Thomas Merton's Autobiography, My Impressions

 There are a few popular Catholic writers who I just can’t get into. One is St. John Henry Newman. I’ve always found his prose too difficult to enjoy. Similarly, though I appreciate Dante, I’ve always struggled through the Divine Comedy. Obviously, this is subjective to my experience. 

When I started reading Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain over two years ago, I wondered if I was going to have a repeat of the experience I’d had with Newman. I was surprised by how boring his book was. I wondered how such a long and unexciting book had inspired so many young men to join the Trappists. His early childhood story of being orphaned wasn’t even that compelling to me, nor was his toe-infection. His wanderings around the earth with his artist father had been confusing, but his college years proved the hardest to follow. I couldn’t keep up with all the names and details. None of the characters seemed to have much flesh and blood to them. The whole thing seemed fairly abstracted. 

Worse, Merton’s description of his hedonism seemed disingenuous. Perhaps, because the monks wanted him to hide some of the details of his desultory life, Merton ended up describing his struggles with alcoholism and women in a way that seemed both simplistic in its moralizing and somehow oddly nostalgic in its detail. Thus, I couldn’t relate to the fallen Merton very much, nor could I relate to the academic Merton who was taking classes with the literary giants of his day and lapping up the writings of James Joyce.  After reading 250 pages of the autobiography, I abruptly stopped. I wondered if the book was going to continue to feel like a list of names and a bunch of minute details about interactions with those names, details that nonetheless didn’t make those characters come alive at least to me. I had expected to see myself in the details of this struggling young man’s life, but instead, I felt like I was looking at a black and white photo of a different era, fascinating for a historian but not for someone trying to figure out his own vocation and path in life. 

My fascination with Merton didn’t end. Merton is something of a bad boy in Catholic circles. That’s because although his writing has inspired many people including Bishop Robert Barron, Merton will always be at least partly known as the man that didn’t become a saint because of scandals that swirled around his life. There is first of all the fact that he may have fathered a child before his conversion. Then, there is his troubling and possibly schismatic fascination with eastern religions. Finally, there’s the possibility that he broke his vow of celibacy with a very young nurse who was treating him for a back issue. Yet his writing and his story and even his imperfections seem to speak to our age of Catholicism. 

The book sat on my bookshelf, catching my eye every once in a while when I happened to see it. Finally, during the COVID lockdown, I picked up the book again right where I’d left off, fully expecting to be bored by it again and to be shelving it soon. I wasn’t bored and I didn’t shelf it. Perhaps, I was able to enjoy the book because I had changed since the time that  I had stopped reading it. I was able to appreciate the slow pace of the book. I was no longer rushing through my own life and could appreciate the musings of a monk who was probably writing his memories down perhaps with pen and paper or a typewriter and maybe in the stillness of the evening.  

There are so many passages that I could quote, but to me, the most impacting part of the book was simply Merton’s struggle to achieve his vocation.  That struggle and pain and with it the reckoning with his past seemed more real than anything I remembered earlier in the book. Merton calls these parts of the book Magnetic North and True North. Is he using these titles to describe the harrowing process that went on in his soul? Both sections of the book have tearjerker moments. 

Merton’s confession which takes place after being denied his vocation at the end of Magnetic North is one of those. Having just been told by a Franciscan priest that he needs to reconsider his vocation because of his past, Merton is in a daze. He feels he has been truly candid about his pre-conversion days and now his honesty has hurt him. He exits the monastery without a plan. He writes, “All I could think of was to go over across Seventh Avenue to the Church of the Capuchins, next to the station. I went inside the church and knelt in the back, and, seeing there was a priest hearing confessions, I presently got up and took my place in the short line that led to the confessional” (325). Merton begins his confession in a small confessional with a priest who looks like James Joyce because of his short beard. The priest is not in the mood for Merton and his confusion, and in a very pre-Vatican II fashion decides Merton is simply indulging himself. Merton continues, “The whole thing was so hopeless that finally, in spite of myself, I began to choke and sob and I couldn’t talk any more. So the priest, probably judging that I was some emotional and unstable and stupid character, began to tell me in very strong terms that I certainly did not belong in the monastery” (326). This tragic experience leaves Merton “broken in pieces. I could not keep back the tears, which ran down between the fingers of the hands in which I concealed my face. So I prayed before the Tabernacle and the big stone Christ above the altar” (326).

I love this scene because of its poignancy. Merton seems to be really laying his heart out not only to the priest in the confessional but to his readers. His pain and confusion are so real because they are so familiar to my experience. What makes the scene even more beautiful is what follows. I saw humility in Merton’s resolution to find a job and embrace life as a lay teacher while continuing to lead a monastic life in the sense that he prayed the office every day. More poignant, heartfelt moments follow as he begins to teach English literature at St. Bonaventure University in Allegany, New York. Around this time, he develops a devotion to St. Therese of the Little Flower; truly, Merton is embarking on the path of self-surrender and small sacrifices to God. One night Merton finds himself in “anguish” about his vocation. He wanders into the woods towards a shrine. He prays for guidance and calls on the “Little Flower.” “Please help me. What am I going to do? I can’t go on like this. You can see that. Look at the state I am in. What ought I to do? Show me the way!” He prays and adds to St. Therese “You show me what to do . . . If I get into the monastery, I will be your monk. Now show me what to do” (390). At that moment, he hears the bell of the Trappist monastery ringing in his imagination. It is a simple but beautiful answer to his anguish. 

I believe Mertons’ understanding of his vocation is strengthened by his suffering. When he writes in the epilogue that there is really only one vocation, the call to “deep interior life” (458), Merton sounds to me like a man who has grasped that his call to holiness was a call to relationship with God. That is what makes the book so beautiful and enduring in my opinion. The beauty of Merton’s call can be realized by all Christians who seek to lead a life of prayer. It is also what makes his agony so beautiful. His agony resulted in the realization of his calling on a much deeper level. That is probably why he needed to find his true north, a vocation not based on being something or somebody for his own sake but based on being “fused into one spirit with Christ in the furnace of contemplation” (458), a fusing that necessarily results in spreading “that same fire” to others. 

I don’t know but I believe Merton is in heaven now. I don’t think Merton would have stayed in error long if he had truly believed in the words he wrote, and, though his death was sudden, I think God is merciful and would have helped him in that last moment. Merton’s whole life was a journey. It obviously did not stop once he entered the monastery.  His autobiography isn’t perfect. Perhaps, I’ll go back and reread the parts I found boring, but I think some of Merton’s name dropping still won’t appeal to me. 

Merton struggled with his ego his whole life, I believe. His writing brought him fame but it also stroked the ego of the “old man of the sea,” what he referred to as his old, sinful self. Yet whether or not he needed time in purgatory to purify his soul, he was a man who taught us about holiness. He seems to have reached out to me in some small way from wherever he is this week, and as I busied myself with scary doctor’s appointments and tests and preparations for the start of school, I appreciated his presence and found his own struggles reassuring. On the date of a doctor’s appointment that I’d been dreading I realized that the Church was celebrating Thomas Merton’s namesake, St. Louis. That was the name Merton was given when he became a Trappist.  He's a complicated figure but we forgot that the saints weren't the simple figures we often make them out to be either.