A Hindu monk told Thomas Merton to go back to Christianity
In 1938 a restless Columbia graduate met a visiting Hindu monk and expected to be steered toward Hinduism. Instead Mahanambrata Brahmachari told him to read Augustine and The Imitation of Christ. Within three years Thomas Merton had entered a silent Kentucky abbey, from which he would write more than 50 books.
Merton was born in Prades, France, in January 1915, to a New Zealand painter father and an American Quaker mother who had met at an art school in Paris. The family crossed to the United States in August 1915 and settled in Queens, where his mother died of stomach cancer in 1921, when he was six. Schooling took him to Montauban in France and then Clare College, Cambridge, where he preferred loafing to study and fathered a child he never met. At Columbia from 1935 he formed lifelong friendships with the poet Robert Lax and the teacher Mark Van Doren.
After his conversion he was confirmed at Corpus Christi Church in November 1938. The Franciscans first accepted him and then told him to withdraw, so he taught at St. Bonaventure University in Olean. On 10 December 1941 he arrived at the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, sitting by an open window in the guest house for three days to prove he was sincere, and caught a bad cold. He was admitted as a postulant and named Mary Louis. His brother John Paul visited in July 1942, was baptised, and was killed the next April when his plane went down over the English Channel.
His abbot, Frederic Dunne, set him to translating and writing, overriding his fear that authorship clashed with monastic humility. The Seven Storey Mountain, written in two-hour sessions in the scriptorium, came out in 1948 and had sold over 150,000 copies by the following year; National Review later ranked it among the century's 100 best nonfiction books. He was ordained a priest in May 1949.
In the 1960s he took a nonviolent stand on race riots and the Vietnam War and grew deeply interested in Eastern religions. From 1965 he lived in a hermitage on the abbey grounds. Abbot Flavian Burns let him tour Asia in late 1968, where he met the Dalai Lama three times in India and made a retreat near Darjeeling. He died that December, aged 53.
Source: Thomas Merton
