Born in France, Thomas Merton was the son of an American artist and poet
and her New Zealander husband, a painter. Merton lost both parents before
he had finished high school, and his younger brother was killed in World
War II. Something of the ephemeral character of human endeavor marked all
his works, deepening the pathos of his writings and drawing him close to
Eastern, especially Buddhist, forms of monasticism.
After an initial education in the United States, France, and England,
he completed his undergraduate degree at Columbia University. His
parents, nominally friends, had given him little religious guidance,
and in 1938, he converted to Roman Catholicism. The following year he
received an M.A. from Columbia University and in 1941, he entered
Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, where he remained until a short time
before his death.
His working life was spent as a Trappist monk. At Gethsemani, he
wrote his famous autobiography, "The Seven Storey Mountain" (1948);
there he labored and prayed through the days and years of a constant
regimen that began with daily prayer at 2:00 a.m. As his contemplative
life developed, he still maintained contact with the outside world,
his many books and articles increasing steadily as the years went by.
Reading them, it is hard to think of him as only a "guilty bystander,"
to use the title of one of his many collections of essays. He was
vehement in his opposition to the Vietnam War, to the nuclear arms
race, to racial oppression.
Having received permission to leave his monastery, he went on a
journey to confer with mystics of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions.
He was accidentally electrocuted in a hotel in Bangkok, Thailand, on
December 10, 1968.
