Word: monk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...clothbound edition. The author, Thomas Merton, was a young Roman Catholic convert who had scuttled a promising literary career to seek the austere and silent cloister of a Trappist monastery. But the career pursued him. At the time of his death in 1968 at the age of 53, the monk who dwelt in a hermitage at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky had become the most celebrated religious recluse in the Western world...
...died in a London air raid early in World War II.) The Seven Storey Mountain was so circumspect about Merton's youthful sins that his later conversion seemed oddly lopsided. Furlong's exploration of the Cambridge episode reveals the secret, morally reckless side that the monk would later say "demands a whole life of penance." What distinguishes Merton, however, is more than the detailed portrait of his scandal-marred youth. The monk lived more than two decades after his early epic, and he died quite a different man from the one he first described. Furlong provides what Thomas...
With the help of Shamus Clarke Schlabach, Mary Kaye in May 1980 traces Thera to a Santa Monica nursing home, where the monk has been placed by La Scola. Says she of her former lover: "I couldn't believe what I saw. He was wearing two pairs of pants, two short-sleeved shirts and a ragged sweater. He looked demented." She takes him from the nursing home and, five days later, marries...
...Scola rushes to a Riverside County judge, charging that Mary Kaye has kidnaped Thera. The judge gives La Scola temporary custody of the monk and his money, which, according to court records, amounts to about $417,000. The monk is moved back to the nursing home...
...custody hearings in July, Mary Kaye accuses La Scola of having used hypnotism and drugs to persuade the Theras to adopt him. She charges that he has unfeelingly left Georgia's ashes for a year in the Cadillac trunk. La Scola countercharges that Mary Kaye coerced the monk into marriage for his money...