Thomas Merton
LongingThomas Merton was an American twentieth-century mystic, Trappist monk, and spiritual writer whose life and work brought contemplation into conversation with the demands of the modern world. The book presents him not as a figure who withdrew from human concerns, but as one whose monastic practice gradually sharpened his recognition of kinship with strangers and whose search for God crossed religious boundaries without erasing his Christian faith.
Monastic life and its discipline
Merton entered the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1941. The monastery, founded in 1848 by monks from France in the rolling Knobs region of Kentucky near Bardstown, became both his home and the setting for a demanding life of prayer, study, and work. As Master of Scholastics, he knew the place through its routines and its history. During a nightly fire watch, he carried sneakers to avoid disturbing sleepers, a flashlight, keys, and a large clock with a leather strap. At stations throughout the monastery he punched the clock to record his rounds, walking from the basements to the bell tower. His recollection of earlier work as a postulant—waxing a hall floor—made the night watch a passage through the stages of his own formation.
The monastery of the 1940s imposed severe conditions: straw mattresses, cold winters and hot summers, manual labor, communication by sign language, and mail delivered only four times a year. On Fridays, monks used a small whip called the discipline while reciting the Lord’s Prayer; in the Chapter of Faults, they publicly acknowledged breaches of the rules and accepted penance without question. Merton’s account does not make these practices an uncomplicated ideal. It shows the physical austerity within which he sought a life ordered around prayer. He wrote, “The night, O My Lord, is a time of freedom.” After Compline, the darkness and silence offered not escape from his questions about God but a place to keep living with them. He had written, “I do not wait for an answer because I have begun to realize you never answer when I expect,” and found “greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.”
Merton described his arrival as a recognition of home. On the anniversary of his first visit, he wrote that the monastery was the one place “where everything made sense,” and recalled, “As soon as I got inside, I knew I was home.” On March 19, 1944, after completing the novitiate, he took simple vows, committing himself to remain for three more years. That same period marked the beginning of his public literary life: his first book, Thirty Poems, appeared, and, encouraged by his abbot, he began the autobiography that became The Seven Storey Mountain.
Writing and the contemplative life
Published on October 4, 1948, The Seven Storey Mountain recounts Merton’s life up to his entrance into the monastery. Its title invokes Dante’s Purgatorio and the seven levels of purgatory that Merton believed he had to climb in moving from his former life toward monastic existence. Censors in the Cistercian order shortened the manuscript, and his editor, Robert Giroux, made further suggestions. Sales began modestly, but the book spread by word of mouth; eight months after publication, Giroux presented Merton with the 100,000th copy. It became a bestseller and remains in print. The book has served as a starting point for readers seeking to understand Merton, but his account of contemplation in New Seeds of Contemplation carries his thought beyond the story of conversion and entry into the monastery.
Merton called contemplation “the highest expression of (a person’s) intellectual and spiritual life” and described it as life “fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive.” Human life, he wrote, comes from “an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source”; contemplation is awareness of that Source. It is not an achievement secured by intellectual effort, but a gift: a sudden awakening to reality, in which love gives the person certainty of God’s active presence in daily life. The account aligns with the book’s wider description of mystical experience as direct awareness of God that exceeds ordinary language and reason. Merton’s writing about Cuba, for example, describes a conviction that God was immediately present without a sensory vision. The experience mattered not because it supplied an extraordinary spectacle, but because it made divine presence certain to him.
His reading life also shows how an older mystical tradition remained active in his own practice. His confessor urged him to pray for understanding and continue reading John of Ruusbroec. Merton later remembered the monastery garden as a place where he walked reading Ruusbroec. The detail joins study to the ordinary movement of monastic life: a fourteenth-century writer was not merely an object of historical study, but a guide Merton continued to consult.
From enclosure to human solidarity
A decisive change in Merton’s understanding of monastic life came during a visit to downtown Louisville. Standing at Fourth and Walnut among shoppers, he was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of love for the people around him: “they were mine and I was theirs,” and they could not be alien to him even though they were strangers. The experience did not lead him to reject his vows or his vocation. It unsettled the idea that monks belonged to a separate, spiritually superior kind of humanity. The supposedly “holy” life could not be a refuge from the human family; Merton understood himself as a man among other people, sharing a humanity in which God had become incarnate. He wanted others to recognize that they were “all walking around shining like the sun.”
This insight supplies a counterpoint to the enclosed world of the monastery. Merton continued in monastic life, but the Louisville experience widened its meaning: contemplation did not make other people remote, and religious separation could not be mistaken for a different order of human existence. His spiritual search was therefore joined to concern for the world beyond the cloister. The book presents his writings on racism, peace, and nuclear war as continuing to speak to contemporary readers, alongside his influence as a spiritual teacher.
Wider religious inquiry and legacy
Merton’s interests extended beyond the Christian mystical tradition. Over the course of his life he explored Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam, while continuing to affirm his Christian faith. His Asian journey and his encounters with religious thought formed part of a sustained effort to cross boundaries and seek further knowledge, rather than a simple departure from his earlier commitments. The account places this openness beside his deep grounding in Christian mysticism: Merton sought insight across traditions while remaining a Trappist monk.
On December 10, 1968, the Abbey of Gethsemani received a cable from the American Embassy in Bangkok reporting Merton’s death. The precise circumstances remained uncertain. The account says he apparently returned to his room to shower and rest, then touched an electric fan that seems to have had a short circuit; his body was found on the floor with the fan across it, and the official cause of death was accidental electrocution. His death ended a life whose influence did not end with the monastery. His books continued to be read, Merton groups remained active around the world, and new publications about his work continued to appear. The book’s final assessment holds together the strands of his legacy: he brought mysticism into the twentieth century, addressed urgent public questions, and encouraged readers to seek spiritual depth without treating the boundaries between people or religions as final.
