The history of the church is strewn with the wreckage of those who confused God’s calling with their own mental illness. Thomas Merton was not one of them. His struggle to disentangle vocation from neurosis was a persistent theme throughout his journals and other writings, though his self-doubt was in many ways imposed upon him. In the opinion of the abbot, Merton’s desire for solitude was a symptom of something—instability, volatility, rebellion, or psychosis—but hardly divine inspiration. Each time the church authorities denied Merton’s requests to pursue an eremitic life, Merton would relent, convincing himself that they, not he, best knew the will of God. It was, after all, their job. And each time, Merton would eventually work his way back to the conviction that he knew God’s intentions for his own life better than the church did.
This cycle came to an abrupt end in March 1958. Merton had a revelation—a vision not unlike those of the medieval mystics. While walking through the crowded shopping district of downtown Louisville, he was “suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.”1
His reflections about that moment of enlightenment, published years later in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, are some of the most ecstatic in all his writing. So powerful was this vision in shaping who Thomas Merton became that a historical marker was later erected on the spot where the revelation had occurred—on the corner of Fourth and Walnut Streets.2 Below the seal of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, its brass letters read, “Merton had a sudden insight at this corner Mar. 18, 1958, that led him to redefine his monastic identity with greater involvement in social justice issues.”3
After that point, his writing did indeed turn decidedly toward social and political involvement. “It was like waking from a dream of separateness,” he wrote. “We [monks] are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the world of mass media, business, revolution, and all the rest.”4
But what, Merton asked himself, is the function of solitude in a world where separateness doesn’t exist? Why would God call anyone to be a hermit? He explains, “My solitude . . . is not my own, for I see now how much it belongs to them [the people on the street]—and that I have a responsibility for it in their regard, not just in my own. It is because I am one with them that I owe it to them to be alone, and when I am alone they are not ‘they’ but my own self. There are no strangers!”5
To Merton, solitude was solidarity, a way of loving the world as Scripture had commanded. “Go into the desert not to escape other men,” Merton wrote, “but in order to find them in God”6—counterintuitive, but in keeping with his evolving thoughts about his vocation.
On March 19, the day after his epiphany, he tramped up the hill to St. Anne’s to reflect on the insights of the previous day. As he watched a hawk wheel over a neighboring farm, “tracing out a circle of silence in the sky,” he was struck by the “peace and sweetness” of the place. At that moment, he had another, smaller revelation. The solitude he had been so actively seeking for years was already his, in “the silence of this little house.” He wrote, “How many graces, here in St. Anne’s, that I did not know about, in those years when I was here all the time, when I had what I most wanted and never really knew it.”7 This is reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s lines near the end of “Little Gidding”:
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.8
Merton no longer needed to waste time waiting for that Love and Calling. They were already his. The revelation showed him that “solitude alone was not exactly what I wanted.” His vocation meant nothing if he did not recognize that he was “still a member of the human race.”9
It was as if Merton was returning to the fall of 1941, when he was faced with the choice of working in the world with Catherine de Hueck Doherty at Friendship House or traveling to Kentucky to become a solitary. He had now discovered it was a false choice. Not only could he take both paths simultaneously, but neither path could be taken without the other. He was not seeking a hermitage for himself. He was seeking it to express his unity with the whole world.
•••
A year later, in June 1959, Merton wrote, “I really owe it to [Dom James] to propose, first of all, a request to become a hermit in the woods. I like less and less the term ‘hermit.’ I want to live alone—not become a member of a fictitious category. But I owe it to him to ask this permission to live alone here.”10 A few days later, he “worked out a simple plan for a hermitage behind the sheep barn in the woods, but it is too silly. Only if no other way is possible will I take that one.”11
At that time, Merton had no less than four invitations to leave Gethsemani—among them, an offer to go to an abbey in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and another to Tortola, British Virgin Islands. He also briefly considered requesting a transfer to New Mexico to work with the Pueblo people. The idea of living in an actual desert was especially tantalizing.
With so many offers, he needed to answer one basic question first: Would the church ever consent to his transferring away from Gethsemani? In September an emissary, Father Georgio, was sent to the Vatican with a personal plea from Merton.
By Christmas, he had his answer: no. While disappointed, he also felt strangely relieved. The decision was made. Staying put—stability—was the way forward.
In January 1960, during a retreat, Merton read an article about “the canonical situation of hermits,” which, he wrote, “reopened everything. The big wound bleeds.”12 Finding a way to live as a hermit at Gethsemani became his focus. With the shed of St. Anne’s as a model, he again pondered the idea of a structure, a habitable shack, just outside the walls on the hills above the abbey. Ever since his afternoon hike eleven years earlier, when he surveyed the monastery from that distant, bucolic perspective, this plan had offered hope.
•••
Ironically, Merton’s new, more socially conscious writing owed as much to Gregory Zilboorg as to the epiphany on the streets of Louisville. The accusation of being “verbological” wouldn’t have bothered Merton so much if he hadn’t already been having doubts about his tendency to view contemplation as the solution to all problems.
Those doubts arose at a time when he was already looking beyond his roles as an income producer for the abbey and the master of novices. He was observing global realities as never before and seeing what activists and thinkers outside the monastery were seeing. And he was distressed. Although he had long been concerned about social issues, new forces had been unleashed in the world. The Cold War was now at its peak. A wall had been constructed in Berlin, spy planes were being shot down, and countries in Eastern Europe had been invaded. Merton perceived the evils of communist totalitarianism as well as the damage done by the West’s overzealous backlash. He read about the emerging Civil Rights movement, the political fear-mongering of politicians, the belligerence of nuclear-armed nations, and the dangers of what Eisenhower dubbed the “military-industrial complex.” Closer to home, from the Strategic Air Command base at Fort Campbell on the Tennessee border, bombers laden with nuclear payloads regularly rumbled so low over Our Lady of Gethsemani that Merton could make out the bomb bay doors on their undersides.
In the 1960s, Merton’s reimagined approach to solitude and his commitment to social concerns began to feed each other, as evidenced by his newest books: Disputed Questions (1960), New Seeds of Contemplation (1962), Seeds of Destruction (1964), Gandhi on Non-Violence (1965), Raids on the Unspeakable (1966), Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966), and Faith and Violence (1968). Even his poetry became more political and countercultural, as seen in his collection Emblems of a Season of Fury (1963). He contributed articles to antiwar journals and helped Catholic activist brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan found an interfaith peace organization.
In October 1961, he published the article “The Root of War Is Fear” in The Catholic Worker. He was also completing a book to be called Peace in the Post-Christian Era and was editing a multi-author compilation of essays on the same subject. His burgeoning activism disturbed the authorities. The following April, fearful that Merton might stir up controversy among the Father Coughlin crowd, the head of the Cistercian order in France, Dom Gabriel Sortais, ordered Merton to cease all publication of his antiwar and antinuclear pronouncements. Merton, who had longed chafed at such censorship, was furious. How could he express his solidarity with those oppressed by war and political exploitation if he was not allowed to publish?
So Merton came up with a work-around. Publishing wasn’t the same as writing, he reasoned, so why not keep writing? He continued to produce scores of letters and essays on the issues of war and peace, but instead of publishing them, he conscripted the abbey’s novices—his monastic students—to mimeograph them. He then circulated the writings, samizdat fashion, among such interested correspondents as therapist Erich Fromm, Catholic social worker Dorothy Day, poet Czeslaw Milosz, novelist Henry Miller, Merton’s former teacher Mark Van Doren, and nearly seventy other cultural gatekeepers.13
Among the recipients was Ethel Kennedy, wife of Bobby Kennedy and sister-in-law to the president. In one letter to her, after praising President Kennedy, Merton wrote, “It seems to me that the great problem we face is not Russia but war itself. War is the main enemy. . . . Unless we fight war, both in ourselves and in the Russians . . . we are purely and simply going to be wrecked by the forces that are in us.”14 Scholar James W. Douglass has suggested that Merton’s letter ended up in the hands of the president himself only months before Kennedy’s standoff with the Soviets over their deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba—the Cuban Missile Crisis.15
Merton’s views on war and peace were vindicated a year and a half later, when, on April 11, 1963, Pope John XXIII issued his influential encyclical Pacem in Terris (“Peace on Earth”), which was partly inspired by Merton’s circulated writings. Three days later, on Easter Sunday, Merton wrote a testy letter to the abbot general who had censored his antiwar writings in the first place. “Now the Holy Father clearly says that war can no longer be used as an instrument of justice in a world where nuclear arms are possessed,” wrote Merton. “Fortunately, he does not need to be approved by the censors.”16
Merton’s antiwar articles, essays, and letters were published posthumously in such volumes as Thomas Merton on Peace (1971, revised in 1980 as The Non-Violent Alternative), Passion for Peace (1995), Cold War Letters (2006), and, the book that was originally censored by the church authorities in 1962, Peace in the Post-Christian Era (eventually published in 2004). Those writings remain some of the most important documents in American literature on the subjects of war and nonviolence.
For Merton, the late fifties and early sixties offered an unusual convergence of circumstances—Zilboorg’s attack, his epiphany in Louisville, his dissatisfaction with his own devotional writing, and the state of the world at large. It was a unique historical moment. His vocation had given him exactly the foothold he needed to climb from the wreckage, and, like the desert hermits he so admired, he was able to “pull the whole world to safety” after him.
•••
Strong desires have a way of shaping the world around them.
At the beginning of 1960, Merton’s dream of a hermitage coincided with the suggestion from someone in the community that a retreat house might be built where group instruction could be offered, important conferences held, and special guests lodged. It was tacitly assumed that Merton would be the chief beneficiary, since, as the master of novices, he could use the structure as a classroom and private meeting space—not a personal living space at that point, but a communal one.
For the next six months, the question was not if such an edifice would be built but when. The plan took shape “unexpectedly and without premeditation.”17 In July, after someone floated the idea of asking some major corporations for financing, it was decided that there should be no corporate strings attached, and the structure should be simple, functional, and cheaply built. After that, things moved quickly.
In September, the monks cleared the brush from the site. In October, Merton and three novices dug the shallow trench for the foundation, and a few days later, while Merton daydreamed about planting fruit trees to the east of the building, the concrete slab was poured. By the end of the month, the cinder-block walls had been raised and the roof added.
Dom James tried to tamp down Merton’s excitement by “intimating,” as Merton wrote, “that it is something he does not want me to have or even use except in a very restricted way. I mean, he is very clear about my not living in it, or sleeping in it.”18
That did not deter him, late one afternoon, from walking up the hill to the empty structure. “Sat on the porch of the hermitage,” he reflected, already conceiving of it as the hermitage rather than the retreat center, “and watched the sunlight fade in the valley, and saw the moon rise over the little maple sapling we planted on the east side yesterday. If I have any desire left in the world it is to live there and die there.”19
•••
Over the next two years, Dom James granted Merton permission to spend an occasional afternoon meditating at the new structure. By late 1964, Dom James eventually warmed to the prospect of Merton’s moving there permanently someday, though Merton was cautious and had good reason to be. Dom James had a different vision of what a hermit’s life entailed, which Merton summarized like this: “No contact with anyone. . . . No letters. No visits. No talking. To do any kind of productive work ‘would spoil the purity of intention.’”20 The abbot’s view was the one traditionally held by the church.
Merton’s vision was more expansive. A few years earlier he had compiled The Wisdom of the Desert, and the alternately winsome and austere anecdotes in that collection directly challenged the stereotype. The desert solitaries of the fourth century were vibrant characters, wise, waggish, and, Merton insisted, “eminently social.”21 They had relationships. They ministered to the poor. They talked to each other, received visitors, and did productive work, like weaving mats and baskets to sell in the nearby towns. It was simply that they spent most of their time alone praying in the desert.
Within the abbey, circumstances began to conspire in Merton’s favor, and many of the old obstacles fell away. In October 1964, Dom James gave Merton permission to sleep overnight in the retreat center on rare occasions, and shortly after that, a letter arrived from the abbot general of the order, stating that he was “not opposed on principle to experiments in the hermit life within our Order. . . . Gethsemani would be a reasonable place for such an experiment.”22
By mid-December, Dom James seemed so supportive of Merton’s spending more time at the center that he went so far as to hire a contractor to install electrical wiring. While Dom James still clung to his image of a largely isolated hermit, Merton wisely took things one day at a time, letting the situation evolve.
After more disputes, reversals, anxieties, internecine politics, and health issues, Merton was finally granted permission to live in the structure full-time. While he was still expected to attend Mass at the abbey every day, have his midday meal there, and give occasional talks to the novices, his dream of becoming a hermit was about to become a reality.
•••
The official date of his relocation was Friday, August 20, 1965. On that day, as part of the official relinquishing of his duties as master of novices, he told the assembled monks that his move would be an unceremonious affair, nothing like the Coptic Rite for “putting away a hermit.” In that ancient rite, the religious community processed to the foot of the cliff below the hermit’s cave, where prayers were recited and the Missa pro defunctis—the “Mass for the Dead”—was sung. The hermit, in essence, was being declared dead to the world. The bishop then read from the psalms and blessed the proceedings, after which the hermit climbed the rope to his cave and pulled it up after him. “So there are possibilities in this racket,” Merton joked. The novices laughed. Still, such caves had held special meaning for Merton ever since he had dreamed of joining the Camaldolese.
Merton explained to the novices the purpose of the solitary life, and all monastic life, for that matter: “It is possible in this kind of life to put away all care, to live without care, to not have to care. . . . It is a life in which you no longer care about anything because God has taken care of everything.”23
With that, he boxed up a few books and manuscripts and moved to the hermitage. A week later, he wrote, “I am beginning to feel the lightness, the strangeness, the desertedness of being really alone.”24 The word desertedness contained a double meaning: “being alone” and “being in the desert.”
•••
The hermitage stood (and still stands) on top of a hill, about a half-mile north of the main buildings of Gethsemani—a ten-minute walk. A few footpaths forked off into the trees. The surrounding woods, mostly evergreens with a few maples and sweetgums, lay east of Nelson County Road 247, called Monk’s Road. To visit Merton, friends would sometimes park on the shoulder of that road and hike across the field and through the trees rather than going through the abbey’s front gate, as officially required. Directly in front of the porch, where Merton would visit with guests, a clearing sloped downward to the east, and well beyond that flowed Monk’s Creek. A dirt access road zigzagged between the abbey and the hermitage.
The floor plan for the three rooms was simple: immediately inside the front door was a large main room, with a desk and a few chairs; to the left toward the back was a small kitchen; and through the kitchen to the right was the bedroom, more precisely called the cell.25 The central fireplace, which opened to the main room, burned only wood during that first winter of 1965, which proved difficult for Merton because chopping wood inflamed the bursitis in his elbow. Behind the hermitage was an outhouse, which he approached with dread because of the king snake that lived there. Before entering, he would ritually shout, “Are you in there, you bastard?”26
The building was christened the Mount Olivet Retreat Center, after the Mount of Olives, the lengthy ridge just east of Jerusalem’s Old City where Jesus wept over Jerusalem and prophesied the destruction of the temple. It also overlooked the garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed on the night of his arrest, and where he predicted that Peter would deny him three times. It is also the place from which Jesus is said to have ascended to heaven. Merton had discovered this place when he first hiked the surrounding hills to get his salutary, distant perspective. Mount Olivet was the perfect name.
Still, the formal name faded, and the place was called simply “the hermitage.”
•••
On Sunday, July 25, 1965, less than a month before moving to his new quarters, Thomas Merton was meditating at the abbey. The long journey was nearly over; he was approaching his dreamed-of desert solitude after nearly two and a half decades. When he began, he was twenty-six. He was now fifty-one and full of anticipation.
That evening he picked up a copy of Kierkegaard’s The Present Age, which he declared to be “one of the best and in some sense most hopeful treatments of the individual in mass-society.” One line from the book struck him as unusually “fine and completely prophetic.” Kierkegaard wrote, “It is in fact through error that the individual is given access to the highest if he courageously desires it.”27
Individuality “in the present age,” explained Kierkegaard, is universally stymied by society’s leveling influence, by too much second-guessing, stultifying self-consciousness, and over-concern for the opinions of others. Only when, by some fluke of fate or personality, a courageous person is able to move, or perhaps stumble, beyond such constraints, can he or she achieve something extraordinary.
The idea was prophetic in a way that Merton could not have imagined.
•••
On that same evening, nearly a thousand miles away, a young man less than half Merton’s age was tuning the strings of a guitar in front of a cheering, or perhaps jeering, crowd. Something startling and unprecedented was about to happen, an event that would be talked about for decades. As the rock band exploded into a descending blues riff behind him, the young man, guitar in hand, shouted to the musicians, “Let’s go!” Then he turned to the microphone. The next words out of his mouth were a chilling declaration of defiance that has resonated through the decades for anyone who has ever wrestled with authority, who has ever kicked against the oppression of society’s leveling influence. In a year’s time, those words would resonate with Thomas Merton as well.
The young man sang, “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more . . .”28