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Thomas Merton
- The University Press of Kentucky
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Elizabeth Madox Roberts 319 Thomas Merton Thomas Merton’s life was of not much consequence until December 10, 1941, when he joined the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, commonly called the Trappists, entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, near Bardstown, Kentucky , and began a life based on prayer, silence, and work. His spiritual journey led finally to his ordination as a priest on May 26, 1949, when he became Father Louis. Two years later he became an American citizen. It was an unlikely destination for this man who was born in 1915 in Prades, France, the son of Ruth Jenkins Merton, an American-born artist-designer, and Owen Merton, a New Zealand–born painter. He was educated in the United States, Bermuda, France, and England; he studied at Cambridge and Columbia, where he received an M.A. in English in 1938. After several years of a reputedly bohemian lifestyle, he converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. He had done some minor writing before he became a Trappist and continued to write as a part of his monastic vocation. His books include Thirty Poems (1944), Seeds of Contemplation (1949), The Sign of Jonas (1953), and Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966). His best-known book is his spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), which chronicles his pilgrimage from a youthful profligate life to his conversion and decision to enter the monastery. In the 1960s he wrote on many topics of social justice, including racial conflict, genocide, nuclear armament, and the Vietnam War. It is, however, as a poet that Merton did his best and most spiritual writing. In 1965 he received permission from his abbot to move into a small, isolated cabin—he called it “The Hermitage”—and live a life of solitude. His developing interest in non-Christian religions and cultures led him to attend a Buddhist-Christian conference on monasticism in 1968 near Bangkok, Thailand, where he apparently died an accidental death on December 10, electrocuted by a fanwithfaultywiring.HisbodywassenthometobeburiedattheAbbeyofGethsemani. The Merton Collection at Bellarmine University in Louisville is the world’s largest collection of books and manuscripts pertaining to his life and writings. The selection that follows, a portion of his Seven Storey Mountain, describes his second arrival at the monastery—this time to stay and become a monk. The four subsequent poems only begin to suggest the dimensions of his subject matter and style. h from The Seven Storey Mountain When I finally got off in Bardstown, I was standing across the road from a gas station. The street appeared to be empty, as if the town were asleep. But 319 320 The Kentucky Anthology presently I saw a man in the gas station. I went over and asked where I could get someone to drive me to Gethsemani. So he put on his hat and started his car and we left town on a straight road through level country, full of empty fields. It was not the kind of landscape that belonged to Gethsemani, and I could not get my bearings until some low, jagged, wooded hills appeared ahead of us, to the left of the road, and we made a turn that took us into rolling, wooded land. Then I saw that high familiar spire. I rang the bell at the gate. It let fall a dull, unresonant note inside the empty court. My man got in his car and went away. Nobody came. I could hear somebody moving around inside the Gatehouse. I did not ring again. Presently, the window opened, and Brother Matthew looked out between the bars, with his clear eyes and graying beard. “Hullo, Brother,” I said. He recognized me, glanced at the suitcase, and said: “This time have you come to stay?” “Yes, Brother, if you’ll pray for me,” I said. Brother nodded, and raised his hand to close the window. “That’s what I’ve been doing,” he said, “praying for you.” II So Brother Matthew locked the gate behind me and I was enclosed in the four walls of my new freedom. And it was appropriate that the beginning of freedom should be as it was. For I entered a garden that was dead and stripped and bare. The flowers that had been there last April were all gone. The sun was hidden behind low clouds and an icy wind was blowing over the gray grass and the concrete walks. In a sense my freedom had already begun, for I minded none...