c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Forty years ago this week, Trappist monk Thomas Merton passed from this life to the next. Merton, 53, met his end on Dec. 10, 1968, stepping out of a shower and touching a short-circuited electric fan.

It was a banal finale to an extraordinary life.

I first read Merton as a graduate student in seminary and was instantly besotted with his unique mix of humanity and holiness. A cloistered monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in rural Kentucky for most of his adult life, Merton straddled the perceived chasm between the sacred and the profane with immense grace and wit.

Merton became a household name in the 1940s and `50s with the publication of his autobiography (written at the age of 31), “The Seven Storey Mountain,” in 1948 and subsequent spiritual writings.

He wrote for an audience reeling from world war, weapons of mass destruction and the real possibility of apocalypse. Those were nervous times, much like today.

“The things he wrote about then really apply now,” said Morgan Atkinson, the editor of a new book on Merton, “Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton” and also the filmmaker of a Merton documentary of the same name.

“You can just substitute words _ if you take out `Vietnam’ and put in `Iraq’ _ and you don’t even have to substitute any words when he talks about a rampant consumerism and things of that nature.”

Atkinson, whose documentary airs on PBS stations on Dec. 14, believes Merton was ahead of his time. “The things that he wrote about and was concerned with are still things that are with us today. More so than ever, I would think.”

In Merton’s surprise best-seller autobiography, he charts his spiritual conversion and unlikely call to monastic life. His odyssey began in earnest as a freshman at Cambridge University in England. He drank too much, studied too little and was an unrepentant womanizer.

For his sophomore year, Merton enrolled at Columbia University in New York, embracing the life of a young intellectual, hanging out in jazz clubs, wooing young women, even flirting briefly with communism _ all of which left him spiritually empty.

He wrote at a near-frenzied pace and couldn’t sit still. He was restless _ a state Merton later said was thoroughly theological. His spiritual quest began with an academic search, but his epiphany came while reading Gerard Manley Hopkins, the great poet and Catholic convert. “Why don’t I do the same?” Merton wrote. He did, and was baptized into the Catholic Church on Nov. 16, 1938, at 23.

The following year, Merton said he felt called to the priesthood. After a false start with the Franciscans, in 1941 he went on a retreat to the Trappist monastery in Kentucky and found his home. He became a novice in the Trappist order a year later and lived in seclusion _ cloistered behind the walls of the abbey (and for periods of time, as a hermit) _ for the next 26 years.

But his life was far from solitary or disconnected. Merton continued to write prolifically _ prose, poetry and critical essays on topics such as nuclear disarmament. Eventually, he would play a leading role in the peace movement.

At age 51, while undergoing back surgery, Merton fell in love with a young nurse. The relationship _ some scholars say it was sexual, others insist it was chaste _ transformed his life and faith.

“While I think he had real misgivings about the fact that he had violated vows … I think he was also very gratified and grateful that he had had this opportunity to express love and feel love of this type,” Atkinson said. “I don’t think less of him for it. It was a situation where he fell in love, and he had to make a very difficult choice, and he made the choice, and then he came back to monastic life.”

A large part of Merton’s appeal for me is his candor about his brokenness and foibles. They were part of him, as much as his love for and devotion to God. He was a complicated man with a complicated faith.

“He kept wanting to search deeper, to not accept easy pat answers, to keep growing. What a challenge that is for all of us,” Atkinson said. “We may stay rooted in certain ways of living that life, but to get to the essence of it, you have to keep pushing forward. And that’s what he did.”

(Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, and author of the new book “Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace.”)

KRE END FALSANI

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