Mystic Monday: Thomas Merton (1915-1968)
“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.”
During one of my admissions interviews for seminary, I spent a portion of an afternoon with a very pleasant history professor in his fantastic townhouse apartment, which was one of the benefits of being a faculty member at the original General Theological Seminary.
By a very high window in his living room, we spoke of the pilgrimage to Holy Orders in the Episcopal Church. Even though he was stuck with interviewing me, as it was summer and most of the other faculty were gone, he was game for it and asked good questions and offered sound advice.
One of those questions was, "So, what theologians do you read?"
Now, I was a 25-year-old high school teacher from Ohio who had just gotten through the labyrinthine diocesan process one must endure simply to receive permission to apply to a seminary, and at no time during that process did anyone discuss with me any theologian except for St. Paul.
As the history professor and I had already spoken of St. Paul, I did not want to go to that Tarsusian well once more, so a flailed a bit, not knowing who was currently popular and not wanting to admit that I could not name an acceptable theologian to save my life.
In desperation I mentioned that I had read a bit of Thomas Merton that summer and was currently enjoying a biography of him.
"Really?," he brightened. "That book was written here."
"At the seminary?"
"I mean 'here' in this apartment. The author is a friend of mine.”
I imagined I heard the sound of a bat hitting a ball out of a stadium right at that moment, along with the cheers of a crowd, but that may have just been my imagination.
Anyway, even though it was not yet formal, I knew I had just been accepted.
“Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.”1
So, Thomas Merton, the former Anglican turned Roman Catholic monk, the hermit and author, fourteen years after his untimely demise, gave me a marvelous assist into the world that would claim the next forty+ years of my life.
A decade later, wearing a cassock and seated on a stage with a Buddhist monk in his saffron robe, we had an enriching conversation about prayer and contemplation for those gathered. What did the monk and I speak about? Why, Merton, of course. He had read his books, too.2
Thomas Merton was the most prolific of the ascetical theologians of the 20th century. Through his written work, that included some of the most forward-thinking notions about the role of contemplation, prayer, and meditation conceived, he inspired many young people, especially during the post-WWII period, to think more deeply about such things.
Merton’s pilgrimage to the religious life mirrors that of St. Augustine. He had his time of “experimentation,” the quest for meaning in the midst of a great meaninglessness, unfortunate personal choices, the limit situation3, and the inevitable return to God that brought him from the promising life of a Columbia University scholar to a humble abbey in Kentucky.
Merton was born in France to a New Zealander father and an American Quaker mother.4 He was baptized in the Church of England. After a private education, he studied at Cambridge in the UK, where he was miserable, then transferred to Columbia in New York, where he was happy, for the remainder of his formal education.
While in New York, Merton availed himself of the differentiated religious composition of the city, exploring traditions outside of Anglicanism and even outside of Christianity.
He also began to stray from the Anglican/Episcopal Church in his religious practice.5 After reading Augustine’s Confessions, Merton began to explore the Roman Catholic Church. In 1938, while still at Columbia, he would be received into the Church of Rome through the parish church of Corpus Christi, near the university.
While in the doctoral program at Columbia, Merton refined his spiritual discernment, eventually leaving the university and seeking as deep a contemplative tradition as he could. He entered religious life with the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani [also known as The Trappists] near Bardstown, Kentucky.6
We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.7
Even by the standards of mid-century monasticism, the Cistercians were severe. They lived according to the strict Benedictine rule and practiced complete silence in the monastic enclosure. Communication between the monks was done through Trappist sign language with their only vocalizations made while chanting in the chapel or by special permission.
Upon his profession into the novitiate, Merton was given his own short-handled whip for self-flagellation. That is, for whipping oneself about the shoulders in punishment for sin. While a traditional, if peculiar, monastic practice, the Cistercians were the only order to have continued it into the 20th century.
For all its extremes, for the first time in his troubled life, Merton found a sense of peace at the Abbey.
Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial “doubt.” This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious “faith” of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion.8
While initially a field laborer on the abbey’s farm, Merton’s education and writing ability came to the attention of the abbot, who transferred him from the field to the library with the charge to write a collection of biographies of the saints. The abbot also encouraged Merton to write often and to seek a publisher for his poetry.
Gaining confidence as a spiritual writer, in his two daily hours of “personal time,” Merton would write an autobiography entitled The Seven Storey Mountain. With the help of the abbot and the support of some of the other monks, it would be published in 1948 and become a surprise bestseller. The first edition would sell out at 150,000 copies, which is remarkable for what was thought to be a niche subject.
To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that Love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.9
Clearly, in the immediate aftermath of both the Second World War and the reality of the atomic bomb, the general population desired spiritual succor. Church attendance grew during this period, as did the number of volumes in Christian history, theology, and mysticism that were published. The seminaries and divinity schools would enjoy their highest and most competitive enrollment. Christian figures as diverse as Bishop Fulton Sheen and Billy Graham would become household names.
Shortly after Mountain’s publication, Merton concluded his studies for Holy Orders and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest. In recognition of his new status, and to facilitate his writing output10, the community of Gethsemani granted Merton the role of hermit, and with it a small hermitage on the abbey’s property where he could pursue life as a solitary.
From there he produced other works, including New Seeds of Contemplation [1949, revised and updated in 1962] and Zen and the Birds of Appetite [1968], his second and third most popular works after Mountain.
The latter work reflects Merton’s interest in Eastern spirituality and what he understood as the cooperative mysticism that is shared in the monastic traditions of Christianity and Buddhism. This interest, as well as his fame as a spiritual writer, enabled him to meet with Eastern spiritual writers and thinkers, including The Dalai Lama, as he was given license to leave the abbey for long periods in order to travel.
In 1968, while attending an East/West monastic conference outside of Bangkok, Merton would suffer a sudden, fatal coronary.11
Thomas Merton’s legacy remains powerful, his works still in print. Some of his unpublished articles on pacifism and civil and gender rights were recently revealed and created new interest in him, especially among Roman Catholics.
Pope Francis has been known to quote from Merton in his sermons and speeches, including just a few years ago when The Bishop of Rome12 addressed the U.S. Congress. I also noticed that just last year, Columbia University, in association with Corpus Christi Church, the nearby parish where Merton was baptized, opened The Thomas Merton Institute for Catholic Life as part of their campus ministry program.
There are a number of schools, libraries, and other academic facilities throughout Catholicism that bear his name, as well.
There is not a flower that opens, not a seed that falls into the ground, and not an ear of wheat that nods on the end of its stalk in the wind that does not preach and proclaim the greatness and the mercy of God to the whole world. There is not an act of kindness or generosity, not an act of sacrifice done, or a word of peace and gentleness spoken, not a child's prayer uttered, that does not sing hymns to God before his throne, and in the eyes of men, and before their faces.13
A current bibliography of Merton’s still-in-print books may be found here.
from The Seven Storey Mountain
There is considerable cross-religious communication between monastic communities in the East and West, and has been since the late 19th century. By virtue of my status as an SSB oblate, I have been able to visit and study at Buddhist monasteries in Singapore, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, a Hindu monastery in India, and the Grand Mosque in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, in addition to Christian communities in the U.S. and Europe.
As described in Old Lady Dixon, Augustinian Existentialist
Again, the influence of the Quakers on American mysticism is remarkable.
An apocryphal story that has been passed through generations of NYC-based Episcopal clergy is that Merton had asked his Episcopal priest about religious vocations in our tradition and was met with the response, “We don’t have any.” While plausible, as even some Episcopal clergy are grossly ignorant of our mystic tradition, I have never found any verification for the story.
Critics of Merton observe that he entered monastic life just days after the attack on Pearl Harbor and that may have had something to do with his timing. However, he was a lifelong pacifist, so that would be consistent.
from Thoughts in Solitude [1956]
from New Seeds of Contemplation [1962]
Ibid.
As a monk under the vow of poverty, all of his earnings belonged to the abbey, so they had a vested interest in his success. I should mention that the abbot who granted Merton the status of hermit was a graduate of Harvard Business School.
Although for many years the story was that he had been electrocuted by a faulty electric fan, that was disproven as was the story that he was assassinated by the CIA because he opposed the war in Vietnam.
Episcopalians and other Anglicans, because of our history as renegade former Roman Catholics, do not recognize papal authority, but out of respect refer to him by this more precise title.
from The Seven Storey Mountain
This is stupid, but I had the idea that the Trappists made jam. Or wine.
What a crazy journey Merton went on! I do wonder what sort of sins a secluded mute monk would have that would warrent self-flagellation...Seems extreme! :P But it sounds that his journey lead him to find what he was looking for in a lovely hybrid practice.