At home with Merton
In 2001, I made a pilgrimage to the Thomas Merton Center in Louisville, KY, to attend the International Thomas Merton Society’s conference. I had come to Merton’s work relatively late, but I had read most of his books by the time I arrived in Louisville. The itinerary promised much, since we were supposed to visit the center where his papers are kept and his monastery, the Abbey of Gethsemani, in rural Kentucky.
On the first morning of the conference, there was much buzz in the dining hall where we ate. I wanted to read some Merton as a form of prayer and I sat by myself at a table far from the honored guests who had many admirers in front of them. As the keynote speech was due to begin, a small, dark-haired woman asked if she could sit near me. Of course, I said, and she and a woman religious in a habit sat next to me. I could overhear some of their conversation and it struck me that the small woman had known Merton very well.
She turned out to be Tommie O’Callaghan, whose seven children called Merton “Uncle Louie” and whose home often granted Merton hospitality. Mrs. O’Callaghan became one of the trustees of Merton’s literary estate. She and I didn’t talk much, but I felt blessed to have met her briefly in a stroke of serendipity.
The conference sessions were all fascinating and the Merton scholars who presented papers or memories of the great writer captured his description of himself as “noisy, full of the racket of imperfections and passions and the wide open wounds left by sin, full of faults and envies and miseries, full of my own intolerable emptiness.” Those who had known Merton invariably talked about his sense of humor and his sociable nature, which seem antithetical to the character of a Trappist monk. Yet, Merton was so full of life that his deepest religious works all have a zest for simple things and a sense of discovery. The magic of literature, language and nature shine in all of Merton’s works as brightly as his impish smile.
I had the opportunity to attend a lecture by the brilliant theologian Fr. Robert Barron, who discussed Merton in the context of Thomas Aquinas. After the lecture, I asked Fr. Barron who today’s Merton was and he gave me the name of the spiritual writer he considered closest to Merton’s lineage: Henri Nouwen. I had to agree.
The highlight of our conference trip was a visit to Gethsemani, Merton’s home for the 26 years he was a Trappist. We attended Mass in the abbey’s church and visited his simple grave, which has his Trappist name, Fr. Louis Merton, which he was given with his vows. (Merton never did stand on formality and he liked to have his seminarians call him “Uncle Louie” like the O’Callaghan children did. I could never picture anyone calling Aquinas “Father Tommy.”)
The church at Gethsemani is plain and whitewashed, with a tall steeple over a monastic cemetery where Merton and his fellow monks lie. After prayers, we walked the mile or so to Merton’s retreat, the little cement-block house he finally won after years of lobbying for a place to be a hermit. (His little house ended up hosting Dr. Martin Luther King, Thich Nhat Hahn, the Berrigan brothers, Joan Baez and a lot of other visitors, since Merton was a magnet for seekers who somehow made their way to his retreat.)
Merton’s home is open to visitors and retreat participants. The simple living room has the desk where he wrote, his chair, his rocker. I sat at Merton’s table and felt his presence in the rough wood. A simple bedroom and kitchen were plain, but his home chapel almost brought me to tears. His icons and the altar where he celebrated Mass alone or for his guests were just as he had left them. No more than 10 of us could squeeze into the little room at a time, but there were the icons we had seen in photos of his house in the Kentucky knobs. I felt at home with Thomas Merton.
I arrived home on June 10, a Sunday. I was tired, but so spiritually enriched that I didn’t mind getting up early for work the next day. As I walked in at 8 a.m., I heard two co-workers having a gleeful discussion about the impending execution of Timothy McVeigh that was junderway. He was pronounced dead by lethal injection 14 minutes after 8 a.m. in our time zone. In the excitement of my trip to the Merton conference and my time on retreat, I had somehow passed up the biggest news of the weekend.
For the rest of the day, the elation of my trip to Merton’s home and the disgust over my co-workers’ celebration of the death of one of God’s children–the sinner’s crimes notwithstanding–competed against one another. I ended up fasting most of that execution day, June 11, 2001, when the media was full of survivors’ elation over his death. As someone who has long supported an end to the death penalty, I have always found that every judicial murder diminishes our humanity. My relationship with the two co-workers who were so full of bloodlust was never the same after that day.
I kept thinking what Merton would have been doing that June 11. He had wanted to march with Dr. King at Selma and to travel to Vietnam during the war to advocate for peace, but his vow of obedience prevented him from going when his abbot refused. That June 11, I think that Merton would have been as nauseated as I was over the national spectacle of celebrating death. (In fact, one of McVeigh’s fellow inmates correctly called the media frenzy Bloodstock.)
Merton was more than a cloistered monk shut off from the world; in fact, he never really left the world. He would have been speaking out about the savagery of turning an execution into a public festival. He would have been writing about its inherent evil from the same little house I had visited the day before. Merton would not have accepted the calls for blood.
A young Norbertine monk I met at a conference in Chicago some years ago told me the paradox of becoming a monk, especially in Merton’s case. “You think you’re leaving the world,” said the young monk. “But you’re actually drawing more people to yourself.” More strangers ask you to pray for them, he said, and they tell you their problems more readily than they would if you were just a neighbor. Like Merton, the young monk could not take himself out of a world staggering under its own painful burden.
The young monk captured the essence of Merton: the more he withdrew, the more he was alive in the world. From his simple home chapel during his solitary Masses, he must have been praying for millions of souls. His books, essays and prayers are still my richest sources of spiritual renewal. He was a master of the mysteries of the soul and of its expression before God. Almost 40 years after his death, Thomas Merton is still wonderfully alive to me.
