“The
beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves,
and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only
the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”
--Thomas
Merton
“But there is greater comfort
in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.”
--Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton, (1915 – 1968) was an American Catholic writer and mystic. He was a Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky; a poet; a social activist, and a student of comparative religion.
Merton wrote more than 50 books, mostly on spirituality, social justice, and pacifism. He 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.
“The theology of love must seek to deal realistically with the
evil and injustice in the world, and not merely to compromise with
them.”
--Thomas Merton
Merton was one of four Americans
mentioned by Pope Francis in his speech to a joint meeting of the
United States Congress on September 24, 2015. (Abraham Lincoln,
Martin Luther King, and Dorothy Day were the other three.) The Pope
used Merton’s legacy to transition into praising the United States’
renewed commitment to mending relationships with other nations.
Pope
Francis said, "A century ago, at the beginning of the Great War (World War I), which Pope Benedict
XV termed a 'pointless slaughter,' another notable American was born:
the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton. He remains a source of spiritual
inspiration and a guide for many people. In his autobiography he wrote:
'I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was
nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in
the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture
of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God, and yet hating him; born
to love him, living instead in fear of hopeless self-contradictory
hungers.'
Francis continued, "Merton was above all a man of prayer, a thinker who challenged
the certitudes of his time and opened new horizons for souls and for
the Church. He was also a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between
peoples and religions."
“The
whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the
interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one
another, and all involved in one another.”
--Thomas
Merton
Brief Biography
Later, Mertin went to private school in England and then to Cambridge. Both of his parents were deceased by the time Merton was a young teen. After a rambunctious youth and adolescence, he eventually moved to his grandparents' home in the United States to finish his education at Columbia University in New York City. There, Merton converted to Roman Catholicism.
“We do not exist for ourselves alone,
and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin
to love ourselves properly and thus also love others.”
--Thomas Merton
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.
“First of all, although men have a
common destiny, each individual also has to work out
his own personal
salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another
to find the meaning of life no doubt. But in the last analysis, the
individual person is
responsible for living his own life and for
"finding himself." If he persists in shifting his
responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of
his own existence. You cannot tell me who I am and I cannot tell you
who you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to
identify you?”
--Thomas Merton
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.
“The truth that many people never
understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid
suffering, the move you suffer because smaller and more insignificant
things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being
hurt.”
--Thomas Merton
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