From the streets of New York to a Trappist enclosure
Born in France in 1915 to a New Zealand painter and an American Quaker, orphaned by sixteen, partially-misspent at Cambridge and Columbia, Merton converted to Catholicism in 1938 and entered the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky in December 1941. He took the religious name Father Louis. His superior asked him in 1946 to write his autobiography; The Seven Storey Mountain appeared in 1948 and did for the contemplative life in mid-century America what no monastic memoir had done in English — sold over 600,000 copies in its first year, was translated into more than fifteen languages, and turned an obscure Cistercian abbey into a vocational pull. Merton remained at Gethsemani for the rest of his life, eventually as the abbey's master of novices and later, from 1965, as a hermit in a cinderblock cabin a mile from the main enclosure. He continued to write at the rate of a book a year — eventually some seventy volumes of journals, essays, poetry, social criticism and translations from the Christian mystics.
The interfaith opening
The second half of his life was given over to a project the institutional church of the period was not asking for and the Vatican periodically attempted to constrain: the systematic comparison of Christian contemplative practice with the meditative literatures of Asia. Mystics and Zen Masters (1967) read Meister Eckhart, the Desert Fathers and the Rhineland mystics alongside the Chán records and the Platform Sutra. Zen and the Birds of Appetite (1968) collected his correspondence with D.T. Suzuki and his essays on the Mahāyāna doctrine of śūnyatā; the title is taken from a remark Suzuki made about Christian mystics — that whatever the birds of appetite were, they had been let go. He wrote a long appreciation of Sufi practice and a forty-page study of Chuang Tzu (The Way of Chuang Tzu, 1965). He hosted Thich Nhat Hanh at Gethsemani in 1966 and described him afterwards as a fellow monk in a way that scandalised some of his readers and gave others their first language for what was actually being attempted. The apophatic theology tradition gave him the technical vocabulary; the Asian literatures gave him the live counterpart that Western Christianity had largely forgotten how to read.
The death in Bangkok and the late voice
Merton died in Bangkok on 10 December 1968, four hours after delivering a paper on Marxism and monasticism at a conference of Asian Christian and Buddhist monks. He was electrocuted by a faulty electric fan in the room where he was staying. The trip had been the longest he ever took outside the abbey; it had included a meeting with the young Dalai Lama in Dharamsala and several weeks of darśan with Tibetan teachers, who afterwards described him as a contemplative of formed depth. The late journals, published posthumously as The Asian Journal, are his most direct record of the encounter and his most explicit identification with the project of contemplative prayer read as one form of a wider human discipline that the Buddhist literature had simply mapped more carefully. The figure that emerges in those final pages is closer to a non-dual reader of his own tradition than the Catholic publishing market of the 1960s knew what to do with.
Why he isn't yet in the index
The index has no Merton media of its own — his books are not yet rowed, the recordings of his Gethsemani novitiate talks not yet rowed. The omission is the gap most worth closing if a single Christian contemplative voice were to be added: he is the figure most consistently named across the entries on Christianity, contemplative prayer, mysticism and apophatic theology, and the obvious point of entry for a reader arriving from a Christian background into the Asian material that fills more of the index's shelves. The Zen entry treats his correspondence as the twentieth century's clearest example of these traditions recognising one another across their vocabularies; an actual Merton row would let the entry point at the source rather than the gloss.
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