Today is Thomas Merton’s birthday. He was born on this day in 1915. The following is a portion of a reflection from my recent book, Almost Catholic:
Mennonites turned me onto Thomas Merton while I was a teenager. I had questions that my own pastor could not answer when it came time for me to register as an 18-year old with Selective Service. “Why would it be right for me to kill another human being if Jesus told his disciples to ‘turn the other cheek’?” I had asked my pastor.
But I didn’t stop at Thomas Merton’s writings on war, justice, and peace. I went back to the beginning and read his youthful autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. Merton was brash and arrogant. He was fun and smart. His parents were painters and he spent more time in Manhattan and Europe than anywhere else in the U.S. Merton graduated from Columbia University and was a “big man on campus,” to be sure. But when he finally figured out who he really was, he had become a monk in a remote monastery in the hills of Kentucky.
In the summer of 1941, a few months before he became a monk, Merton was living in upstate New York teaching English at St. Bonaventure College. He was in his twenties and trying to figure out what to do with his life, attracted as he was to both the life of the mind (as a writer) and the life of the spirit (a possible, religious vocation). He was debating many things within himself: should he become a writer? Is it possible to be a writer without becoming full of oneself? What about the call to contemplation that he felt deep inside of himself?
These tensions made Merton’s life and work relevant to millions of readers, long after his death in 1968. Many of us bump up against these same questions—not necessarily because we are writers, as he was, but because we seek to exercise our talents without self-aggrandizement. To use the language of monastic spirituality, how do we dismantle our “false self,” and gradually discover our “true self,” as we succeed in our work in the world? This question filled Merton with anxiety throughout his life.
His autobiography was published when Merton was only thirty-three years old. He found it nearly impossible not to write about what was happening inside of him throughout his life as a cloistered monk. And that was odd. Why would a monk—a man who has taken many vows including a vow of silence—publish? During his first visit as a retreatant to The Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, during Holy Week of 1941, he wrote in his journal, “I should tear out all the other pages of this book and all the other pages of everything else I ever wrote, and begin here.” In the years to follow, after hundreds of thousands of copies of The Seven Storey Mountain were purchased and read around the world, Merton would go through times when he wanted to stop writing altogether. He once wrote, “An author in a Trappist monastery is like a duck in a chicken coop. And he would give anything in the world to be a chicken instead of a duck.” But, still, he wrote, and expressed himself to millions of people beside his monastic brothers. These were times when he felt his ego growing faster than his spirit. But, thank God, they were short-lived, and he went back to his typewriter.
He was a Catholic in the broadest of all possible meanings of the word. The essence of Merton’s genius is also the reason why Merton’s writings will outlive those of most any other spiritual writer of the twentieth century. He taught those of us outside the monastery how to live more as if we were inside the monastery. He distilled the monastic life down to the point where it seemed possible to replicate it in the secular world. Before Merton, monasticism seemed to be a life of retreat, irrelevant scholarship, and prejudice against the world. After Merton, to live like a monk became synonymous with mindfulness, attentiveness, contemplation, and embracing of others.
Thomas Merton, pray for me.
