NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
Thomas Merton has been called the man with a thousand lives. The number is an exaggeration. The sentiment is not.
Born in 1915 in France to an American mother and a New Zealander father, Merton’s early life was that of a troubled child. First, his family fled to America to escape World War I. Then, on October 21, 1921, his mother died. After that, Merton bounced between schools, homes, and countries. By his 16th birthday, his father had died, too.
Merton’s next life was that of a hard-drinking, womanizing agnostic. As a student at Cambridge University, he fathered a child out of wedlock. Later, as a student at Columbia University, he joined the Young Communist League. Religion, of any sort, held no attraction for him.
Then, it did. Merton’s life changed yet again in 1937, when he encountered the work of the Catholic philosopher Étienne Gilson. One Catholic book led to another, and in November 1938, Merton entered the Church. Three years later, on December 10, 1941, he entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky and became a Trappist monk.
Merton’s quiet monastic life, however, was also short-lived. Soon after his arrival, the monastery’s abbot encouraged him to pursue his writing. Merton’s literary reputation grew, and in 1948, Merton published his spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. Widely acclaimed, the book sold over 100,000 copies in its first year. For the next two decades, Merton (who became Father Merton in 1949) was one of the most influential intellectuals in America, writing more than 70 books and helping thousands find their way to the Church.
By the late 1960s, however, Merton had transformed once more, embodying the angst and questioning that defined the early post-conciliar years. Increasingly discontented with his life at Gethsemani, Merton spoke out on Vietnam, fell in love with a woman half his age, and became fascinated with Zen Buddhism.
In 1968, that fascination took him to Asia. There, 27 years to the day of his entrance to Gethsemani, Merton died in an accident.
The last of his “thousand” lives had begun.
