Merton - My argument with the Gestapo: a macaronic journal

On December 10, 1968, Thomas Merton died at the age of fifty-three in Bangkok, Thailand, where he had gone to attend a meeting of Abbots of all the Catholic Monastic Orders in Asia. He was born on January 31, 1915, in Prades, France, the older of two boys. His parents were both artists, his father a New Zealander and his mother an American. In 1916 the family moved to the United States, and when Mrs. Merton died five years later, the two boys lived with her parents for some years. In 1925 Merton returned to France with his father and attended the Lyce Ingres at Montauban. When he was fourteen they went to live in England and Merton entered Oakham School, in Rutland. Two years later (1931) his father died in London from a brain tumor. It was his wish that his son should complete his education in England, so Merton remained at Oakham, spending his vacations with family friends or traveling in Europe. In 1933 he won a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge, but after one year he returned to his maternal grandparents home in Douglaston, Long Island, and entered Columbia University in 1935, receiving his B.A. in 1938 and his M.A. in 1939.

On December 10, 1941, he entered the Older of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (Trappists), a silent, contemplative order, at Gethsemane, Kentucky. He expected to give up entirely his early ambition to be a writer, but after some years of rigorous training in the Trappist life and studying for the priesthood (he was ordained in 1949) he was encouraged by his abbot to write again. His first published book was Thirty Poems (New Directions, 1944). In 1948 his first prose work, The Seven Storey Mountain, was brought out and became an almost immediate international best-seller. It was followed by some thirty or more books of prose, poetry, and translation. For many years Merton was considered to be one of the leading writers in the world on the spiritual life, but recently he had more and more turned his attention to matters that had always deeply concerned himpeace, civil rights, ecumenismand to a subject that had interested him since his undergraduate days, the religions of the Far East.

In thinking of Thomas Merton as a monk (since 1965 a hermit living alone in the woods near the abbey) it is sometimes hard for people to understand his passionate interest in the problems of our time. The fact is the monks are no longer so sheltered from the world that they do not know what is happening outside their own walls, and Merton carried on a vast correspondence, read prolifically, and received visitors from all over the world and from all walks of life. It was not really possible for him to shut out the world. Even in the peaceful wooded hills of Kentucky he could hear the distant boom of the guns at Fort Knox and write: I have seen the SAC plane, with the bomb in it, fly low over me and I have looked up out of the woods directly at the closed bay of the metal bird with a scientific egg in its breast! More and more, it seems to me, the concerns of the last years of his life were the same concerns that occupied him in 1940, when I first made the acquaintance of a blond young man who had a novel he wanted published.