Thomas Merton: A Man for All Seasons

January 31 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Merton; while he may or may not be familiar to many of you, he was arguably the best-known American Catholic author of the 20th century (Dorothy Day is the only other person I think even comes close). While there are a lot of commemorations floating around among Catholic (and other) publications whose readership skews much older than the undergraduate age range, I would argue that he remains a strikingly relevant companion for young adults who are working to make sense of their spiritual lives and the part they will play in the world.

Thomas Merton was born January 31, 1915 in Prades, France to artist parents and spent a wandering childhood between France, New York, and Bermuda. His parents had both died before his 16th birthday, leaving him adrift spiritually as much as he had been geographically. Young Merton grew into a sophisticated and literary but somewhat aimless life, including a disastrous year at Cambridge University which concluded after he fathered a child and was summoned to New York by his guardian. Transferring to Columbia University in New York City, Merton surrounded himself with friends and mentors who gradually awakened his latent desire for maturity and peace, culminating in his 1939 conversion to Catholicism and his 1941 entrance to the Abbey of Gethsemane in the woods of Kentucky, a house of the austere Trappist order. His 1948 autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, became an overnight bestseller and remains a spiritual classic; nearly seventy years after its initial publication, it has never been out of print. While his early years in the monastery were marked by a rather world-denying split of the sacred life of monasticism from the worldly secular realm, he grew to realize that monastic life could not be about escape from the world as bad, but as critical distance to speak to the world as fallen and loved.

From his previous identity as a gifted but fairly pious and conventional Catholic author, his “second conversion” back to the world opened Merton to a new sense of dialogue with the world he had left behind nearly twenty years before. Nothing was out of reach: art, music, poetry, literature, religion, philosophy and more. Despite almost never leaving his monastery, he befriended and corresponded with some of the most significant figures of his generation, from Dorothy Day and the Dalai Lama to Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan to Martin Luther King Jr. and Pope Paul VI. From the atrocities of World War II, he gained fresh insight into the need to speak out against the same violent and dehumanizing mentality that made new terrors possible in his time: racism, the Cold War, the Vietnam conflict and more. At a time when monks were expected to remain in silent prayer, he spoke out against the seemingly imminent threat of nuclear warfare, writing essay after essay about the madness of an allegedly Christian nation manufacturing both weapons of mass destruction and the arguments that dared to legitimate their use. In the early 1960s his order silenced him from writing about nuclear war as a topic “unbecoming” of a monk; it was only after Pope Paul VI himself turned to writing against nuclear warfare that he was allowed to do so again.

When he died in December 1968 of an accidental electrocution while at a conference in Bangkok, Merton left behind over 60 published books, and at least that many more have been collected from his letters, journals, photographs, poems, drawings and book reviews. What makes him enduringly relevant nearly 50 years after his death is not only how applicable his writings are to the existential struggles and social problems we continue to face (although, that too), but his restless heart, always working to welcome a new perspective, to reach across another aisle to learn from someone else, always wondering what else is out there. In an era of information overload and media saturation, Merton paradoxically holds together the love of silence and solitude with the need to remain in conversation with the world. His best-known prayer remains one of my favorites and is a favorite of millions of people around the world who struggle to know how they will contribute to the reconciliation of the world:

“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 know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that 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 perils alone.”