I was so delighted two days ago to find that one of my favorite bloggers, Rain at Rainy Day Thoughts, had recently watched a documentary on the late Trappist monk Thomas Merton and was drawn to his life and to his work. Merton has had a profound effect on my life since I first read Seven Storey Mountain in the late 1950s. It had been written in 1948 but I didn't convert to Catholicism until 1958.
I would later write my M.A. thesis on Merton and even made a Merton pilgrimage of his upper west side NYC environs when I was with students at Columbia University for a journalism program. The Columbia archives gave me access to his papers, I visited with the then pastor at Corpus Christi Church where Merton received instruction for his conversion to Catholicism and baptism. It's only a few blocks from Columbia and the pastor had many stories to tell. I visited apartments Merton had lived in and some of his known hang-outs. It was a deeply moving experience for me.
The Thomas Merton Center and the International Thomas Merton Society are at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky.
I think I have copies of all the books Merton wrote and many written about him and his Thoughts in Solitude contains the passage of his that I have pasted next to my home and work computers:
Thomas Merton: From the Love of Solitude, Part II, “Thoughts in Solitude”
“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore, I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”
When I conduct spiritual journal workshops I sometimes use a handout called Writing Springboards From Thomas Merton. I am amazed how Merton's writings speak to so many people cross-religiously and cross-culturally. He is a phenomena.
The following excerpt from one of the documentaries about Merton, "Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton," shows his beloved hermitage, but it also features his voice. When I listen to this, though I never heard him speak in person, I am thrown back to a time when I studied him endlessly, wrote about him, and listened to audio tapes of him lecturing or reading from his books. This particular clip's last sentence is particularly haunting knowing how he died.
