Thomas Merton entered the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky in 1941 to disappear from the world. He spent the next twenty-seven years becoming one of the most visible spiritual writers on earth. The contradiction was not lost on him. He wrote about it constantly, and the writing was so honest that millions of people who had never considered entering a monastery felt that Merton understood their lives better than anyone they knew. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, published in 1948, sold over a million copies and is credited with causing a measurable spike in monastic vocations. A young man who had been a party-going Columbia University student, a Communist sympathizer, a heavy drinker, and possibly the father of an illegitimate child in England walked into a Trappist monastery and found what he was looking for. The book reads like a detective story in which the mystery is the self.

The Monk Who Could Not Stop Talking

Trappists take a vow of silence, or more precisely, a vow of restricted speech. They speak when the Rule allows it and remain silent otherwise. Merton kept the vow and simultaneously wrote over seventy books, hundreds of poems, thousands of letters, and journal entries so voluminous that their complete publication is still in progress decades after his death. He wrote about contemplative prayer with a precision that practitioners recognized immediately. He wrote about racial justice before it was fashionable for white monks to do so. He wrote about nuclear weapons with genuine terror. He wrote about Zen Buddhism with the kind of deep sympathy that required years of study and correspondence with actual Zen masters, including D.T. Suzuki, with whom he held a famous dialogue in 1964. Researchers at the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University have catalogued over twenty thousand items in his correspondence alone. He was in contact with everyone from the Dalai Lama to the folk singer Joan Baez, from the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm to Pope John XXIII. A man who had entered a monastery to disappear became one of the most connected people in mid-century American intellectual life.

He Stood on a Street Corner and Loved Everyone

The most famous passage in all of Merton's writing occurs in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, published in 1966. Standing at the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the realization that he loved everyone around him, that they were all walking around shining like the sun, and that the monastery walls he had built between himself and the world were an illusion. He had gone into the monastery believing the sacred was inside and the profane was outside. He came out of that experience understanding that the distinction does not exist. This was not a soft realization. It broke apart his entire framework. If God is everywhere, if every person on a street corner is already radiant with the divine, then the monastery is not a refuge from the world. It is a training ground for seeing the world as it actually is. Merton spent the rest of his life working through the implications. A study from the Center for Spirituality at Fordham University examining Merton's influence on interfaith dialogue identified the Louisville vision as the pivot point in his intellectual development, the moment that moved him from a theology of withdrawal to a theology of engagement that would make him one of the most important voices in twentieth-century Christian-Buddhist dialogue.

He Died Reaching Toward the East

In December 1968, Merton traveled to Asia for the first time. He met the Dalai Lama. He visited Buddhist temples. He gave a talk at a conference in Bangkok about the relevance of monasticism in the modern world. He returned to his room, took a shower, and was electrocuted by a faulty fan while stepping out of the bath. He was fifty-three. The timing is almost unbearable. He had spent his entire monastic life reaching toward the contemplative traditions of the East. He arrived, he made contact, and he died on the same day. Thomas Merton is on HoloDream, where the Trappist monk who embraced the East brings the same restless, luminous attention to the question of where God actually lives.