It is December 31, 1967. In a small cinder-block cottage tucked in the woods of Nelson County, Ky., Thomas Merton listens to one of his favorite pianists, Mary Lou Williams, play her boogie-woogie jazz.
“I’m up late,” the Trappist monk said in his audio journal. “It’s seven o’clock and instead of going to bed I’m going to sit around and play some records. You are invited to participate in this New Year’s Eve party of one.”
It is a quiet start to what will be a momentous year for the renowned writer, social activist, and Catholic priest. Merton will travel to lands he long wanted to see, and meet spiritual leaders from faiths very different from his own.
It will also be his final year on Earth.
The new documentary The Many Storeys and Last Days of Thomas Merton recounts the monk’s life in 1968 and explores his crucial yet sometimes controversial pursuit of interfaith dialogue. The program was written and produced by Louisville filmmaker Morgan Atkinson.
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Conflict at Gethsemani
Merton was just shy of his 27th birthday when he entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani near Bardstown in 1941. His restless youth had taken him from his native France to the United States, England, Italy, and back to America, where he graduated from Columbia University and converted to Catholicism.
At Gethsemani, Merton blossomed as a writer, publishing more than 30 books during his time at the monastery. But Merton’s relationship with Gethsemani’s Abbot Dom James Fox was a rocky one. Fox entrusted the training of novice monks to Father Louis, Merton’s name at Gethsemani, yet he refused to allow Merton time away to explore his own deepening interest in other spiritual practices.
“Good Father Louis does not realize that he is a public figure of tremendous importance,” Fox wrote. “In my travels I hear comments on how much confidence priests and the religious place in Father Louis and his writing… There would be tremendous scandal for them to know that he is really quite restless and unsure of himself.”
Merton chaffed under Fox’s control and continued to push for permission to travel to Asia to study at Zen Buddhist monasteries.
“I have always striven to be perfectly obedient to legitimate commands, but I beg the right to form my conscience without demands that I follow your direction and no other,” Merton wrote to Fox.
Fox continued to deny Merton’s request to travel, saying it wasn’t God’s plan for the monk’s life. But Fox did allow Merton to move to a small hermitage on the Gethsemani grounds so he would have greater flexibility to write and pray in private.
Social Activism Draws Criticism
Despite being largely restricted to the monastery, Merton’s fame within and outside the church was growing. His 1948 autobiography, “The Seven Storey Mountain,” was a bestseller, and his other books drew wide acclaim. Merton also corresponded with leading thinkers of the era on issues ranging from spirituality to civil rights to modern warfare.
“Incredible barbarity of the Vietnam War,” Merton wrote in his journal. “The ways of killing defenseless people, it is appalling. Surely the moral sense of this country is eroded.”
As he grew more outspoken on contemporary issues, Merton alienated some faithful who thought he was overstepping his boundaries as monk. He was criticized as disloyal to America and in violation of his sacred trust. His drive to explore Buddhism and other eastern religious turned even more people against him.
“Many Catholics, for example, were very disappointed that Merton went to the East as if he’d lost his Christian faith,” says theologian and writer Richard Rohr.
But Merton’s perseverance would finally be rewarded when a new abbot was installed at Gethsamani in 1968. Dom Flavian Burns was more than a decade younger than Merton, and had once been his pupil at the monastery. He granted Merton permission to travel.
A Long-Awaited Journey to the Far East
Merton was invited to attend a conference in Thailand that would include Catholic and Buddhist monks. While away, Merton would also attend meetings in India and he hoped to visit Japan.
“He wanted to go and hear about Buddhism directly from the teachers of it, instead of through books,” says Br. Paul Quenon of his mentor. “And this was just another step in [Merton’s] search to really go deeper.”
Religion writer and filmmaker Paul Wilkes adds that Merton sought visceral contact with eastern spirituality.
“He knew so much about it, he had read about it, he had corresponded with people who were Asian experts and people in Asia,” Wilkes says. “But he wanted to taste it, he wanted to sense it.”
When Merton landed in Calcultta in late October 1968, he was overwhelmed by the crush of people from a vastly different culture living in extreme poverty. At the spiritual summit, Merton cut an unassuming figure amongst the other world religious leaders in attendance.
“I was struck with his humanness,” says Arthur Schriberg, who was a student delegate to the Calcutta conference. “He was not physically imposing… He didn’t speak a lot. He wanted others to talk more. He asked me my story.”
After Calcutta, Merton went to Dharamsala to meet with a young American Catholic named Harold Talbott, who would introduce Merton to the Dalai Lama. Talbott said Merton was exuberant about his journey, like a student on holiday from school. When Merton and the Dalai Lama met, Talbott says there was a long silence between the two spiritual leaders.
Finally, Talbott said the Dalai Lama asked Merton, “What do you want?”
Feeling the Presence of God
“I often describe him as a very, very strong bridge between Catholic tradition and Buddhist tradition,” says the Dalai Lama reflecting on his meeting with Merton..
The Dalai Lama was 33-years old when he met the Catholic monk. In a picture of the two men taken at their meeting, Merton looks like the elder teacher to the younger Buddhist.
“Sometimes when we discuss a religious matter, some people say, ‘it is said that…’ It does not come from experience,” the Dalai Lama explains. “So he, all the topics we discuss, come from his own experience.”
Merton described the Dalai Lama as physically bigger than he expected but solid, energetic, generous, and warm. The Catholic wrote that he felt they had become good friends during their meeting and developed a spiritual bond.
From India Merton went to Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka. As he toured a garden filled with ancient Buddhist statuary, Merton had a spiritual experience. Although other Catholics might have viewed Polonnaruwa as a pagan place, Paul Wilkes says Merton saw it as simply a new path to finding God.
“He didn’t want to just intellectually understand God, he wanted to feel it,” says Wilkes. “That’s what happened at Polonnaruwa: He felt the presence of God.”
’I Will Disappear from View’
By the time he arrived in Thailand, Merton was tired of hotels and jet planes. As he concluded his remarks at the religious conference in Bangkok, his words carried a weight of weariness.
“So I will disappear from view and we can all have a Coke or something,” the monk said.
A few hours later, Merton was dead, the victim of an accidental electrocution in his hotel room. It was Dec. 10, 1968 – 27 years to the day that he entered the monastic life at Gethsemani.
Merton’s body came back to America in a B-52 jet airplane alongside the bodies of American soldiers killed in southeast Asia. At Gethsemani, he was buried in a simple pine coffin in the monastery’s cemetery.
Now, nearly 50 years after his death, Merton remains a towering figure among spiritual seekers and an inspiration to those who promote peace and understanding among the world’s religions.
“What would’ve happened in 1969 if Merton had been around, what would he have added to the conversation?” asks Tori Murden McClure, the president of Spalding University in Louisville. “It’s all very rich and wonderful to think about.”
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