Thomas Merton died in Thailand on December 10, 1968. Forty nine years ago.
The following is an extract from
"Living With Wisdom", a biography of Merton, by Jim Forest.
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The last event of Thomas Merton’s life was participation in a
conference of Trappist and Benedictine monks at the Sawang Kaniwat (Red
Cross) Conference Center Samutprakan, 29 miles south of Bangkok. Merton
arrived in the afternoon of December 9, 1968, and was housed on the
ground floor of Cottage Two. The conference began the next day with a
welcoming address from the Supreme Patriarch of Thai Buddhism. Events of
the day included an evening discussion on marriage and celibacy.
Few of the monks got much sleep that night. A chorus of cats had come
out to sing the night office on nearby roofs. Following crescendos of
cat howling, those in adjacent rooms heard Merton’s laughter.
Merton’s paper, “Marxism and Monastic Perspectives,” so much on his mind
for many weeks, was presented the following morning. Merton, under
orders from his abbot to avoid the press, was made nervous by Dutch and
Italian television crews which had turned up to film his lecture.
One of the crucial issues confronting the monk, Merton pointed out, is
what his position is and how he identifies himself in a world of
revolution. This wasn’t simply a matter of how to survive an enemy who
is intent on either destroying religion or converting those of religious
convictions to atheism. Rather, it was a matter of understanding,
beyond present models of Marxism and monasticism, the fundamental points
of similarity and difference.
He recognized significant
similarities. The monk, after all, “is essentially someone who takes up a
critical attitude toward the world and its structures ... [saying] that
the claims of the world are fraudulent.” In addition, both monk and
Marxist share the idea that each should give according to his capacity
and receive according to his need. But while the Marxist gives primary
emphasis to the material and economic structures of life, seeing
religious approaches as empty mystification, the monk is committed to
bringing about a human transformation that begins at the level of
consciousness.
“Instead of starting with matter itself and then
moving up to a new structure, in which man will automatically develop a
new consciousness, the traditional religions begin with the
consciousness of the individual seeking to transform and liberate the
truth in each person, with the idea that it will then communicate itself
to others.”
This is emphatically the vocation of the monk “who
seeks full realization ... [and] has come to experience the ground of
his own being in such a way that he knows the secret of liberation and
can somehow or other communicate it to others.” At the deepest level,
the monk is teaching others how to live by love. For Christians, this is
the discovery of Christ dwelling in all others.
Only with such
love, Merton went on, is it possible to realize the economic ideal of
each giving according to his ability and receiving according to his
need. But in actuality many Christians, including those in monastic
communities, have not reached this level of love and realization. They
have burdened their lives with too many false needs and these have
blocked the way to full realization, the monk’s only reason for being.
Merton told a story he had heard from Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche of a
Buddhist abbot fleeing from his Tibetan monastery before the advance of
Chinese Communist troops. He encountered another monk leading a train of
twenty-five yaks loaded with the treasures of the monastery and
“essential” provisions. The abbot chose not to stay with the treasure or
the treasurer; traveling light, he managed to cross the border into
India, destitute but alive. The yak-tending monk, chained to his
treasure, was overtaken by the soldiers and was never heard of again.
“We can ask ourselves,” Merton said, “if we are planning for the next
twenty years to be traveling with a train of yaks.” Monasticism, after
all, is not architecture or clothing or even rules of life. It is “total
inner transformation. Let the yaks take care of themselves.” The
monastic life thrives whenever there is a person “giving some kind of
direction and instruction to a small group attempting to love God and
reach union with him.”
Authentic monasticism cannot be
extinguished. “It is imperishable. It represents an instinct of the
human heart, and it represents a charism given by God to man. It cannot
be rooted out, because it does not depend on man. It does not depend on
cultural factors, and it does not depend on sociological or
psychological factors. It is something much deeper.”
Finishing
the talk, Merton suggested putting off questions until the evening
session. He concluded with the words, “So I will disappear,” adding the
suggestion that everyone have a Coke.
At about 3 p.m., Father
François de Grunne, who had a room near Merton’s, heard a cry and what
sounded like someone falling. He knocked on Merton’s door but there was
no response. Shortly before 4 o’clock Father de Grunne came down again
to get the cottage key from Merton and to reassure himself that nothing
was the matter. When there was no answer he looked through the louvers
in the upper part of the door and saw Merton lying on the terrazzo
floor. A standing fan had fallen on top of him. Father de Grunne tried
to open the door but it was locked. With the help of others, the door
was opened.
There was a smell of burned flesh. Merton, clearly
dead, was lying on his back with the five-foot fan diagonally across his
body. Dom Odo Haas, Abbot of Waekwan, tried to lift it and received an
electric shock that jerked him sideways, holding him fast to the shaft
of the fan until Father Celestine Say pulled the plug.
A long,
raw third-degree burn about a hand’s width ran along the right side of
Merton’s body almost to the groin. There were no marks on his hands. His
face was bluish-red, eyes and mouth half open. There had been bleeding
from the back of the head. The priests gave Merton absolution, then Dom
Odo went to get the Abbot Primate of the Benedictines, Dom Rembert
Weakland, who gave Merton extreme unction. A doctor arrived, Mother
Edeltrud Weist, prioress of Taegu Convent in Korea. She checked for
pulse and eye reaction to light.
A police test of the fan showed
that a “defective electric cord was installed inside its stand.... The
flow of electricity was strong enough to cause the death of a person if
he touched the metal part.”
After Merton’s body was released to
Dom Weakland, it was washed, then taken to the chapel. There was a
prayer vigil throughout the night at the side of the body.
The
next day Merton’s body was taken to the United States Air Force Base in
Bangkok and from there flown back to the United States in company with
dead bodies of Americans killed in Vietnam. From Oakland, California, it
continued by civilian carrier, at last reaching the Abbey of Gethsemani
the afternoon of December 17.
The monks at the abbey had been
informed of the death by Dom Flavian during their mid-day meal on
December 10. In the days that followed, The Seven Storey Mountain was
read aloud during meals in the refectory. “Some of us saw a considerable
irony in fact that the refectory reader was Father Raymond Flanagan,”
recalls Father Patrick Reardon, then a member of the community, “who had
been carrying on a running feud with Father Louis for about as long as
any of us could remember.”
One of the brothers drove a truck out
to the hermitage of Dom James Fox to bring him back for the funeral. Dom
James remarked that Merton “now knows more theology than any of us.”
The brother responded, “Well, Reverend Father, he always did.”
Dom Flavian and Father John Eudes Bamberger identified the body at the
undertakers in New Haven, where the casket was briefly opened. “I
readily identified the body though it was already bloated and swollen
considerably,” Father John Eudes wrote. “There was no doubt it was
Father Louis.”
The casket arrived at the monastery only a couple of
hours before the afternoon funeral Mass and was placed in the abbey
basilica. Father Timothy Kelly, later to succeed Dom Flavian as abbot,
and Father Patrick Reardon prayed the psalms over the body for the hour
or more prior to the funeral.
The funeral Mass was composed by
Father Chrysogonus Waddell. On the cover of the Liturgy booklet was a
text from The Sign of Jonas: “I have always overshadowed Jonas with My
Mercy.... Have you lost sight of me Jonas My Child? Mercy within mercy
within mercy.” Part of the Book of Jonah was read aloud. At the end of
the Mass, there was a reading from The Seven Storey Mountain, concluding
with the book’s prophetic final sentence, “That you may become the
brother of God and learn to know the Christ of the burnt men.”
His brother monks buried Merton in their small cemetery next to the
abbey church. Normally Trappists were buried without a casket. Merton
was one of two exceptions. The other had been Dom Frederick Dunne, the
abbot who had received Merton in 1941 and encouraged him to write. Dom
Frederick had also died while traveling.
“A whole bunch of us
grabbed shovels to fill in Father Louis’s grave at the end of the
service,” Father Patrick recalled. “I remember Father Raymond going at
it with the gusto he brought to every enterprise. Toward the end of the
burial, it began to rain, so we were quite damp when we returned to the
church.”
With the body came an official declaration of Merton’s effects, appraised in dollars. The items listed included these five:
1 Timex Watch $10.00
1 Pair Dark Glasses in Tortoise Frames Nil
1 Cistercian Leather Bound Breviary Nil
1 Rosary (broken) Nil
1 Small Icon on Wood of Virgin and Child Nil
There was also the memory of Merton’s last words. Following the morning
conference, Father de Grunne told Merton that a nun in the audience was
annoyed that Merton had said nothing about converting people.
“What we are asked to do at present,” Merton responded, “is not so much
to speak of Christ as to let him live in us so that people may find him
by feeling how he lives in us.”
The icon Merton had with him
contains its own last words, silent on one side, and on the back a brief
extract from the Philokalia, written in Greek in Merton’s hand:
If we wish to please the true God and to be friends with the most
blessed of friendships, let us present our spirit naked to God. Let us
not draw into it anything of this present world — no art, no thought, no
reasoning, no self-justification — even though we should possess all
the wisdom of this world.
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- an extract from
"Living With Wisdom", a biography of Merton, by Jim Forest
