Thomas Merton: An Introduction to His Life, Teachings, and Practices

By Jon M. Sweeney

An introduction to the spiritual legacy of Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk and one of the most influential spiritual figures of the 20th century. His writing on contemplation, monastic life, mysticism, poetry, and social issues have influenced generations and his legacy of interfaith understanding and social justice endures to this day. Thomas Merton: An Introduction to His Life, Teachings, and Practices offers an exploration of Merton as a monk, as a writer, and as a human being. Author Jon M. Sweeney delves into Merton’s life and ideas with an appreciation for his work and a deep understanding of the spiritual depth that it contains.

Thomas Merton offers a unique view of the popular and sometimes controversial monk, braiding together his thoughts and practices with the reality of his life to create a full portrait of a pivotal figure. The Merton revealed in its pages is a source of inspiration and insight for those wrestling with questions of faith and spirituality.

At its core, the book is about the search for wholeness—a search Merton undertook himself throughout his lifetime and one readers can also embark on as they draw inspiration and guidance from his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: May 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781250250490

Jon M. Sweeney

Jon M. Sweeney is an award-winning author who has been interviewed in the Dallas Morning News and The Irish Catholic, and on television at CBS Saturday Morning. His book, The Pope Who Quit, (Doubleday/Image) was optioned by HBO. He is also author of forty other books on spirituality, mysticism, and religion, including Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart, with Mark S. Burrows (Hampton Roads), the biography Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Catechist, Saint (Liturgical Press), and Thomas Merton: An Introduction to His Life and Practices (St. Martin’s Essentials and Penguin Random House Audio, 2021). His bookish reputation is nothing new. In 2014, Publishers Weekly featured Jon in an interview titled, “A Life in Books and On the Move.” He began the 1990s as a theological bookseller in Cambridge, and ended the decade founding a multifaith publishing house, SkyLight Paths Publishing, in Vermont. He’s worked in books and publishing ever since. Today he writes, reviews, edits, and recommends books, speaks regularly at literary and religious conferences, is a Catholic married to a rabbi, and is active on social media (Twitter @jonmsweeney; Facebook jonmsweeney). Sweeney lives in the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee.

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Thomas Merton by Jon M. Sweeney

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For my Trappist friends,

present and gone

There is in all things an invisible fecundity … a hidden wholeness.

—THOMAS MERTON

Simple Chronology

Introduction

I would love to know what brought you here. What led you to go looking for Thomas Merton? I have my own reasons, which I’ll mention in a minute.

He’s famous, at least as famous as a monk can be. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, is the bestselling autobiographical book written by a monastic since St. Augustine’s Confessions, which first appeared in the fifth century. That’s a 1,500-year gap between bestsellers. Even today, nearly seventy-five years after The Seven Storey Mountain was published, spiritual directors, college professors, campus ministers, vowed religious, and reading groups still actively recommend it. It is a true classic. So is Merton, which can’t honestly be said about many religious figures from the twentieth century.

Not long ago, in 2015, Pope Francis recommended Merton in the first speech a pope ever gave before a joint session of the U.S. Congress. Pope Francis named four Americans that day as exemplary: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton. Merton, the pope said, 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. Thousands of people that night, including me, live streaming the speech or watching on television, cheered out loud. I’m not exaggerating. I’ve confirmed this with many friends. Audible cheers were heard outside apartments, condos, and houses throughout the land. How unexpected it was! (More on that later.) At the same time, thousands of others must surely have turned to each other on their couches as the pope mentioned Merton alongside President Lincoln, and said, Who’s that?

Thomas Merton is the one who wrote, There is in all things an invisible fecundity … a hidden wholeness. He wrote a lot of things (more on that later, too). But this quote is emblematic of his body of work—and his life. Throughout his life, Merton searched for the elusive wholeness that we all know somehow lurks nearby. This is what we all want for our lives—wholeness, integration, vitality, growth. And the opposites of those things are what we very much don’t want.

It is only by looking to Merton’s books that we begin to discover how much his search for spiritual truth was part of his own journey. He chronicled his experiences. He was a writer because it was by writing that he figured out who he was. For these reasons, the best approach to understanding him is to look at his chronological life, and the books, ideas, people, travels, and encounters that defined who he was at each step along the way. That’s what we will do here.

We all search for that elusive fecundity and wholeness in our own ways, and as a great spiritual writer, Merton consistently described his search in the most compelling of language. That’s what you find in the bestselling books—and we will look at those—and there are many of them. But most of all, this introduction to Merton will be about the search for wholeness itself. I don’t want this to be a place where you simply glean information about a famous twentieth-century Christian. I want you to find help on your own way. That is, in fact, what Merton wanted to do with all his writing: help readers find God and themselves, hopefully on paths that converge.

About the search for wholeness, Merton was always certain. And by the end of his life, he may even have found what he was looking for. We’ll see. You’ll be ready to decide that for yourself before we’re done.

HE CONFUSES A LOT OF PEOPLE

We are all secrets, Merton wrote one day in his private journal. In other words, there are limits to how much we can understand ourselves, let alone each other. Particularly, we can’t presume to understand someone else’s religious or spiritual life. What is on the surface tells only a fraction of their story.

Another twentieth-century favorite of mine is Edith Stein, the Jewish philosopher who converted to Roman Catholicism, became a Carmelite nun, and then died in a Nazi concentration camp. The Nazis didn’t care if a Jew had converted to another religion. After her tragic death, Stein became a saint in the estimation of the Catholic Church, whereas I’m sure Merton never will receive such an honor. (More on that later.) She’s officially known in the church as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Still, her niece once asked her about her conversion to Catholicism from Judaism, and Edith responded with a Latin phrase: "Secretum meum mihi. My secret is mine."

I think you’ll find that this is very true of Merton, as well, before you’re done reading about his life, writings, and spiritual practices. Our secrets are our own, particularly when it comes to who we are in our relationship with a God who, when communicating with us, if at all, often does so in a whisper.

This is one way of suggesting that we’ll never fully understand our subject. It is also a way of saying that Merton’s willingness to consistently and consciously be on pilgrimage, to talk with us while he’s searching for what he’s looking for, and to acknowledge that the search never stops in this life—that the answers are not often clear or simple—makes him an evergreen teacher of spiritual wisdom.

Popularly understood, he was a contemplative monk who introduced the possibility of a deep religious and spiritual life—something one might imagine exists only in a monastery—as available to anyone, whether they lived in a cloister or a city, were Christian or some other religious tradition, and whether or not they felt certain in their beliefs. His own life was full of contradictions, as we will soon see, and it is these very contradictions that also make him appealing to us still. He seems to have found a real and deep personal connection to the living God, and yet some of his actions reveal how very human he remained. Yet that core understanding—that a monastic sort of life might be available to you wherever you live—remains compelling.

Given that he was a monk, it is a wonder that we even know his name. He entered a strict monastery at the age of twenty-six, saying that he was no longer going to be a writer, that writing was mostly about ego, and that as a monk he was instead going to be a person of asceticism and prayer. If things had gone for him the way they went for 99.9 percent of the monks before him, Merton would have prayed and practiced his penance earnestly and quietly, and then died in blissful obscurity. That’s the