Thomas Merton, Monastic and Spiritual Writer

Today the Church commemorates Thomas Merton, Cistercian monk and spiritual writer, whose search for God drew him into silence and whose silence opened outward into a deeper communion with the suffering world.

Thomas was born at Prades, France, in 1915 to an American mother and a New Zealand father, both artists. He was baptized there as an infant in the Church of England. His childhood was unsettled by travel and loss. His mother died when he was six, and his father died before Thomas reached adulthood. Through years of schooling in France and England, religious faith gave him no stable center.

After a brief and unhappy period at Cambridge, Thomas moved to New York and studied at Columbia University. There friendship, literature, philosophy, and a growing religious hunger began to converge. In 1938 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Three years later, on December 10, 1941, he arrived at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky and entered the Cistercians of the Strict Observance, commonly called Trappists. In the monastery he was known as Brother Louis.

Thomas came seeking a life hidden in God, but his abbot recognized his gift for writing. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, appeared in 1948 and unexpectedly became a best seller. The monk who had entered enclosure to leave worldly ambition behind became a public religious voice. He was ordained a priest in 1949 and later served for years in the formation of younger monks.

His understanding of solitude changed as he lived it. In March 1958, standing in a busy shopping district at Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, Thomas experienced a sudden awareness that the strangers around him were not an alien world from which holiness required escape. The separation he had imagined between the monk and everyone else gave way to a sense of shared human belonging before God.

That insight widened his writing. Thomas addressed racism, nuclear weapons, war, economic injustice, and the habits of violence by which societies learn to treat other human beings as abstractions. He corresponded with activists, writers, clergy, and people seeking spiritual counsel. His contemplative life did not become less monastic as it became more attentive to the world. He increasingly understood contemplation as the place from which false divisions are exposed and love is made concrete.

In 1965 Thomas received permission to live as a hermit on the grounds of Gethsemani. Solitude, however, did not make him immune to divided desire. In 1966, while recovering from surgery, he fell in love with a young student nurse. They exchanged letters, spoke secretly by telephone, and met away from the monastery. The relationship crossed the boundaries of his monastic commitment. When his abbot learned of it, he instructed Thomas to end the relationship. Thomas struggled to obey, and his journals preserve both the intensity of the attachment and the painful self-knowledge that accompanied his return to the discipline of his vocation.

Thomas’s later years also brought sustained engagement with the spiritual traditions of Asia. He read Zen Buddhism and Taoism, corresponded with Buddhist thinkers, and sought conversation with monks whose faith was not his own. He did not regard this as a reason to abandon Christ or his Cistercian vocation. He believed that serious encounter could strip away caricature, reveal genuine contemplative wisdom, and send a Christian back more deeply into the mystery he had received.

In 1968 he was allowed to travel in Asia for meetings and dialogue with monastic leaders. On December 10, after speaking at a gathering of Benedictine and Cistercian religious near Bangkok, Thailand, Thomas died accidentally from electric shock in his room. It was exactly twenty-seven years after the day he had arrived at Gethsemani.

In Thomas’s life, prayer became a school of love for people beyond the monastery’s walls. With him, we ask for the humility to face our failures and for a contemplative peace attentive to the suffering of our neighbors.