive insertion in the boundary between present and future. One of the most luminous passages in Merton’s corpus is the oft-cited “epiphany” in Louisville, Ky., on March 18, 1958: “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,” Merton wrote. “This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud.”
Up to this point Merton had viewed his vocation as a “flight from the world,” setting him apart in a kind of separate, holy existence from the masses of humanity. Here he was discovering the lightning flash of God in the stranger, the worldly “other,” once alien and even threatening to his monastic vocation. The key to this epiphany of human life as the life story of God, as Merton discovered, is love, the highest expression of spirituality and freedom. Love “is the work not of states, not of organizations, not of institutions, but of persons.”
HELP ALONG THE WAY
For many U.S. Catholics of the pre-Vatican II era, it was The Seven Storey Mountain that marked a pivotal signpost or even a major turning point in their life journeys. For many more, in both the Catholic and Protestant communities, it was Merton’s witness to ecumenical and interfaith dialogue during the 1950s and 1960s, well ahead of the ecumenical movement harbingered by Vatican II.
Jesuit Father Daniel Berrigan remembers Merton’s critical role as “pastor to the peace movement” in those difficult years. “It was a long, hard road, and we needed help along the way, and he gave it. He was very important to all of us.” That sentiment may be truer today than it was five decades ago. Merton’s Peace in the Post-Christian Era, published posthumously in 2004, but censored by his Trappist superiors in 1962 at the height of the Cold War, remains a tour de force of prophecy fired with mysticism, a field manual by which the church today might gauge the adequacy of its own response to a world engineered for war.
The same can be said of Merton’s writings on race. An elderly African-American woman and former nun in my parish told me that Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander was her “bible” during the 1960s, when she was an activist for racial justice and felt alienated by her religious community. “Merton got it,” she said to me, with pained remembrance on her face, “when few others did.” As a cloistered monk living in a monastery in rural Kentucky, Merton was about as distant geographically from the race crisis in urban America as one could be. But Merton’s deep sensitivity to the situation of African Americans during the 1960s was rooted not in geographical proximity so much as basic human empathy, a radical openness to the life-worlds of others. “Most of us,” he wrote in 1964, “are congenitally unable to think black, and yet that is precisely what we must do before we can hope to understand the crisis in which we find ourselves.”
What would it mean for whites in America today to “think black”? Fifty years ago, the face of racial animosity was epitomized in openly racist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and in men like Bull Connor, the bigoted public safety commissioner of Birmingham, Ala. Then it was quite clear what racial hatred meant: It meant to will the nonexistence of black people, to seek their erasure. Merton’s poem “And the Children of Birmingham” is a powerful lament for this kind of race hatred; so also his “Picture of a Black Child with a White Doll,” an elegy for Denise McNair, one of the four children killed in the Birmingham church bombing.
Today racial animosity manifests much more subtly, though its effects are no less oppressive or potentially violent. In the decades since the civil rights movement, racism’s implicit strategy has not been the erasure of the feared and marginal other (i.e. young black men) so much as their eclipse from meaningful participation in society. To eclipse is to ignore, to refuse to deal with a person as a person, as a child of God who matters. To eclipse is to blot out the light.
In his 1961 “Letter to a White Liberal,” Merton confronted his readers with a very basic question: “How, then, do we treat this other Christ, this person, who happens to be black?” Of course in doing so he angered a great many of his white Christian readers. Yet he chose to speak, knowing he was wading into dangerous waters. “I ought to learn to just shut up and go about my business of thinking and breathing under trees,” he wrote in 1967. “But protest is a biological necessity.”
THE HIDDEN GROUND OF LOVE
One would be hard- pressed to name a 20th-century Christian who sought after the vocation to unity and peace more tenaciously, publicly, and prophetically than Merton.
Is it misguided, finally, to suggest that the contours of a single person’s life may serve as a trustworthy window into the life story of God? Not the least. The lives of the prophets, mystics, and saints reveal that this has always been the case. “Contrary to what has been thought in recent centuries in the West,” Merton writes, “the spiritual or interior life is not an exclusively private affair. ... The spiritual life of one person is simply the life of all manifesting itself in him.” This beautiful—and often terrible—insight holds for the prophets and saints just as it holds for all of us. And yet in Merton, life, spirituality, and theology seem to spark and ignite with disarming intensity. One need not resort to hagiography to celebrate such a witness to the possibilities of Presence, the hidden ground of Love, who hides in all things.
“Like each of us, Merton was flawed,” poet Susan McCaslin observes. But what matters “is the constant evolution of both his life and his work—the always surging, expanding presence. The way he makes a gift of his own fragility gives us hope that each of us, with our own finitudes, flaws, and failures, may also touch holy ground. He’s not removed from us, but a brother.”
One hundred years after his birth and almost 50 years after his death, Merton still walks beside us as a brother. Merton was a friend of God who has led innumerable pilgrims on the way of the gospel. Perhaps he will accompany still another generation in the same way.
CORRECTION: In our January 2015 issue, we misidentified the nationality of Thomas Merton’s father and godfather. Both were from New Zealand.
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