October 11, 1948: Thomas Merton publishes his memoir The Seven Storey Mountain. It becomes one of the leading books on spirituality in the 20th Century.
He was born on January 31, 1915 in Prades, Occitanie, in southern France. His father was a painter from New Zealand, and his mother was an artist from America, both of Welsh ancestry. World War I was raging, so they left France for America. His mother died young, and his father put him back in French and English schools. He returned to America and graduated from Columbia University.
In 1941, he resigned his position as a teach of English literature at St. Bonaventure's College in Olean, New York, and was accepted into Gethsemani Abbey, a Trappist monastery outside Bardstown, Kentucky. He loved it, writing, "Brother Matthew locked the gate behind me, and I was enclosed in the four walls of my new freedom."
Dom Frederic Dunne, the abbot at the abbey, who had received him as a novice, suggested that Merton write out his life story, which he reluctantly began, but once he did, it started "pouring out." Soon, he was filling up his journals with the work that led to the book which Time magazine later described as having "redefined the image of monasticism and made the concept of saintliness accessible to moderns."
With Merton having taken a vow of poverty, all the royalties were to go to the Abbey community. Soon a trouble arose, though, when an elderly censor from another abbey objected to Merton's colloquial prose style, which he found inappropriate for a monk. Merton appealed (in French) to the Abbot General in France, who concluded that an author's style was a personal matter, and subsequently the local censor also reversed his opinion, paving the way for the book's publication.
The Seven Storey Mountain resonated within a society longing for renewed personal meaning and direction in the aftermath of World War II, at a time when global annihilation was increasingly imaginable due to the development of atomic bombs.
English writer Graham Greene wrote, "It is a rare pleasure to read an autobiography with a pattern and meaning valid for us all. The Seven Storey Mountain is a book one reads with a pencil so as to make it one's own."
The book has served as a powerful recruitment tool for the priestly life in general, and for the monastic orders in particular. In the 1950s, Gethsemani Abbey and the other Trappist monasteries experienced a surge in young men presenting themselves for the cenobitic life.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Merton became concerned about issues like peace, racial tolerance, and social equality. In a letter to Nicaraguan liberation theologian Ernesto Cardenal, who had entered Gethsemani but left in 1959 to study theology in Mexico, Merton wrote: "The world is full of great criminals with enormous power, and they are in a death struggle with each other. It is a huge gang battle, using well-meaning lawyers and policemen and clergymen as their front, controlling papers, means of communication, and enrolling everybody in their armies."
On December 10, 1968, Merton was at a Red Cross retreat facility named Sawang Khaniwat in Samut Prakan, outside Bangkok, Thailand, attending a monastic conference. After giving a talk at the morning session, he was found dead later in the afternoon in the room of his cottage, wearing only shorts, lying on his back with a short-circuited Hitachi floor fan lying across his body. He was 53 years old.
His associate, Jean Leclercq, stated: "In all probability the death of Thomas Merton was due in part to heart failure, in part to an electric shock." Since there was no autopsy, there was no suitable explanation for the wound in the back of Merton's head, "which had bled considerably." This has led to conspiracy theories that he was murdered for his political stances.
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October 11, 1948 was a Monday. This was also the day the Cleveland Indians won the World Series by beating the Boston Braves, winning Game 6, 4-3 at Braves Field in Boston. I have a separate entry for that event.
The baseball season had ended that day. Football was in midweek. And it was too soon for the NBA and NHL seasons. So there were no other scores on this historic day.
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