One of the most profound and deeply spiritual authors of the 20th century was Thomas Merton of the Order of the Cistercians of Strict Observance, more popularly called the Trappists. Although born in France in 1915, Merton spent much of his life in America, applying for U.S. citizenship in 1949. His most famous book, a powerful autobiographical journal called The Seven Storey Mountain, as its publisher states, “tells of the growing restlessness of a brilliant and passionate young man whose search for peace and faith leads him, at the age of 26, to take vows in one of the most demanding Catholic orders — the Trappist monks. At the abbey of Gethsemani, ‘the four walls of my new freedom,’ Thomas Merton struggles to withdraw from the world, but only after he has fully immersed himself in it.”
He would leave his rebellious youth behind, and devote the rest of his life to the interior cultivation of a sacred place within where God could once again walk with his creature in the cool of the evening.
Merton’s legacy of a life of prayer, physical labor, writing and silence continues to inspire. Popular Jesuit author Jim Martin, of the Colbert Report and Broadway chaplaincy fame, told me it was a documentary about Merton that eventually convinced him to approach the Jesuits at Fairfield regarding a possible vocation.
The asceticism of the monastic life certainly has something universally compelling and captivating about it, and the humanity which exudes from Merton’s interpretation of it has resonated not only with Father Martin, but with countless others. Take Merton’s whimsical inquiry: “Is there any man who has ever gone through a whole lifetime without dressing himself up, in his fancy, in the habit of a monk and enclosing himself in a cell where he sits magnificent in heroic austerity and solitude, while all the young ladies who hitherto were cool to his affections in the world come and beat on the gates of the monastery crying ‘Come out! Come out!’” I remember laughing out loud with good humored self-deprecation the first time I read those words.
But, Merton obviously transcends such egoistic and superficial perspectives and comes to realize his soul ultimately cannot find comfort in the transitory things of this life; that only in union with the divine can one find “the peace the world cannot give.” He is without doubt one of my favorite authors, albeit sometimes disparaging to those who do not share his vision, outlook or zeal. But there is a consolation in reading Merton, where one realizes that he or she is not alone in the disorienting (and sometimes disheartening) conviction that the life of the church inexorably pumps through his or her veins and that when Jesus described his followers as in, but somehow not completely of the world, he wasn’t lying and was making a local not a long-distance call.
Merton’s words speak with unflinching power and intensity, for in them we encounter what we intuitively already know well, that in what society sees as foolishness we are made wise, and as weakness, made strong. (cf. 2 Cor 12:9).
Even Merton’s death is rather intriguing. Visiting Thailand to learn more about Eastern meditation in an attempt to integrate it into his Christian prayer life, he was instantly electrocuted when he stepped out of a bath and touched a portable fan that apparently had fraying wires. The accident occurred on the anniversary of the day he entered the cloistered abbey in Kentucky 27 years before. It was one of the very few times he had left the property in those nearly three decades. Merton’s life and death give witness to a position of trust that if we take the hard road to step outside of our intellectual, temporal and spiritual comfort zones, God will do his part to meet us in ways that continue to stun and amaze beyond what words can capture or relay.
Michael M. Canaris of Collingswood is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.
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