A Quick Thought: The American Mystic Thomas Merton

If he were alive today, Thomas Merton would be 107 years old.  Born in 1915, he died in 1968 at 53 years old.  He entered the cloistered monastic life at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky when he was 26, and died 26 years later.  I was 9 years old when he died.  I recall one thing from this time: my Mother, who followed him and saw the news of his death in the papers (she had introduced me to his writings), was bereft at the terrible thought that he may have committed suicide.  Bathing in a flophouse somewhere in Thailand, so read the tabloids at the time, Merton was found naked, a fan tipped into his bathwater while he was in it. He had died instantly.  Was it an accident? Was it an act of suicide?  There are even suggestions today that he may have been assassinated for his anti-war activism. The authorities at the time had said he had just returned from a stay in a Thai Buddhist monastery and was near Bangkok to arrange his return to his home in Kentucky.

I started reading Merton more extensively in high school. As a boy, I had started with his autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain (1948), and I was hooked.  I even chose Merton’s now ubiquitous (but nonetheless inspiring) prayer, “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going…” (see it reprinted below in its entirety) to emblazon my senior high school yearbook page. Since then, I have read just about everything he ever wrote, and several books about him. These days I relish his work from the later part of his life, especially from the period when he sought to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western monastic life and mystical spirituality.  I have been told I am obsessed. Obscure collections of his letters, and previously unpublished works on certain themes (like the somewhat recently published Merton and Sufism: The Untold Story (1999)), are treasures to be discovered over and over again.

What I admire most about Merton is his down-to-earth approach to spirituality (See, especially, his book No Man Is an Island (1950)).  He wrote against the Vietnam War; he argued against nuclear proliferation. The more they tried to silence him, the more risks he took.  His poems are filled with images of fiery sunsets, fields of wildflowers, and smoke-filled ruins at the end of the world.  He was rumored to have partied hard those first 26 years of his life, and rumors continued after he entered religious life that he carried on a secret affair with a woman while behind the walls of the Trappist -Cistercian Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky.  This makes me love him all the more:  so very human, tortured, brilliant, in love with life and love itself! Isn’t that what a saint in the modern world should be? 

It was Merton’s life and insights that led me to decide in my early twenties to explore life with the monks at a Trappist Cistercian community in the Midwest (some names and locations are changed from this point, to protect the guilty).  It was there that I met Father Benedict, at that time the Director of Formation at the Abbey, and a contemporary of Merton’s. He invited me to stay with the monks for a week, and I did.  Rising before dawn to follow the barefoot and cowled monks through the freezing cold corridors into the chapel, I sat as they did, cross-legged on the floor of the choir, chanting (in English) the morning prayer of Lauds.  I cried a lot. Peaceful, beautiful, it more than lived up to my Merton-esque fantasies of Trappist religious life. 

But Fr. Benedict would not have any of it. “Dry your tears and come back to reality,” he would say gently and quietly in our evening fireside chats in the guesthouse (there were two: one behind the wall for men contemplating joining, where I stayed, and another outside the wall for women and all other guests).  “This life is not for everyone, and I doubt it is for you.”  He was gentle but firm, and merciless in his assessment of my condition: a boy still young and inexperienced at—well-- everything.  What did I know of sex, lust, or desire? How much of the world had I seen? How many jobs have I held down on my own? Did I know what it was like to support myself?  Love someone else?  Then give it all up?  “Very little, none, no, no, and not yet, Father,” came my quiet answers.  I was never to return.

Many years later, I learned from a friend – a former Trappist himself – that Benedict had run a secret underground network of celibate monks who identified as gay, authoring a newsletter about monasticism and sexuality.  My friend was a subscriber.  It was through him that I learned of Benedict’s death, in the early 2000’s, of complications suffered from injuries in a freak accident. What was it that gave me away to Benedict? I was not yet out, not yet ready to make these kinds of life-altering decisions, and he saw right through me. Perhaps “Merton’s Prayer” was already written on my heart:

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 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.

“The Merton Prayer” from Thoughts in Solitude Copyright © 1956, 1958 by The Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani.