Thomas Merton (Mid-week Message)

 Thomas Merton, O.S.C.O. and HH the XIV Dalai Lama 

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Thomas Merton

Dec. 10, 2014

Forty-two years ago today, Cistercian monk and author Thomas Merton died in Bangkok by accidental electrocution. 

I think many of you may know his story, told in The Seven Storey Mountain (1948). 

He is somewhat of a hero for me, since his works on contemplation (The Seeds of Contemplation, 1969), and the bridging of eastern and Western mysticism (Zen and the Birds of Appetite, 1968; The Way of Chuang Tzu, 1965) played a profound role in my own spiritual journey. 

He was the one who wrote the words that encouraged me to change from the church of my youth to more traditional Christianity:  “God does not want us to be an army of robot, victim souls” and “any god that must be sustained by a constant effort is an idol.” 

His writings on the Eucharist and liturgy (Seeds of Celebration, 1966) also had a profound influence on me:  the timelessness of the liturgy bound in the timeliness of the liturgical calendar and lectionary. In No Man is an Island (1955), he wrote, "Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God because they induce a kind of contact with the Creator and Ruler of the Universe."

Merton near the end of his life was a pacifist, strongly criticizing the U.S. war in Indochina.  He believed that the Gospel of Christ required him to take this position:   "War represents a vice that mankind would like to get rid of but which it cannot do without. Man is like an alcoholic who knows that drink will destroy him but who always has a reason for drinking. So with war” (Love and Living, a posthumous collection of his letters and lectures, 1980).

Let us pray,

Gracious God, you called your monk Thomas Merton to proclaim your justice out of silence, and moved him in his contemplative writings to perceive and value Christ at work in the faiths of others: Keep us, like him, steadfast in the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.