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Thomas
Merton
But Merton's active social and political conscience was also informed by his conversion to Christianity and Catholicism in his early twenties. He worked for a time at Friendship House and then began to sense a vocation in the priesthood. In December 1941, he resigned his teaching post at Bonaventure College, Olean, NY, and journeyed to the Abbey of Gethsemani, near Louisville, Kentucky. There, Merton undertook the life of a scholar and man of letters, in addition to his formation as a Cistercian monk. The thoroughly secular man was about to undertake a lifelong spiritual journey into monasticism and the pursuit of his own spirituality. The more than 50 books, 2000 poems, and numerous essays, reviews, and lectures that have been recorded and published, now form the canon of Merton's writings. His importance as a writer in the American literary tradition is becoming clear. His influence as a religious thinker and social critic is taking its place alongside such luminaries as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Flannery O'Connor, and Martin Luther King. His explorations of the religions of the east initiated Merton's entrance into inter-religious dialogue that puts him in the pioneering forefront of worldwide ecumenical movements. Merton died suddenly, electrocuted by a malfunctioning fan, while he was attending his first international monastic conference near Bangkok, Thailand, on 10 December 1968. An abbreviated selection of his works, including some posthumous publications, is noted below:
"Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God
because they induce a kind of contact with the Creator and Ruler of the
Universe." ?
1966 Conjectures Of A Guilty Bystander "Businesses, are, in
reality, quasi-religious sects. When you go to work in one, you embrace
A NEW FAITH. And if they are really big businesses, you progress from
faith to a kind of mystique. Belief in the product, preaching the
product, in the end the product becomes the focus of a transcendental
experience. Through 'the product' one communes with the vast forces of
life, nature, and history that are expressed in business." "Advertising treats
all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to
sacraments." "Technology is not
in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a
great temptation."
"[A publisher asked
me to write something on 'The Secret of Success,' and I refused.] If I
had a message to my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be
anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and
form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success. ... If you have learned
only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted. If a
university concentrates on producing successful people, it is lamentably
failing in its obligation to society and to the students
themselves." "War represents a
vice that mankind would like to get rid of but which it cannot do
without. Man is like an alcoholic who knows that drink will destroy him
but who always has a reason for drinking. So with war." Acknowledgements: |
Thomas
Merton was born in Prades, France, to artists, Ruth and Owen Merton. His
early years were spent in the south of France; later, he went to private
school in England and then to Cambridge.