On Thomas Merton
Mary Gordon
Schambhala Publications (January 2019)

He was a Trappist monk, committed to silence, “and yet his vocation was based on words.”

Mary Gordon’s comment refers to only one of several contradictions and paradoxes that help to explain who Thomas Merton was — and wasn’t. They also suggest why he continues to attract interest long after his death in 1968. It has been several decades since I read Thomas Merton’s most famous work, The Seven Story Mountain (first published in 1948). Later, I read “The Contemplative Life,” edited by Naomi Burton, Brother Patrick Hart, and James Laughlin in The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, published by New Directions (1975). Here is a passage from it that caught my eye.

Merton suggests, “The contemplative life must provide an area, a space of liberty, of silence, in which possibilities are allowed to surface and new choices –beyond routine choice — become manifest. It should create a new experience of time, not as stopgap stillness, but a ‘temps vierge’ — not a blank to be filled or an untouched space to be conquered and violated, but a space which can enjoy its own potentialities and hopes — and its own presence to itself. One’s own time. But not dominated by one’s ego and its demands. Hence open to others — compassionate time, rooted in the sense of common illusion and in criticism of it.” (Page 117)

It’s fair to say I haven’t given him much thought since then until reading Jane Brox’s latest book, Silence: The Social History of One of the Least Appreciated Elements of Our Lives. And then a dear friend gave me a copy of Mary Gordon’s book and I have just read it. What do I make of it?

She is probably right: “If Thomas Merton had been a writer and not a monk, we would never have heard of him. If Thomas Merton had been a monk and not a writer, we would never have heard of him.” His duality “contained within itself a particular irony: in becoming a Trappist, he entered an order devoted to silence, “and yet his vocation was based on words.” Throughout his adult life, Merton seems to have tried very hard to have a fulfilling life in two quite different worlds…and as a result, he had self-doubts and consequent frustrations in both even as each, paradoxically, enriched the other while competing for (yes) his devotion.

I also think that, paradoxically, he would have been both a better and worse writer had he not become a Cistercian monk…and that he would have been both a more and less devout Cistercian monk had he not become a writer. He was “a man for all seasons,” his and ours. Not only involved but engaged in whatever each day offered to him.

My final thought is that there is much of value to be learned from each phase of his multi-dimensional life. The Gospels tell us that Jesus became enraged with the profiteers outside a temple of worship and physically and vehemently threw them into the streets, that he masked that the “cup” of sacrifice could be taken from his hands on the evening prior to his crucifixion, and that just before dying, asked God why he had been forsaken. They are reminders of Jesus’ humanity as are Thomas Merton’s various lapses reminders of his.

These are among Mary Gordon’s final comments. They offer a much better conclusion than any of mine could:

“In 1968, we lost Martin Luther King, Jr, Robert Kennedy, and Thomas Merton. Life lived in all its imperfectability, reaching toward it in exaltation, pulling back in fear, in anguish, but insisting on the primacy of his praise as a man of God.”

Merton is perhaps best remembered as an imperfect pilgrim who personified “the grandeur and impossibility of his vision.”