He
died almost half a century ago, but Thomas Merton (1915-1968) continues
to exert a significant pull on the imagination, the intellect, and the conscience.
Perhaps
it is partially his resume: child of a New Zealand father and American mother;
raised partially in France; parents dying of cancer; something of a dissolute
youth related to his short stint at Cambridge; literary influences of Columbia
University; conversion to Catholicism; joining the Trappist monks with their
vows of silence at the Abbey of
Gethsemani outside of Louisville, Kentucky.
Perhaps,
too, it is his writings; he was a ferociously prolific writer. Coming to
national attention with The
Seven Storey Mountain in 1948, Merton wrote poetry, essays, criticism, and
religious philosophy. (He was so prolific that many of his writings and poems
were published for the first time after his death.) He became an opponent of
the atomic bomb and went on to become an antiwar activist in the 1960s. His
faith became the basis for social action and social activism.
To
continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak
Poetry.
Photograph by Vera Kratochvil via Public
Domain Pictures. Used with permission.
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