Thomas Merton Walks Around Shining

Thomas Merton died fifty years ago yesterday. He was accidentally electrocuted in Thailand, where he had gone for a conference on Contemplation and Eastern Religion.

I have long looked at him as one of my spiritual fathers. He was born just a year later than my own father, and the same year as my other spiritual father, Ralph Harper.

I have read many of his books. My favorite is The Sign of Jonah.

Merton had a mystical vision in downtown Louisville Kentucky which is described this way in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:
“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”


From those words, I wrote this sonnet:

Thomas Merton Walks Around Shining

His hermitage stands sturdy in the sun.

The front porch longs to feel his heavy tread.

The windows wonder what it is he’s done

In Thailand in the room where he lies dead.

The little house would long to see him write

In hours when the winter sky was bleak

He found within himself  the world’s delight

Where only on the pages he could speak.

The living conscious Christ engulfed him there,

The well of seeing ,splashing into sound.

He found himself beneath the eye of God,

The God of Seeing,  tearing up the ground.

He tells his novices it’s something rare---

A love that only poets can compare.

 

 

 

 

Here he is, outside the hermitage he built and lived in , on the grounds of Gethsamani Monastery in Kentucky.