Wednesday, December 10, 2008

This Day in Religious History (The Contested Death of Thomas Merton, Catholic Mystic)


December 10, 1968—The spiritual journey of Thomas Merton--Columbia University aesthete, Roman Catholic convert, Trappist monk, bestselling author, advocate of nonviolence—ended characteristically: with a surprise.

On the 27th anniversary of his entrance into the Abbey of Gethsemani, Merton died in a room in Bangkok, Thailand, where he had journeyed for a conference of monks from East and West. He was found lying on the floor on his back with a large standing electric fan lying diagonally across his body. Though the blades had stopped running, the current was still operating, leaving a large brown streak halfway up his side.

A nun at the conference who had previously been a physician surmised that Merton died from a heart attack induced by an electric shock. The official story issued by church officials was that “Father Louis” (the name he had taken upon entrance into the religious life) had slipped on the terrazzo floor while getting out of the tub and had instinctively grabbed at the nearby fan.

In a prior post, I briefly described what attracted readers to Merton in the last 20 years of his life: an anguished search for God described in impressionistic prose that reflected a visual eye probably in his genetic makeup (his father was a painter). As a Catholic who also graduated from Columbia University, I have also been fascinated by how a school with few discernible tendencies toward the religious life nevertheless contributed indelibly to his youthful spiritual quest.

But another aspect of Merton’s life has intrigued me: the numerous non-official explanations for how he died.

The first such explanation came 30 years ago from someone I knew through my family who had decided to enter the priesthood. The seminarian had become, like virtually everyone exposed to any of Merton’s prose, intoxicated by the monk’s fervor and powerful writing. But despite his admiration, the seminarian had come, slowly and reluctantly, to conclude that Merton had committed suicide, executing it in such a way as to appear consistent with an accident.

The other non-official explanation I encountered recently is more characteristic of our age: Merton fell victim to a CIA plot. Former Catholic (now Episcopalian) priest Matthew Fox recounted in his autobiography a conversation with an unnamed CIA agent who sounded dangerously noncommittal on whether the agency might have ordered the priest terminated.

According to this line of thinking, Merton had become a dangerous force because of his pacifist associations with people not definitively aligned with the West in the struggle against Communism. (Indeed, the morning lecture he delivered immediately before returning to his room, on Marxism and monasticism, was not likely to reassure these critics.)

Two novels have even been written about Merton’s death: The Death of Thomas Merton, by Paul Hourihan, and The Bossuet Conspiracy, by Bill Goodson. I’m sure that eventually Dan Brown will get around to it, too.

It should be stated right there that the official story of Merton’s death has strong elements of plausibility. Merton’s longtime friend from Columbia, Edward Rice, observed that the monk combined clumsiness with impracticality about certain aspects of life, leading him to walk around wet, barely clothed, with little understanding that he needed to be careful about electric shocks. It also didn’t help that faulty electrical wiring was, at the time, a not-infrequent occurrence in the Far East.

Above all, what fed the rumors were the emotional circumstances leading up to Merton’s last journey and the hasty manner in which the death was investigated.

It should have stunned nobody, least of all Merton, that he remained an intellectual and emotional sojourner years after he had seemingly come to an Augustinian spiritual rest:

* His prolific writings had only brought a host of well-wishers to see him, increasingly disrupting the contemplative life he sought.


* His escalating appeals for nonviolence at the height of the Cold War had brought notoriety not just to himself but to his religious order, which briefly silenced him.


* Friendship with a twentysomething nurse who had tended him after an operation led him to break his vows of chastity, poverty (he borrowed money to contrive to see her), and disobedience (he disobeyed the rules of his order regarding encounters with women). The messy aftermath of the love affair reminded him of his youthful, pre-conversion experiences leaving emotionally damaged women in his wake.


* Eastern monastic practices intrigued Merton. His journals of his Asian trip indicate that he had at least two mystical experiences involving Buddhism, including one he interpreted as an out-of-body experience.


A number of associates who were familiar with Merton’s situation thought that his Asian trip—secured, after years of rejection by his monastic superiors, with the accession of a new abbot—would lead the monk to break from his vows. Yet only a few weeks before his demise, he wrote a friend: “Keep telling everyone that I am a monk of Gethsemani and intend to remain one all my days.”


My own opinion is that Merton’s death was probably accidental. But in addition to his uncertain emotional state, two other factors probably ensure that the various rumors arising from his death will probably never be entirely dismissed out of hand:


First, no autopsy was conducted on Merton’s body because of the desire to bury him on the grounds of Gethsemani.


Second, the man who administered last rites to Merton, anointed his body, and arranged for its disposal back to the United States was Rembert Weakland, who as Benedictine Archabbot presided over the conference that Merton was attending.


It can be argued that when he saw the body, Weakland wanted to leave some semblance of dignity to a man found in a messy, chaotic death scene. The strongest counterpoint to that is Weakland’s own subsequent background: As Archbishop of Milwaukee, he not only transferred out of his control priests who had sexually abused minors, but paid half a million dollars of church money to conceal his own sexual misconduct. In other words, on at least a couple of occasions, he had covered up matters embarrassing or even criminal to the Church.


Curiously, Merton, an eloquent proponent of nonviolence, was flown back to the U.S. in an Air Force bomber also carrying back the bodies of dead soldiers from Vietnam. He was buried a week later at Gethsemani, amid a light snowfall, under a cedar tree.

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