Thomas Merton is the rare modern monastic writer whose work crossed religious lines. He was a Catholic monk, deeply traditional in some ways, but he was also reading Zen Buddhism in his cell at the abbey, corresponding with the Dalai Lama, hosting Vietnamese Buddhists like Thich Nhat Hanh as guests, marching in spirit (if not body) with the civil rights movement. He was a contemplative who never stopped engaging with the world.
He was born in 1915 in southern France to an artist father from New Zealand and an artist mother from the United States. The family moved around a lot — France, England, the U.S. His mother died of cancer when he was 6. His father, a painter, raised him for a while in France and Bermuda, then died of a brain tumor when Merton was 16. He was effectively orphaned as a teenager.
He went to Cambridge for a year and lived hard — drinking, partying, getting into trouble. He had an affair that produced a child. He left Cambridge under murky circumstances (his guardians may have been paying off the woman to keep things quiet). The mother and the baby both died during the London Blitz in WWII a few years later. Merton would never meet his own son. He carried that weight quietly for the rest of his life.
He moved to New York, finished his undergrad and a master's at Columbia. He was still hard-partying but also reading constantly — philosophy, theology, mysticism, poetry. In his early 20s he became increasingly drawn to Catholic mysticism. He converted in 1938. Two years later, in December 1941, he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani — a Trappist monastery in rural Kentucky. The Trappists are one of the strictest contemplative orders in the Catholic Church. Long hours of silence. Hard physical labor. Very limited contact with the outside world.
He took the religious name Father Louis. He took final vows. And then — paradoxically — he started writing more than he ever had in his life.
His abbot recognized the writing talent and gave him permission to write as part of his religious work. In 1948 he published The Seven Storey Mountain — his autobiography, written in his early 30s, telling the story of his wild youth and his entry into the monastery. The book was a sensation. It sold over a million copies. It made Merton, a cloistered monk in rural Kentucky, into one of the most famous American Catholics of his era. He started getting fan mail from around the world.
What's remarkable is that he didn't let the fame undo him. He stayed in the monastery. He kept the disciplines. But he also kept writing — at a rate that would have been impressive for a full-time professional, and he was doing it inside a community where he was also chopping wood and milking cows and observing the Great Silence between sundown and dawn.
His writing evolved over the next 20 years. The early books are more conventionally devotional — Catholic in a fairly traditional sense. As he matured, his thought opened up enormously. He started writing about social justice, civil rights, the Vietnam War, the spiritual dangers of nuclear weapons, the violence of consumer culture. He corresponded with Martin Luther King Jr. and was drafting a retreat for King and his lieutenants when King was assassinated in 1968.
He also got deeply into Eastern thought. He read Zen seriously. He read Sufi mystics. He read the Tao Te Ching. He published essays comparing Christian contemplative traditions with their Buddhist counterparts. He wasn't interested in a watered-down universalism — he was interested in real, rigorous comparative work between traditions that were each rooted in their own histories. His book Zen and the Birds of Appetite is one of the more interesting Catholic-Buddhist dialogues anyone has produced.
We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.
His spiritual writing kept coming back to the difference between what he called the "true self" and the "false self." The false self is the constructed identity we put together out of social roles, achievements, the way we want to be perceived. The true self is something deeper, something we can only access through contemplation, where the noise of the constructed self quiets enough that something more original can emerge. The whole project of monastic life, in his view, was about giving the false self enough silence and space that it loosened its grip and the true self had room to breathe.
In late 1968 he got permission, for the first time in his monastic life, to travel widely. He flew to Asia. He met the Dalai Lama in northern India. They had three long conversations. The Dalai Lama said afterward that Merton was one of the few Westerners who had truly understood Buddhism.
Then on December 10, 1968, at a conference of Buddhist and Christian monastics in Bangkok, Thailand, Merton gave a talk in the morning. After lunch he went to his cottage to rest. He stepped out of the shower, reached for an electric fan, and was electrocuted. The fan was faulty. He died alone in his bathroom. He was 53.
His body was flown back to Gethsemani. He was buried in the abbey cemetery alongside the other monks of his community.
The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
The reason Thomas Merton still matters to me is that he's the model of how a contemplative spiritual life and serious engagement with the suffering of the world can coexist. He didn't retreat from the world. He went deeper into it from inside the silence. The civil rights work, the antiwar activism, the dialogue with Eastern traditions — none of it was distraction from his monastic vocation. It was an expression of it.
If you're feeling lost af and the lostness has the shape of I want depth but I'm trapped in a noisy modern life — Merton is the one to read. He'll show you that depth is available, even in the noisiest contexts, if you know where to look. And he'll do it without asking you to convert to anything. He's just describing what he found, in case you want to look there too.