Introduction
I would love to know what brought you here. What led you to go looking for Thomas Merton? I have my own reasons, which I’ll mention in a minute.
He’s famous, at least as famous as a monk can be. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, is the bestselling autobiographical book written by a monastic since St. Augustine’s Confessions, which first appeared in the fifth century. That’s a 1,500-year gap between bestsellers. Even today, nearly seventy-five years after The Seven Storey Mountain was published, spiritual directors, college professors, campus ministers, vowed religious, and reading groups still actively recommend it. It is a true classic. So is Merton, which can’t honestly be said about many religious figures from the twentieth century.
Not long ago, in 2015, Pope Francis recommended Merton in the first speech a pope ever gave before a joint session of the U.S. Congress. Pope Francis named four Americans that day as exemplary: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton. Merton, the pope said, was “above all a man of prayer, a thinker who challenged the certitudes of his time and opened new horizons for souls and for the church. He was also a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions.” Thousands of people that night, including me, live streaming the speech or watching on television, cheered out loud. I’m not exaggerating. I’ve confirmed this with many friends. Audible cheers were heard outside apartments, condos, and houses throughout the land. How unexpected it was! (More on that later.) At the same time, thousands of others must surely have turned to each other on their couches as the pope mentioned Merton alongside President Lincoln, and said, Who’s that?
Thomas Merton is the one who wrote, “There is in all things an invisible fecundity … a hidden wholeness.” He wrote a lot of things (more on that later, too). But this quote is emblematic of his body of work—and his life. Throughout his life, Merton searched for the elusive wholeness that we all know somehow lurks nearby. This is what we all want for our lives—wholeness, integration, vitality, growth. And the opposites of those things are what we very much don’t want.
It is only by looking to Merton’s books that we begin to discover how much his search for spiritual truth was part of his own journey. He chronicled his experiences. He was a writer because it was by writing that he figured out who he was. For these reasons, the best approach to understanding him is to look at his chronological life, and the books, ideas, people, travels, and encounters that defined who he was at each step along the way. That’s what we will do here.
We all search for that elusive fecundity and wholeness in our own ways, and as a great spiritual writer, Merton consistently described his search in the most compelling of language. That’s what you find in the bestselling books—and we will look at those—and there are many of them. But most of all, this introduction to Merton will be about the search for wholeness itself. I don’t want this to be a place where you simply glean information about a famous twentieth-century Christian. I want you to find help on your own way. That is, in fact, what Merton wanted to do with all his writing: help readers find God and themselves, hopefully on paths that converge.
About the search for wholeness, Merton was always certain. And by the end of his life, he may even have found what he was looking for. We’ll see. You’ll be ready to decide that for yourself before we’re done.
HE CONFUSES A LOT OF PEOPLE
“We are all secrets,” Merton wrote one day in his private journal. In other words, there are limits to how much we can understand ourselves, let alone each other. Particularly, we can’t presume to understand someone else’s religious or spiritual life. What is “on the surface” tells only a fraction of their story.
Another twentieth-century favorite of mine is Edith Stein, the Jewish philosopher who converted to Roman Catholicism, became a Carmelite nun, and then died in a Nazi concentration camp. The Nazis didn’t care if a Jew had converted to another religion. After her tragic death, Stein became a saint in the estimation of the Catholic Church, whereas I’m sure Merton never will receive such an honor. (More on that later.) She’s officially known in the church as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Still, her niece once asked her about her conversion to Catholicism from Judaism, and Edith responded with a Latin phrase: “Secretum meum mihi.” “My secret is mine.”
I think you’ll find that this is very true of Merton, as well, before you’re done reading about his life, writings, and spiritual practices. Our secrets are our own, particularly when it comes to who we are in our relationship with a God who, when communicating with us, if at all, often does so in a whisper.
This is one way of suggesting that we’ll never fully understand our subject. It is also a way of saying that Merton’s willingness to consistently and consciously be on pilgrimage, to talk with us while he’s searching for what he’s looking for, and to acknowledge that the search never stops in this life—that the answers are not often clear or simple—makes him an evergreen teacher of spiritual wisdom.
Popularly understood, he was a contemplative monk who introduced the possibility of a deep religious and spiritual life—something one might imagine exists only in a monastery—as available to anyone, whether they lived in a cloister or a city, were Christian or some other religious tradition, and whether or not they felt certain in their beliefs. His own life was full of contradictions, as we will soon see, and it is these very contradictions that also make him appealing to us still. He seems to have found a real and deep personal connection to the living God, and yet some of his actions reveal how very human he remained. Yet that core understanding—that a monastic sort of life might be available to you wherever you live—remains compelling.
Given that he was a monk, it is a wonder that we even know his name. He entered a strict monastery at the age of twenty-six, saying that he was no longer going to be a writer, that writing was mostly about ego, and that as a monk he was instead going to be a person of asceticism and prayer. If things had gone for him the way they went for 99.9 percent of the monks before him, Merton would have prayed and practiced his penance earnestly and quietly, and then died in blissful obscurity. That’s the way of most cloistered monks.
But before he turned thirty-five, he wrote one of the bestselling autobiographies ever published—the one I mentioned already—titled The Seven Storey Mountain. The first edition of that book, in its original binding and dust jacket, will cost you about $7,500 the last time I checked. It is valuable today as a collector’s item because the publisher did not print many of them. Who knew that such a book would be the bestselling nonfiction book in the United States that year? The original publisher, Harcourt Brace, also got in trouble for one of the captions to one of the photographs on the back cover. It showed a group of monks working in the fields, as Trappist monks in Kentucky once did, and although none of the faces of those monks were visible in the photo, the caption read, “Author is second from the left.” Merton had joined a religious order in which he was supposedly going to go through life with anonymity.
So why did he write an autobiography in the first place? What happened to the life of quiet prayer to which he’d dedicated himself? This is one of the fascinating stories of Merton’s life to be told in the chapters to come. He prayed aplenty, but he also went on to write many, many bestselling books, turning him into a star.
Like many of the great spiritual teachers in every religious tradition, the story of his life is intertwined with his writings. In them, he was always advocating for the spiritual life: encouraging his readers to find and deepen theirs. Dialogue, wonder, paradox, friendship, pilgrimage, and conversation were among his most essential spiritual practices. These teachings are what still draw many seekers to him.
But as I hope to show you, I believe that his chief vocation—which he finally accepted for himself late in life—was as a writer. Writing was how he entered the world. It was how he understood the world and found his place in it. It is also his best way to show others how they may find their own places and paths today, and Merton remains enormously popular among spiritual seekers for this reason. They discover his books in their own quests. They also find their quests echoed in the pages of his books. One such person is Fr. James Martin, SJ, popular Catholic author and former corporate executive turned Jesuit priest. Fr. Martin says:
Thomas Merton’s writings were one of the main reasons I left a job at General Electric and entered the Jesuit order in the late 1980s. A chance encounter with a television documentary on his life led me to track down and read The Seven Storey Mountain. But it was this quote, from No Man Is an Island, that stopped me dead in my tracks as an aspiring corporate executive: “Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?”1
For all these reasons, it is no wonder that many of Merton’s books were autobiographies, memoirs, and personal journals. He discovered spiritual insight in the context of living. He worked on his spiritual practices while exploring the meaning in his life and doings. He couldn’t shake off where he’d come from, and he didn’t want to. He was like the author of the other greatest autobiography in English in the twentieth century, Stephen Spender, who once said: “Autobiography provides the line of continuity in my work. I am not someone who can shed or disclaim his past.”2 For these reasons, the structure of this book follows the basic chronological trajectory of Merton’s life, with occasional flashes forward and flashbacks, and his teachings and practices are woven throughout.
I love his vision—you get a sense of it in every paragraph—and his eyes: what they saw. He never stopped looking. He was ever curious. In his last decade, that looking and curiosity extended to photography and drawing, as well. His gaze moved outward toward others, to the created world, and to inanimate objects like old barns and railroad tracks, captured in black-and-white photographs. Such images—and they’ve been published before (see the “Suggestions for Further Reading” at the back of this book)—were a mirror of what he was seeing inside himself. Similarly, his drawings were usually with a black pen or brush, on clean white paper. He did self-portraits, Zen images, and simple figures. There’s clear joy in them. Early in his conversion, Merton was looking at and writing about things like personal sin, repentance, and turning away from the world. In his final decade, he was looking more often at opportunity, open fields, new and different and more expansive paths, and congruent shapes; one gets the sense that he eventually came to see the inability to see opportunity and change itself as a kind of sin.
That quotation from Merton repeated by James Martin, SJ, is worth repeating: “Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?”3 Merton inspires. He gave his books titles like Zen and the Birds of Appetite and The Wisdom of the Desert. Merton is not your usual Catholic priest, monk, or writer.
I also love his smile and his hands—these things we came to know in the decades following that initial bestselling autobiography in which the publisher was reprimanded for pointing out the author in a blurry photograph. Times changed, and quickly, and within just a few years, the monk-writer who shouldn’t be identified became an international figure.
If he had been a monk of the Middle Ages, we wouldn’t know his smile and his hands, but Merton was very much a man of the second half of the twentieth century, and he was photographed with a variety of other writers, religious figures, and famous people. You can find photos of Merton, for instance, with the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Joan Baez, Wendell Berry, and Daniel Berrigan, SJ.
To see him, you’d think perhaps he was a sculptor or a high school football coach. He was of average height and a sturdy build. He had strong hands. At times, wearing glasses and bent over a book, he appeared to be an intellectual. At other times, the smile on his shining face reflected the playfulness that filled him. That smile and those hands brought him close friendships with people of every religious tradition, every fascinating thinker, every poet, and even local Kentucky farmers who wanted some interesting conversation after the sun went down. To see Merton’s own photographs—because he took many—is to understand more of who he was, and again, that extraordinary vision.
He had written so many books by the time he turned fifty that words began to feel noisy to him. The photography offered another way of speaking, seeing, and gesturing. For him, it was both a new way of “articulating the silence” of his life, and an “antidote to the noisiness of the world.”4
“Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” This, from the Gospel of St. John, chapter 12, is one of the most popular scripture texts read in Catholic funeral liturgies. There are great mysteries in that short verse. One could argue that Thomas Merton embraced it but also that he spent his life overturning it.
WHY ANOTHER BOOK ABOUT HIM?
There are so many books about Merton, so why another?
I can only offer this, by way of explanation: I think that this one does something a little differently, by taking a look at his life, teachings, and practices all together, and in a way that speaks directly to religiously unanchored people living in the twenty-first century.
We will begin with his death, in 1968, and then go back in time to better see his beginnings and who and how he had become. Who Merton was at the end of his life was an evolved spiritual creature unlike the one who stepped into the monastery in Kentucky for the first time twenty-seven years earlier. I don’t think we can know him in a way that’s relevant for our own spiritual seeking and finding the way without starting (rather than ending) with who he was at the end of his life. He had come to a point of understanding love in profound ways, embracing strangers and the unfamiliar with courage and abandon, and discovering truth in the spiritualities of the East in ways that forever changed his own faith tradition.
Another of his famous teachings centered around discovering to differentiate between our “true selves” and our “false selves.” Like most teachers and their teachings, he didn’t invent this one but discovered it in the monastic tradition of which he was a part (called Cistercian; Trappist is a branch of Cistercian). This will come up again later, but in essence, Merton was passionately convinced that every person has a unique version for being like Christ in the world, and we can’t discover this for ourselves without a lot of prayer and help from God, without complete self-honesty, and without undoing all the ways that we’ve learned to hide behind falsity. We find, discover, and become our true selves. We become godly.
If you’ve read anything previously about this unique twentieth-century religious figure, you’ve probably heard that he was important for bringing the spiritual practices and wisdom teachings of the monastery to people on the outside of monastery walls. He gave us access. Merton showed those of us who aren’t monks—and won’t ever be monks—how to be like one. I was moved by that emphasis in understanding Merton’s legacy when I was younger.
WHAT BROUGHT ME HERE
I was only a year old when Merton died. But when I was seventeen and contemplating having to register with selective service as eligible for the draft, I had a feeling that I shouldn’t be willing to kill others, even in a war. I didn’t find people who were friendly to objecting to military service in my church, but someone pointed me to a Mennonite nonprofit nearby, and I met with the director there. It was he who first put a Thomas Merton book in my hands: a collection of Merton’s writings on peace. Then, when I was nineteen, after having devoured The Seven Storey Mountain’s five hundred or so pages in three days of excited reading, I made the first of several visits to Merton’s monastery in Kentucky, pondering a monastic life. Should I? Eventually, I decided no. Instead, I would try to be what is sometimes called a “monk in the world.” I became a disciple of the teachings of those who emphasized the contemplative aspect of the spiritual life.
Today, there are far fewer monks left at the Abbey of Gethsemani than there were when Merton was alive. Hundreds of monks lived there at one time, some sixty or seventy years ago. Today, they are perhaps a few dozen. Organized religious life is on the wane everywhere you look, and monastery populations are no exception. The population of every monastic community has been aging every year for decades. Some monasteries have closed. Others survive only because they have become places of retreat, as people like you and me visit for a weekend or two a year. Also, many monasteries have a large numbers of oblates, or associates—laypeople who commit to living with monastic rhythms and spiritual practices, and financially support the monastery. I suspect that Merton could see that this would one day be the case. (See the start of the next chapter.)
Those of us who visit monasteries on retreat, and who pursue the spiritual practices of someone like Thomas Merton, are indeed among the keepers of the monastic way. We don’t—we can’t—do it like he did. But in many ways, we can be monks, and I hope you find your own way as you read this book.
Not long ago at the Abbey of Gethsemani, I spent an afternoon with one of the monks and a friend at Merton’s old hermitage in the woods. Although there is a right way to see this special place—by permission, without trespassing—it also isn’t uncommon for people to make their way to the hermitage in their own way, and the monks are generally gracious and forgiving about it. In fact, the trespassing has been happening since Merton’s own lifetime; he spent a fair amount of time ducking people in the woods who were trying to find “that famous monk.”
Merton liked to walk in the predawn hours as the mist was rising, observing wrens, cardinals, woodpeckers, and the occasional mockingbird along the way. On this particular morning not long ago, as my two companions and I were walking from the hermitage back to the abbey, I spied a folded single sheet of paper soaking on the grass in the morning dew. I bent down and picked it up.
Someone had printed out a Merton poem and carried it with them, probably to read it while sitting on the hermitage porch the night before. It had fallen out of the pocket, quite recently, of someone who had walked back down the same hill we were walking down. “His God lives in his emptiness like an affliction,” is one of the lines from the poem on that paper soaking in the dew. The poem is titled “When in the Soul of the Serene Disciple.” It was that emptiness, but also the knowing that God was there in it, that moved Merton throughout his life.
I tucked the poem in my pocket as we all walked down the hill in the woods, then crossed the road, toward where the gate used to stand that Merton was so happy had once enclosed him inside, about eighty years before.
Copyright © 2021 by Jon M. Sweeney
