By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Pope Francis’s speech to Congress two years ago discussed four persons “who shaped fundamental values which will endure forever in the spirit of the American people.” One of them was Thomas Merton, who died almost fifty years ago this month, and who would have celebrated his one hundredth birthday during the year the Pope was in the United States.
These important Merton anniversaries, however, were the least significant of the reasons to praise Merton, someone the Pope called “a man of prayer, a thinker who challenged the certitudes of his time and opened new horizons for souls and for the Church…a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions.”
Merton was a Cistercian (Trappist) monk who lived from 1941 to 1964 at the Abbey of Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky under the name Father Louis. He was, as Pope Francis noted, an agnostic born in France to an American mother at the beginning of World War I, a conflict which Pope Benedict XV had called a “pointless slaughter.” Merton entered the monastery on the eve of yet another pointless slaughter, World War II. From within the quiet stone walls of Gethsemani, Merton reached an audience of millions. He was a prolific writer whose focus evolved from discussing his contempt for the “outside world” to actively engaging in a dialogue to help that world confront and resolve its many challenges.
One of these published works was Merton’s great autobiography, called The Seven Story Mountain, in which he wrote: “I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God, and yet hating him; born to love him, living instead in fear of hopeless self-contradictory hungers.” Merton’s immediate answer to this “picture of hell” was to go to the Kentucky monastery, to seek solitude, and to pray for the world. Soon, however, from that place of contemplation, he was actively addressing some of the most vexing moral issues of his time: war, the Holocaust, nuclear weapons, technology, poverty, religious divisions, and racism.
Many of my friends, the Utah Trappist monks who lived in Huntsville, Utah, knew Merton well. One was his instructor, and another helped edit his books. Although they and he all chose to live in a monastery, they never lost their passion or desire to help make the world a better place. Most tried to do so by appealing to God, in prayer seven times every day, to allow his peace, mercy, compassion, and love to transform the world. As my friend Brother Boniface explained in an oral history provided in 1972 to Weber State University, “We ask God to do what we cannot do…I have nothing to do with the world. Yet, my influence is universal.”
Merton prayed, of course, but also took the additional step of using his God-given skills to write, to explain monastic spirituality to all of us, to address moral issues from the perspective of years of contemplation and solitude, and to seek to cross over the religious divide that is the source of so much suffering in the world. Like my friends the Utah Trappist monks, Merton did so in the full spirit of love, explaining that: “to live selfishly is to view life as an intolerable burden. To live selflessly is to live in joy.”
It was for these reasons, on the centennial of his birth, that Pope Francis noted the valuable contributions this humble monk made to American values: “A nation can be considered great when it defends liberty as Lincoln did, when it fosters a culture which enables people to ‘dream’ of full rights for all their brothers and sisters, as Martin Luther King sought to do; when it strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed, as Dorothy Day did by her tireless work, the fruit of a faith which becomes dialogue and sows peace in the contemplative style of Thomas Merton.”
In a lecture at Gethsemani, Merton once told his fellow monks, “When you come to a monastery you put yourself in the arms of God and he’s going to carry you where you are going.” For Merton, what a journey it was!
