Thomas Merton

Fundamentally I am a very secular person. Organised religion, its creeds and rituals, mean little if anything at all. As I see it, "belief" - in whatever - often acts more as an anaesthetic than as a catalyst for acting in the world. Nevertheless, I have admiration for various human beings who some would consider "religious". One such is the Catholic Trappist monk Thomas Merton. As I have implied, this is not "hero worship".  I see him more as a mentor, through whom I can come to my own understanding - Merton himself was very rarely didactic in any real sense of the word. Being a Trappist monk, his published books necessarily passed through the censorship system of the Catholic Church. Given that those books included essays on Buddhism and a translation of Chuang Tzu, this indicates that the censorship system is perhaps not as stifling of free thought as some might suppose. Yet it is for me in his letters - and Journals - that he speaks to my own tastes, and these escaped censorship in any real meaning of the word.

Merton in monastic garb 

I first read Merton when I picked up "The Seven Storey Mountain" in my local library. This book is autobiographical and tells of Merton's early life ( not one of religious indoctrination ), his conversion to Catholicism, and ends with his entry into the monastery of Gethsemane in Kentucky, U.S.A. I got about half way through before giving up. I found it over pious and stifling. Next I found a collection of his letters ("The Hidden Ground of Love") in a second hand bookshop. It was priced at only £5, and being a skinflint at heart, always having an eye for a bargain, I snapped it up. Once again, after about 100 pages I left it aside. Yet about a couple of years later, for some reason I picked it up again and this time read through to the end. It was pure delight. Merton wrote to so many people, of so many different faiths - and to some of none - and without betraying at any time his own fidelity to Christ, opened his heart to all, saying "yes" where he could.

Since then I have built up my own little library of Merton. All of his published letters (5 volumes), many of his Journals (published in 7 volumes) plus a few of his other books, mainly those concerned with Buddhism/Zen.

I suppose the impression can be given, when reading the words of others - particularly of a "religious" figure - that the words originate from some ethereal source and not from a concrete human being. Whether or not this is the case, I would just like to speak of Merton's own very lovable humanity. There is a wonderful photo of Merton in the Lion edition of "The Intimate Merton" that is worth a million words. The caption is "This is the old hillbilly who knows where the still is", and it truly captures the man as he must have been known to his own friends, full of fun and humour. 

Does he know where the still is?

When Henri Nouwen met him, he spoke of an initial reaction of disappointment as nothing "very special, profound or spiritual" occurred:-


Maybe I expected something unusual, something to talk about with others or to write home about. But Thomas Merton proved to be a very down-to-earth, healthy human being who was not going to perform to satisfy our curiosity. He was one of us...............(later) I became very grateful for that one unspectacular encounter. I found that whenever I was tempted to let myself be carried away by lofty ideas or cloudy aspirations, I had only to remind myself of that one afternoon to bring myself back to earth. (With) my mind's eye I saw him again as that earthy man, dressed in sloppy blue jeans, loud, laughing, friendly and unpretentious..................


There is a passage in one of his letters where he relates an episode following the ordination of one of his best friends, Dan Walsh, in 1967. Following the ceremony, Merton and a few of his other friends got just a little bit tiddly on alcohol and began falling around with laughter. Looking on were a group of nuns who appeared just a little shocked. "Another pillar of the Church had fallen" commented Merton.


Merton has also been called an "anti-monk" and wrote himself:-


I see clearer than ever that I am not a monk.........................I expect to live for a few more years, hoping that I will not go nuts...............This, I think, is about the best I can hope for. It sums up the total of my expectations for the immediate future. If on top of this the Lord sees fit in His mercy to admit me to a non-monastic corner of heaven, among the beatniks and pacifists and other maniacs, I will be exceedingly grateful. Doubtless there will be a few pseudo-hermits among them and we will all sit around and look at each other and wonder how we made it. Up above will be the monks, with a clearer view of their own status and a more profound capacity to appreciate the meaning of status and the value of having one.....

Maybe it can be all summed up by a comment made by Merton when visited in 1954 by his friend Mark Van Doren. Van Doren remarked that Merton had not changed much since joining the monastic community.  Merton replied:- "Why should I? Here our duty is to be more ourselves, not less"

Anyway, maybe enough. But just a couple of quotes from Merton which I find meaningful:- 

True communication on the deepest level is more than a simple sharing of ideas, conceptual knowledge, or formulated truth......and the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless, it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.

And finally:-

(True religion is)......freedom from domination, freedom to live one's own spiritual life, freedom to seek the highest truth, unabashed by any human pressure or any collective demand, the ability to say one's own "yes" and one's own "no" and not merely to echo the "yes" and the "no" of state, party, corporation, army or system. This is inseparable from authentic religion. It is one of the deepest and most fundamental needs of the human person, perhaps the deepest and most crucial need of the human person as such.

(From "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander")