THE LIFE OF THOMAS MERTON

Thomas Merton was born in the village of Prades in southern France in 1915 when the major European powers were confronting one another on the battlefields of a war that would alter the course of the 20th Century. Both parents were artists. Owen Merton, a native of New Zealand, painted landscapes; Ruth (Jenkins) Merton, also a painter, was an American Quaker from Douglaston, New York.

In 1916, with no end in sight to the chaos and carnage of The Great War, the Mertons decided to move to he United States where a second child, John Paul, was born. The family remained in Douglaston for five years, until Ruth’s death in 1921 when Merton was barely six years old.
Over the next 15 years, Merton lived a haphazard, nomadic existence. He spent two years in Bermuda, then returned to the home of his maternal grandparents in Douglaston; two years later, in 1925, he was off again with his father, this time to France, living four years in the village of Montauban; then in 1929 he moved to England where, in 1931, his father died.

Thomas remained living in Rutland and after completing his prep school studies in Oakham in 1933, won a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge. But a year later, in December of 1934, Thomas’ godfather and guardian, Tom Bennett, ordered him to return to the United States and remain there.
Columbia University and the rich cultural and political milieu of New York were new and exciting experiences for Merton. He revelled in the turbulent social life Columbia offered him, with long evenings and weekends of debating and drinking, women and jazz; but he was also captivated by the remarkable social concern and political activism of students and faculty. Mark Van Doren was among those professors on the Morningside campus who significantly influenced his life and his thinking. Merton received him Bachelor’s Degree from Columbia in 1938, and a year later his Master’s Degree, writing his theses, interestingly enough, on the life of the mystical poet, William Blake.
Concurrently, but unknown to most of his friends, Merton was also experiencing a religious conversion. Although later in life he would write about several earlier spiritual experiences that were of great significance for him, especially a visit to Rome in 1932, it was not until 1938 that Merton made an appointment to see the legendary Columbia Roman Catholic chaplain at Corpus Cristi, Father George Ford. He was baptized November 16, 1938.

Although Merton’s career as a writer had already begun to show promise, he clearly was searching for something more immediate and challenging. He began contemplating a radical new direction in his life - becoming a member of a religious teaching community.
In 1940 he applied for admission to the Order of Friars Minor, popularly known as Franciscans. Accepted at first, and then rejected, because he revealed his youthful excesses, Merton took a teaching post at St. Bonaventure’s, a Franciscan college in upstate New York. But his fretful search continued, taking him on weekends back to New York City and to the streets of Harlem where for the better part of a year he worked as a volunteer with Baroness Catherine de Hueck Doherty in one of her settlement houses. This was Merton’s first authentic encounter with America’s racial problem and he began to radicalize socially, wondering if he should not devote his entire like to the Harlem settlement houses.
But a retreat in the spring of 1941 at the Abbey of Gethsemani, outside of Bardstown, Kentucky, quickly and decisively changed his mind. He would instead become a Trappist monk.

On December 10, 1941, Merton was admitted as a novice to Gethsemani, the remote Cistercian monastery which, for the next twenty-seven years, would be his final spiritual refuge and the axis for his literary creativity. (Merton was extremely prolific, writing over sixty volumes in his lifetime.)

In 1949 Merton was ordained a priest. Within two years he was named Master of Scholastics, and four years later he was appointed Master of Novices, a position he would hold for ten years.
In the 1950s, he committed himself to the civil rights movement, and later became one of the most provocative critics of the United States presence in Vietnam. In 1965 Merton received permission to live a life he had been long drawn to and had ardently desired: as a hermit in a cottage on the grounds of Gethsemani, about a half mile from the Abbey. Throughout this period, Merton maintained and deepened his studies of Eastern religious traditions.

Thus, Merton was well qualified and eager to respond to the invitation of (the then) Benedictine Abbot Primate Rembert Weakland to attend the meeting of religious leaders in Bangkok in 1968.
Except for brief visits to Louisville, Merton virtually had remained within the confines of Gethsemani for twenty-seven years. The first global journey outside the monastery gave him the opportunity to discover Americans and parts of America he had been writing about; and to them travel leisurely to India, Sri Lanka and finally Thailand - all recorded in The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton.
He arrived in Bangkok in early December and at midday December 10 addressed religious leaders of Eastern and Western traditions on the subject Marxism and Monastic Perspectives. After delivering his lecture, Merton returned to his bungalow and showered.

No one is certain about what happened next. But from the position of his body it would appear that while adjusting a large floor fan, he may have collapsed from a strong electric shock, or, he may have tripped. In any event, the fan toppled onto his damp lower torso, electrocuting him.

Merton’s body was flown back to America in a U.S. Air Force jet, accompanied by a dozen American servicemen who had been killed in Vietnam. He is buried at a simple grave site in the monastic cemetery of Gethsemani.