The story is told much the same way in every biography of Thomas Merton. On December 10, 1968, twenty-seven years to the day after arriving at Gethsemani, Merton touched a malfunctioning floor fan in his room near the conference center in Samut Prakan on the outskirts of Bangkok and was electrocuted. Only minutes before, he had concluded his address with the words “I will disappear from view, and we can all have a Coke or something.”1 The Dutch television crew captured that final lecture with their cameras—the only footage of Merton speaking ever made.
His body was flown back to California on a US Air Force transport plane. Alongside his casket on that long flight were the caskets of American service members killed in Vietnam. He was buried in the cemetery at Gethsemani on December 17, and nineteen years later, Dom James was buried in the adjacent plot. Ten years after that, the Dalai Lama, during a visit to the United States, made a special point of visiting Gethsemani. He wanted to pray at Merton’s grave.
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Merton’s journey to the hermitage had taken twenty-four years. He lived there only three. The many distractions—the medical problems, the affair, the visitors—were frequent reminders that he was a long way from the desert and far removed from the caves of the Camaldolese. As many times as he tried to “pull the rope up after him,” he was unable.
In one sense, he shouldn’t have been surprised. In his epiphany on the streets of Louisville ten years earlier, he discovered that solitude was the path to greater oneness with others. After settling into the hermitage, he found an ever-widening circle of relationships, and through his acquaintances old and new, through his journey to the East, and through his millions of readers, he did indeed find a fundamental unity with the world. And an ever-deepening love for God.
His editor Robert Giroux once wrote, “I don’t think he ever found a home, but I think he found happiness.”2 The hermitage was simply a way station, not the destination. No wonder Merton was fascinated by the deer that wandered out of the woods and stared at him so soulfully two and a half years earlier. It was as if they were beckoning him to follow. And follow them he did, halfway around the world.
But in another sense, he never left home. He carried it with him everywhere, for as Thich Nhat Hanh once wrote, “Our true home is the present moment, whatever is happening right here and now.”3
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A week and a half before Thomas Merton met with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, Bob Dylan met with country-music star Johnny Cash. The two had dinner immediately after Cash’s concert in New York City on October 23, 1968. Although they had met several times before, this was an important reconnection. A few months later, they would record together in the studio for Dylan’s album of country songs, Nashville Skyline, and the following July, Dylan would perform on Cash’s television variety show.
Dylan owed Cash a considerable debt. Not only had he cut his teeth on Johnny Cash songs as a teenager, but after Dylan’s debut album failed to sell well, Cash encouraged Columbia Records executives to give the young folksinger another shot, which resulted in the successful Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album. And two years later, when fans complained that Dylan had abandoned protest music, Cash defended him publicly in Sing Out! magazine by writing, “SHUT UP! . . . AND LET HIM SING!”4
But just a few months before their dinner in New York, Cash, who struggled with amphetamine addiction, had attempted suicide by crawling into a deep, watery cave not far from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Waiting to die in the dark, he had an epiphany, a penetrating sensation of God’s presence. In his autobiography, he wrote, “I felt something very powerful start to happen to me, a sensation of utter peace, clarity, and sobriety. . . . There in the Nickajack Cave I became conscious of a very clear, simple idea: I was not in charge of my own destiny.”5 This experience led to a major renewal of the Christian faith of his childhood.
To Dylan, Johnny Cash was both a peer and a mentor—someone Dylan respected and to whom he could turn for wisdom and understanding. Dylan once acknowledged that “Johnny Cash was more like a religious figure to me.”6 Like Cash, Dylan had his own inner demons to outrun, not the least of which were the drugs and the burden of fame. In 1979, prompted in part by his failing marriage, Dylan too would publicly embrace Christianity, to the surprise—and consternation—of many of his fans.
Merton, had he lived, wouldn’t have been surprised. He would have been sixty-four at the time of Dylan’s famous conversion and would have found Dylan’s new faith fascinating, arguing that Dylan had always been a spiritual seeker and pilgrim. John Wesley Harding was replete with biblical allusions, and Highway 61 Revisited expressed our existential aloneness better than most clergy, as Merton had explained in his Midsummer Diary. Dylan’s embrace of religious faith, Merton would have argued, was inevitable; his honest voice, his authenticity, and his artistic integrity had always been indications of something deeply prophetic.
But Thomas Merton didn’t live to see Bob Dylan’s conversion. Nor did he have a chance to hear Dylan’s controversial sequel to John Wesley Harding, the quite un-mystical Nashville Skyline, released six months after Merton’s death. Although Merton might have been baffled by Dylan’s new good-old-boy country persona, he would certainly have agreed with Johnny Cash’s assessment on the back of that album: “Here-in is a hell of a poet.”7
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The images we have in our minds of Thomas Merton and Bob Dylan are founded in large part on who they were in 1966.
Fans of Merton’s books almost invariably picture him in his hermitage, reading by the light of his single lamp or praying by the fire, talking delightedly with famous visitors like Thich Nhat Hanh, Jacques Maritain, Daniel Berrigan, and Joan Baez; and writing . . . always writing. One of the most iconic photos of Merton shows him standing outside the hermitage with his hands in the pockets of his rough denim coat, a blue stocking cap on his head, and a compassionate, slightly impish smile on his face. As John Howard Griffin wrote, “He had . . . an unblemished happiness with the moment.”8
And likewise, even though his career has spanned six decades, it is the Bob Dylan of 1965 and 1966 that immediately appears to our cultural mind’s eye. Music fans will always associate him with the tangle of electric-wire hair on his head, the Ray-Ban sunglasses, and the Fender Stratocaster strapped across his shoulder. They will always remember his intense, inscrutable expression on the covers of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, and his cutting-edge, culture-shifting electric performances from Newport in July 1965 to London in May 1966.
Although one of those men died a few years later, and the other continued to create and perform for decades, both achieved something of an apotheosis during that critical, chaotic time. “Bringing it all back home” meant something different to each of them. But it is to our benefit that these two men, artists of very different kinds, had enough vision to seek out that ideal home in the first place and, when they grew disenchanted with it, enough wisdom to keep on looking.
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Finally, for a man who earnestly sought the silence of solitude for much of his adult life, Merton was curiously infatuated with music: not just Dylan’s, but classical, chant, jazz, ethnic, folk, and rock. Merton realized that silence and music are entwined, fellow travelers, or, to quote Cables to the Ace, “La musique est une joie inventée par le silence”—“Music is a joy invented by silence.”9
Why else would a hermit monk on his journey into the desert—to live alone, worship God, and pray for the whole world—take a record player along?
“Music,” wrote Merton, “is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it. . . . If we have no silence, God is not heard in our music.”10