Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

 "Thomas Merton (1915-1968) is arguably the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, has sold over one million copies and has been translated into over fifteen languages. He wrote over sixty other books and hundreds of poems and articles on topics ranging from monastic spirituality to civil rights, nonviolence, and the nuclear arms race.

His Life

(Quoted from the website www.merton.org)

"Thomas Merton was born in Prades, France. His New Zealand-born father, Owen Merton, and his American-born mother, Ruth Jenkins, were both artists. They had met at painting school in Paris, were married at St. Anne's Church, Soho, London and returned to the France where Thomas Merton was born on January 31st, 1915.

After a rambunctious youth and adolescence, Merton converted to Roman Catholicism whilst at Columbia University and on December 10th, 1941 he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani, a community of monks belonging to the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (Trappists), the most ascetic Roman Catholic monastic order.

The twenty-seven years he spent in Gethsemani brought about profound changes in his self-understanding. This ongoing conversion impelled him into the political arena, where he became, according to Daniel Berrigan, the conscience of the peace movement of the 1960's. Referring to race and peace as the two most urgent issues of our time, Merton was a strong supporter of the nonviolent civil rights movement, which he called "certainly the greatest example of Christian faith in action in the social history of the United States." For his social activism Merton endured severe criticism, from Catholics and non-Catholics alike, who assailed his political writings as unbecoming of a monk.

During his last years, he became deeply interested in Asian religions, particularly Zen Buddhism, and in promoting East-West dialogue. After several meetings with Merton during the American monk's trip to the Far East in 1968, the Dalai Lama praised him as having a more profound understanding of Buddhism than any other Christian he had known. It was during this trip to a conference on East-West monastic dialogue that Merton died, in Bangkok on December 10, 1968, the victim of an accidental electrocution. The date marked the twenty-seventh anniversary of his entrance to Gethsemani."

Timeline

Posthumous Publications:

Quotes


You are made in the image of what you desire.

To unify your life unify your desires.

To spiritualize your life, spiritualize your desires.

To spiritualize your desires, desire to be without desire.

Thomas Merton, Firewatch, p. 55

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Tomas Merton writes in the foreword to his book Zen and the Birds of Appetite, 1968, shortly before his own death:


"Where there is carrion lying, meat-eating birds circle and descend. Life and death are two. The living attack the dead, to their own profit. The dead lose nothing by it. They gain too, by being disposed of. Or they seem to, if you must think in terms of gain and loss. Do you then approach the study of Zen with the idea that there is something to be gained by it? This question is not intended as an implicit accusation. But it is, nevertheless, a serious question. Where there is a lot of fuss about 'spirituality,’ 'enlightenment' or just 'turning on,' it is often because there are buzzards hovering around a corpse. This hovering. this circling, this descending, this celebration of victory, are not what is meant by the Study of Zen - even though they may be a highly useful exercise in other contexts. And they enrich the birds of appetite.

Zen enriches no one. There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the 'nothing,’ the 'no-body' that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. lt was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey."

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From "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:"  

"If technology really represented the rule of reason, there would be much less to regret about our present situation.  Actually, technology represents the rule of quantity, not the rule of reason (quality=value=relation of means to authentic human ends).  It is by means of technology that man the person, the subject of qualified and perfectible freedom, becomes quantified, that is, becomes part of a mass--mass man--whose only function is to enter anonymously into the process of production and consumption.  He becomes on one side an implement, a 'hand,' or better, a 'biophysical link' between machines: on the other side he is a mouth, a digestive system, and an anus, something through which pass the products of his technological world, leaving a transient and meaningless sense of enjoyment.  The effect of a totally emancipated technology is the regression of man to a climate of moral infancy, in total dependence not on 'mother nature' (such a dependence would be partly tolerable and human) but on the pseudo-nature of technology, which has replaced nature by a closed system of mechanisms with no purpose but that of keeping themselves going.

If technology remained in the service of what is higher than itself--reason, man, God--it might indeed fulfill some of the functions that are now mythically attributed to it.  But becoming autonomous, existing only for itself, it imposes upon man its own irrational demands, and threatens to destroy him.  Let us hope it is not too late for man to regain control."   (1966)


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