Thomas Merton (1915–68,) ordained as Father Louis, was a Trappist monk, social critic, spiritual guide, and minor poet. He was one of the most prominent American Roman Catholic writers of the 20th century.
Born in Prades in the French Pyrenees to a New Zealander father and an American mother, Merton studied and taught English at Columbia University. In 1938, he converted to Roman Catholicism and, in 1941, joined the Trappist order at Our Lady of Gethsemane Abbey, Kentucky.
Merton’s bestselling autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1946; also titled Elected Silence, 1949,) depicted a traditional conversion story to Catholicism. However, Merton’s approach to monastic spirituality, chronicled in his vast literary output, resonated the transformations in modern-day Catholicism—a greater openness to other spiritual beliefs and a deep concern for the ethical dilemmas of the modern world.
Merton wrote personal journals, poetry, and social criticism. His notable works include Seeds of Contemplation (1949) and Contemplation in a World of Action (1971.) A collaborator of the Dalai Lama, Zen author D. T. Suzuki, and Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, Merton authored popular books on Zen Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism.
Morton’s perception of monasticism matured, and he became a hermit. He died from accidental electrocution by a damaged shower while attending a world conference of contemplatives in Bangkok.
Lawrence S. Cunningham, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, wrote the acclaimed biography Thomas Merton and the Monastic Vision (1999.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Thomas Merton
My life is … a mystery which I do not attempt to really understand, as though I were led by the hand in a night where I see nothing, but can fully depend on the Love and Protection of Him Who guides me.
—Thomas Merton
What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous…
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Discovery, Patience
We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have – for their usefulness
—Thomas Merton
You must realize that it is the ordinary way of God’s dealings with us that our ideas do not work out speedily and efficiently as we would like them to. The reason for this is not only the loving wisdom of God, but also the fact that our acts have to fit into a great complex pattern that we cannot possibly understand. I have learned over the years that Providence is always a whole lot wiser than any of us, and that there are always not only good reasons, but the very best reasons for the delays and blocks that often seem to us so frustrating and absurd.
—Thomas Merton
A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Living
Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy if anything can.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Acceptance
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.
—Thomas Merton
We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Advertising
We are already one and we imagine we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. Whatever we have to be is what we are.
—Thomas Merton
Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity. The Seven Storey Mountain.
—Thomas Merton
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
Topics: Love
Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its visions of other realities, but in the end when we become used to the new light, we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Faith
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is itself to succumb to the violence of our times. Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Service
Attachment to spiritual things is.. just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Attachment
What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forests, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the bridges, and the talk of the water courses everywhere in the hollows!Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.
—Thomas Merton
The monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less than himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order.
—Thomas Merton
Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a man deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost.
—Thomas Merton
Peace is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Peace
I am willing to admit that some people might live there for years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them — the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise, that fills those ancient buildings.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Education, Universities
He who attempts to act and do things for others and for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give to others. He will communicate to them only the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, and his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas.
—Thomas Merton
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Happiness
If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world.
—Thomas Merton
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Harmony
Modern man believes he is fruitful and productive when his ego is aggressively affirmed, when he is visibly active, and when his action produces obvious results.
—Thomas Merton
It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as Gods will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe youtry to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as Gods will yourself!
—Thomas Merton
The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: One liners, Temptation
If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell
—Thomas Merton
Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for Joy. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and joy you have not yet begun to live.
—Thomas Merton
To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us – and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him. Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.
—Thomas Merton
Perhaps I am stronger than I think.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Assurance, Confidence
When we are strong, we are always much greater than the things that happen to us.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Strength
The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Truth
When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash–at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the “newness”, the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Vision, Solitude, Life
We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Courage, Failure, Growth
We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Decisions
Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.
—Thomas Merton
Topics: Security, Anxiety
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Jacques Barzun French-born American Historian
John Henry Newman British Theologian, Poet
John Lancaster Spalding American Catholic Clergyman
Frederick Buechner American Presbyterian Clergyman
Jean-luc Godard French-born Swiss Film Director
Edward McKendree Bounds American Methodist Clergyman
William Sloane Coffin American Presbyterian Clergyman
Harry Emerson Fosdick American Baptist Minister
William Laurence Sullivan American Unitarian Clergyman
Charles Henry Parkhurst American Clergyman