Thomas Merton

Introduction

In the interest of full disclosure I must say that there is no way I can give an unbiased lecture today. So let it be known, I love Thomas Merton. And I am excited to be able to share his writing and thoughts with you today. There is no one I have spoken of this year that I know better and I have had such a long relationship with his work that I feel he is a part of my family. Have you ever had a dream where you interact with someone famous? I even have dreams where he shows up? It is interesting to say the least. I was given Thomas Merton’s autobiography to read, The Seven Story Mountain, when I was 15. But it didn’t take. I guess it was a little over my head. But I tried again when I was 18 and from then on I have been reading him steadily. Since then I have accumulated a small library of books by and about Merton. I have read 94 of his books, some more than once and I have read 51 books about him! And I still have more to go. So I can’t imagine how many hours that is in terms of spending time with someone, but you do start to feel like you know him really well! And so unlike someone I don’t know very well, I have the problem today of trying to figure out what I can talk about when there is so much I could talk about. But first we will start with his life.

Biography

Thomas Merton was born in France in 1915 and he died when he was only 53 in Bangkok in 1968 due to a freak accident while attending a conference. Between 1915 and 1968 he would become what some call the most important spiritual writer of the twentieth century. And his beginnings gave early hints to his love of writing and words, but not to his spirituality. Merton had an interesting and traumatic childhood, moving back and forth between Europe and the United States. Both of his parents were artists. His mother was American and his father was from New Zealand. They met as art students in Paris. Because of World War 1 they moved back to the United States for a while, living in New York. When Merton was 6 his mother died of cancer and from then on he was moved around quite a bit because of his father’s travels as a painter. He was left for long periods in boarding schools in France and England, and he spent time with guardians chosen by his dad and with his maternal grandparents in New York. He was an excellent student and read many advanced books for his age as he grew up. His interest in writing would be one of his life long passions. Even as a child he would write stories and novels and illustrate them himself to share with his younger cousins. And he wrote for all of his school papers, thinking at one time to become a diplomat or a journalist. He had a great facility for languages and could speak and write fluently in French, English, Spanish, and Latin while he could also work in Italian, German and Greek. He also tried to learn Russian, Chinese, and Persian but was never able to give it the proper amount of time. As a poet he worked creatively with words and even worked up a version of his own language in some of his more abstract poems.

When he was 16 he lost his father to cancer. So he was now an orphan. Guardians watched over him while he finished up his education in England and started at Cambridge. During vacations he traveled around Europe quite a bit with a backpack and hitch hiking all over the place. Due to his bohemian background and lack of religious training he was very worldly and not at all interested in religion, although he did find that something in him responded aesthetically to church ruins and the cathedrals and the religious art he was exposed to. But his interests were in modern literature. His year at Cambridge was a disaster scholastically and personally. He took up with the party scene and drank to excess and fathered a child. His guardian was fed up and sent him back to America where he moved in with his grandparents and started university over at Columbia where he was to find his way and get back on track. He never did return to Europe, a place he considered home as much as anywhere. His child and the mother were killed in the Blitz.

His time in New York was as rich and interesting as any biography you might read. It is amazing the amount of reading, classes, writing, and socializing he managed to put into those years. Intellectually he blossomed under the teachers he loved, especially people like Mark Van Doren. He made lifelong friends with several famous people in their own right, including the poet Robert Lax. But as filled as these years were with learning and development Merton felt a growing sense of emptiness, a lack of meaning and purpose in all that he was doing. He tried to fill this emptiness with writing, but that didn’t work. He tried to fill it with politics, but that also didn’t work. He even flirted with the Communist Party. But nothing worked.

Finally, he was drawn to spirituality. But his road there interested me perhaps more than anything else. So many times when you hear of someone converting they would have an emotional experience. But Merton had a philosophical experience. And that is why I fell in love with his path when I was so young. It made sense to me that someone would not just grab at the first thing to offer security, but would actually study and learn about a lot of things and then only gradually be converted to a way of life based on the beauty of ideas studied rather than anything else. And Merton slowly found himself gravitating toward the Catholic Church. He loved medieval philosophy, he loved the Saints and the mystics, and he loved the art and the poetry. In 1938 when he was 23 he was baptized a Roman Catholic in New York City. He finished a Masters in English Literature, started a doctoral program and began to change his career plans and instead of teaching and writing he decided to become a Franciscan priest. He was drawn to pacifism and social work and spent time volunteering working with the poor and downtrodden in Harlem. But just as he was about to be accepted into the Franciscan seminary he was rejected when it became known that he had fathered a child. This rejection sent him into a deep depression and he left New York City to teach at a college in upstate New York. He wasn’t sure what to do now. He tried to live as a religious while still a lay person in that he would fast, say the prayers of the religious orders, attend daily mass and slowly try to learn to give up some of his habits that were, he felt, holding him back from giving himself fully to God. While teaching he made a retreat at the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky during Easter break in the spring of 1941. This was to change everything. He decided right then and there to become a Trappist if they would have him. He entered the monastery on December 10th 1941. He was to die exactly 27 years later on December 10th, 1968.

The Trappists

The Trappists is the common name of a religious order known officially as the Order of Cistercians of the Stricter Observance (OCSO). They are a European order that follows the rule of Saint Benedict. They are and were one of the strictest orders in the Catholic Church and at the time that Merton joined they were something out of medieval times although since then they have made many changes, many of them as a result of Merton’s influence. At the time he joined them they had a strict rile of silence and a lifestyle that was extremely rigid and difficult. They fasted about half the year and arose at 2:00 to start their day of prayer and work. Most of the monks supported themselves by manual labor on the farmlands that were part of the monastery. When Merton joined he was trying to give up everything and he really did think that he was doing so. It is only one of the many ironies of his life that he would become a famous and best selling author and his words would become known by millions around the world. The man given to silence would become quite well known for his many words!

When Merton first joined up he was put to the work of a regular monk and he tried his best to live that life. But it did not take too long before the abbot of the monastery recognized his gifts and put him to work writing. And this was the main thing Merton had tried to give up! The struggle with whether to be a monk or a writer would continue for some years before Merton found peace realizing that he could only become the monk he was supposed to be by being the writer he was supposed to be. And this reconciliation with his own writing gifts would be the clue to many of his other breakthroughs in understanding that his rejection of the world when he entered the monastery was a false solution to a false problem.

Toward an Integrated Life

Probably what I love about Merton so much is that he was always changing, learning and growing. So much so that he was often embarrassed by his earlier writings which he felt to be too conservative and too simplistic in their understanding. And because Merton wrote so much, especially in letters and journals that have now been published, we are able to watch and understand these changes and, I think, use them somewhat as a model for the spiritual journey. Merton, as he progressed in his monastic life, and especially as he worked with other young monks as the novice master for many years, started to see that spirituality was much more organic and natural than he had previously supposed. He started to see that monks bring into the monastery the same problems people outside of monasteries had to deal with and that living in a monastery did not save one form having to deal with the ordinary struggles of being a human being. Merton never lost his love for monasticism. He did feel it was a legitimate way of life for selected people, but he did become one of monasticism’s harshest critics in many ways.

Basically Merton felt that all people are born into a condition, something we might simply call the human condition, which leads us to develop a false self at the expense of our true self. The true self is in many ways simply a seed that we all have. It is our potential to be truly alive and vibrant human beings. It is the part of us that seeks and recognizes truth and the part of us that is capable of self-sacrifice and loving unconditionally. But the false self is the self we normally know by the word egoism. It is the self-centered self, the one more concerned with its own pleasure and fulfillment than that of others. To a certain extent it is natural, but it is something that should be outgrown and let go as we mature. Merton felt that there were many ways to facilitate this growth and one of those ways was monasticism. The “way of the monk” is not for everybody or even most people, but it is a way for certain people to find and serve God. While working with young monks Merton came to see that many monks entered a monastery for all of the wrong reasons. Usually they were trying to escape the world in some way that was not appropriate. So in many cases he had to urge people to leave. In doing so he came to recognize that the path to holiness was simply following your own path, a path that was sometimes not understood or approved of by the religious authorities. In that case one needed to have the courage to persevere and follow through on one’s own deepest calling. And this deepest calling, which as a Christian Merton believed was the voice of God, is heard through the true self.

And is there a reason why we should turn to the true self? Why not just live out our lives as the selves we seem to be? Merton says that we would do this but that the false self loses its charm. It sort of wears out. We are no longer satisfied by life and what it offers. In this sense Merton shows the influences of the existentialists that we have been looking at and that he read. He believed that our ordinary lives would lead us to despair. And the true self is found on the other side of despair. In many ways Merton means by the term “true self” what existentialists seem to mean by “authenticity.” The authentic life is the life of becoming who we truly are without believing any of the lies that tell us we need to be this or buy that or live here or do this to find happiness. Happiness can be found any time we decide to turn from what is false to what is true.

And what does it look life to live life from the perspective of one’s true self? Merton taught that a true life was a life of compassion, creativity and service. In other words, as one moves away from what is false, one is able to free up a lot of energy that can be used for other purposes. And those purposes are ones that bring the happiness that the false self looks for but can never deliver. And what did this look like in Merton? Does his life provide a model?

I think it does. A nun who met Merton shortly before he died said that he seemed to be one who had turned himself completely inside out. And most people who met Merton in the months before he died talked about him in a similar fashion. Certainly he seems to have undergone the changes he wrote about. And this gave birth to the great compassion and creativity that marked his last years. Merton was creative in many forms, especially in his poetry, which took on new forms as he experimented with new ways of doing poetry. He also started to write about an increasing number of subjects. He took on racial issues and called for justice. He took on nuclear issues and was silenced by his own order for quite some time. He wrote about nature and the environment. He became involved in inter-religious dialogue and published works on Taoism, Zen, Judaism, and Sufism as well as the indigenous tribes of the Americas and Africa. He became more interested in literature as a source of truth again and started to publish essays on novels that he felt were offering important ideas and truths that needed to be heard by modern people. He took up painting and photography and turned out quite a bit of beautiful work, although his fame would always rest with his writings rather than his other artwork. He gave retreats for those who were more involved in worldly activities than he was, and in this way tried to be involved and offered encouragement to those who were fighting injustice. The day Martin Luther King was killed he had been scheduled to be with Merton, but changed his schedule to deal with the strike in Memphis. I can only touch on his many involvements, but they all give witness to a life of creativity, service, and compassion, the trademarks of a life lived from the true self rather than the false self.