I literally bumped into Thomas Merton a few years ago at a time of great personal, creative and spiritual awakening. I had endeavored to push myself into new writerly discoveries and he seemed to be lighting my path.
What I found in his writing would forever change how I viewed my faith and my career. Though the path is winding, contracting and expanding all the time, it remains a worthy journey.
It continued last night as I attended the monthly meeting of the Cleveland Chapter of the International Thomas Merton Society at Ursuline College. We watched the new film "Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton."
In that darkened room filled with Ursuline nuns and Merton enthusiasts I watched a quiet, beautiful film that touched something buried deep within. I fought the lump in my throat and tears welling throughout as I listened to Merton's own words and those of the people who knew him. I recognized something of myself in him—a person desperately looking for God, plagued with doubt and longing—always the longing—for solitude, understanding, knowledge, peace...
To keep the emotion from spilling over, I busied myself by writing snippets from the film in my Moleskin. I'm not even sure I was consciously choosing what to write, rather the fragments wrote themselves.
Here is what appears in my notebook this Ash Wednesday:
"I will listen to this Asian ocean..." — Thomas Merton
He was unclassifiable, a dangerous thinker...
The lost soul of the 20th century looking for redemption, looking for God...
His 180-degree turn toward God fascinates people; how and why did this happen...
He cannot NOT write...
"My God there's an intellectual component to this (faith)..."
God Alone—the words outside the Abbey at Gethsemani
Merton entered the Abby heavy with a sense of punishment; the sex, alcohol and self-absorption had given him a sense of self-disgust...
"A shadow double followed me into the Abbey and he still wears the name, Thomas Merton..."
Gethsemani became too crowded and he turned to a tool shed and later a hermitage for solitude...
Dissatisfaction kept him going; kept him searching for God...
Merton spoke about monastic life the way some speak about Notre Dame football...
Faith means doubt; faith is not the suppression of doubt, it's the overcoming of doubt. You overcome doubt by going through it...
Merton had an omnivorous intellect, interested in all things...
His advice for prayer was to quiet down, it'll happen...
It was not unusual for him to write 20 letters a day to people from all walks of life...
He was silenced on the Cold War and nuclear arms race. For Merton to obey he had to work hard at it and his abbot considered him most obedient for that reason...
Some of his best writing occurred when he moved to the hermitage...
In 1966 he had to have back surgery and fell in love with a 24-year-old nurse.
"I have to think my way around this tenderness...It's a chain of events that can't be stopped...No question I'm in deep and that's no place for a hermit..."
Merton fell in love, those things happen, and yet he chose to stick with his monastic life...
"There's a certain fullness in my life even without her..."
Merton was not at the edge of anything; he was creating a new center...
He's not a relic, rather we haven't caught up with him yet...
Merton was a risk-taker by temperament and realized that to learn anything is to leave a safe ground...
His trip to the Far East in 1968 ended in his accidental death. There were rumors he was leaving the abbey permanently, was getting married or was on a CIA hit list.
"The moment of takeoff was ecstatic. We left the ground, I with Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny of being at last on my true way after years of waiting and wondering and fooling around. I'm going home, to a home I've never been in this body..."
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