When I was a young journalist on the staff of the Edinburgh Evening News, two of the paper�s sub-editors tried hard to convert me to Roman Catholicism
When I was a young journalist on the staff of the Edinburgh Evening News, two of the paper's sub-editors tried hard to convert me to Roman Catholicism. With the zeal of the second-born, these converts from Protestantism saw me as a potential recruit. They gave me a copy of a book, The Seven Storey Mountain, which they thought would interest me greatly.
I had never heard of the author, Thomas Merton, even though his memoir had apparently become a cult book in the US. Merton had been a journalist and a poet until, at the age of 27, he became a Trappist monk.
It's fair to say that the words "journalist" and "Trappist monk" rarely appear in the same sentence. As I read Merton's account of his early pilgrimage, I grew to dislike him more and more. True, the book was exceptionally well-written, but it was a bit too sure of itself, too pleased with itself in a humble, Christiany sort of way. Merton, it seemed, had discovered the Truth with a capital T; for me, too many questions had found easy closure.
Three years later, I left journalism to study for the ministry of the Church of Scotland. Inspired by the Iona Community's commitment to prayer and political action in urban situations, I devoured writings that combined these interests. As community minister in Easterhouse in the 1970s, I was part of a group of clergy living and working in deprived areas of Glasgow. One of the priests gave me a book called Seeds of Contemplation. I was hooked by it. The writer's name? None other than Thomas Merton.
It was and it wasn't the same man. He was still an accomplished prose writer, but the slightly overbearing certainties were gone. Rather than being an escape into reinforced silent certitude, his time in the Cistercian order had made him face difficult questions about his faith and his own past.
Merton's religious quest undoubtedly grew out of the twin facts of his Quaker mother's death from cancer in 1921, when he was six years old, and his artist father's death from a brain tumour 10 years later. His friends described the young Merton as restless, always looking for something (or someone). As a student at Cambridge, the handsome and gifted writer was a womaniser who also flirted with communism. His manic sociability however, covered up an increasing disposition towards solitude, which eventually led him to the silent cloisters of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky in 1942.
From his cell, the priest who had taken a vow of silence was to speak eloquently, through his 60 books and numerous articles, to a growing international readership. Reading more of his books, I was captivated by the generous Catholic spirituality and the radical peace witness of the mature Merton. He was inspirational for figures such as Fathers Daniel and Philip Berrigan who were jailed for breaking into an American airbase and hammering the nose cones of nuclear fighter planes before pouring blood on files, as a protest against the Vietnam war. For me, Tom Merton, Dorothy Day (co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement), Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and the Berrigan brothers were moral and spiritual giants.
Why am I saying all this? Wednesday is the 40th anniversary of the death of Merton, probably the most influential Catholic writer of the twentieth century. (My old pal from my Glasgow east end days, Father Willy Slavin, will celebrate a special commemorative Mass on Wednesday at 6pm in St Simon's Church at Partick Cross.) The ever-questing Father Merton in his latter years embarked on an ecumenical journey that took him beyond the historic Catholic- Protestant divisions into the realms of Buddhism. He had a profound appreciation of Buddhist spirituality, one which was acknowledged by Buddhist leaders such as the Dalai Lama and D T Suzuki. Merton saw Buddhism not as a substitute for Christianity, but an enriching "way". Out of the centre of the Catholic Christian tradition, he was able, as one scholar put it, to "engage in dialogue with other restless Catholics, Christians and people of other faiths or no formal faith".
While in Bangkok for dialogue with Buddhists, he was accidentally electrocuted on December 10, 1968. He was 53 years old. I was interested to learn that the year before his death, Merton said that The Seven Storey Mountain, widely regarded as a spiritual masterpiece, was theologically crude, and he had since departed from its "black and white" certainties.
The biggest human temptation, said Thomas Merton, is to settle for too little. This extraordinary monk was a man with a big soul. I'm glad I rediscovered him, and learned how to be a Protestant Catholic in a secular world. My two journalist mentors in Edinburgh might have been proud. Well, sort of.
