Word: merton
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...THOMAS MERTON...
...scenario calls for a quiet death among concerned chipmunks," Thomas Merton once wrote a friend after surviving major surgery, "and I'd like it that way." He did not get his wish. On the very day that Karl Barth lay dying in Basel, the 53-year-old Trappist poet-priest was attending an ecumenical conference of Roman Catholic and non-Christian monks in suburban Bangkok. Returning to his bungalow to rest during the hot afternoon, he reached out to adjust an electric fan and apparently touched an exposed wire. He was instantly electrocuted...
...years Merton had been the most publicly visible Christian contemplative since St. Simeon Stylites took refuge on top of a pillar. Merton's pillar was print, and he had not exactly chosen it for himself. What he had chosen, at the age of 26 and as a new convert to Roman Catholicism, was the silent and anonymous life of the Trappist monks, who rise early, work hard, eat little and pray much. When he entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, however, his abbot decreed that Merton should continue writing-as he had since...
Provocative Perfume. The most lucidly honest autobiography since Rousseau's Confessions, The Seven Storey Mountain found a surprisingly receptive audience in the uneasy, searching postwar world. The book was a frank, self-effacing narrative of Merton's peripatetic youth: his dizzying year at Cambridge, his first grapplings with the craft of poetry, his mildly wicked undergraduate years at Columbia (including a one-meeting membership in the Young Communist League), his ultimate discovery of a faith and a vocation. It was a book suffused with spiritual zeal, and was perhaps the last great flowering of Catholic romanticism. Its perfume...
...Seven Storey Mountain also hinted of the Merton to come. Prophetically, he digressed in it to deliver a stinging rebuke to the civilization that could pro duce a Harlem. In a wide range of books and articles, Merton returned again and again to themes of social justice and a quiet, but very absolute pacifism. He lent his name to many antiwar organizations, resolutely opposed the Viet Nam war. Just two months ago, he characterized some student activists he met as "real modern monks...