ISBN: 1-931816-01-8
ISBN 13: 978-1-931816-01-4
$13.95, 168 pages
$11.16 Online Price
(Quality paperback)

Preface

WHY DID THOMAS MERTON DIE—at such a time, in such a way?

In December 1968 Merton, the Trappist monk and world-famous author, expired suddenly in Bangkok while attending an international monastic conference. Accidental death by electrocution was the verdict.

He would have died instantly—with no warning, no time to prepare himself.

Merton, at the height of his powers and peak of his influence, had come to mean much to great numbers of Christians in his generation. For tens of thousands he was a pathfinder, an exemplary figure of his age. That a life so vital and expanding was so indifferently extinguished violates for many their sense of justice and appropriateness.

The apparently meaningless end cries out for some attempt at clarification of what took place that December day—and of the background that led to it. The present work is an imaginative version of what might have happened; one answer perhaps to the nagging question, why?

We make this effort not only to interpret as pivotal a figure as Thomas Merton but for the sake of our own lives with their ever-shifting measures of light and darkness.

When Merton died with such brutal suddenness and, as it were, neglect, the darkness of ignorance seemed to increase perceptibly and has so remained ... as long as we continue to turn away from the challenge of the mystery.

If we can achieve greater insight not only into Merton's death but into his life as well, we may cast more light upon the problem of how we ourselves propose to live.

At issue, then, is not so much the enigma of Thomas Merton and his death as that of our own destinies. The profound reflections that arise in our minds after pondering the manner of his departure are of greater moment than particular ideas his individual career may generate. He is essentially the catalyst in the mixture, the precipitating agent for our investigation.

Many will discourage the attempt on the grounds that it is not for us to question the will of Providence. But here the mystery compels us to question—not in the sense of opposing or doubting but of discovering what that Will actually was.

Or we are told that we cannot know the ways of God. Yet in fact we can know, in part at least. Surely that is one of the purposes driving human life: our ability to know or conjecture the ways of Providence. What goal is more rewarding to pursue?

We hear that his death was simply "accidental." But in a world ruled by law and justice, as, despite appearances, we must believe, can there be true accidents in a life that has gained significance?

“He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see? … He that teacheth man knowledge, shall he not know?" (Psalms 94:9-10)

Or one is told that God takes care of his own. Someone who was not-not yet necessary to the divine purpose-might well have died precisely as Merton did, as so many do in the same sudden, "accidental" fashion. Souls whose time—for Truth, for saintliness, for release from the bonds that fetter us—has not yet come.

Why was Thomas Merton one of them?

For his time had come, or seemed to have. But perhaps not. We may have been mistaken in what we took him to be.

This will be a disturbing train of thought for many, and no doubt it is out of wariness toward just such ideas that devoted Merton followers choose not to look too closely into any aspect of his death. One can sympathize with them, but the need to know, where knowledge may be possible, is more compelling, and that is the motive that must guide us.

Merton’s journals and letters of his last two months—those written during the Asian journey—have been examined closely for clues to his mysterious end; they tell us little. In these communications he seemed, outwardly at least, his normal self. But in tracing the course of his tragedy the dutiful record of the final weeks should not be our principal criterion. To find the truth that has eluded us, we have to look elsewhere and intuit what was going on in his life. For, in view of what befell him, something assuredly was.

Indeed, our sense of Merton's known personality has shed no real light on his death or on the factors that may have led up to it. It is the unknown Merton we must call into being.

Since nonfiction is comfortable with known parameters, and fiction with the unknown, I have chosen the form of the novel to search out hidden facets of his complex nature of which hitherto we have been too little aware. In this effort the role of the creative imagination—fortified by meditative practice and brought to bear upon important aspects of his life-has been indispensable.

Although it is the unknown Merton I am seeking, I have made use of familiar events of his career as a realistic framework to provide immediate verisimilitude and ease of recognition. In short, the character of Thomas Merton portrayed here is based, more or less freely, on the historical figure, and the work as a whole on facts generally verifiable. The interpretation is new.

In analyzing him we should not forget how different Merton's time—the fifties and sixties—was from our own today, nor how much he was a product of his era. Its religious belief—system and mindset may still be real for only a few today but, both in acceptance and rejection, they were real for him then. Feeling acutely its passions, discontents, and changes, and often contending with the transitional mid-century atmosphere of its Catholicism, Merton fought the battles that others in our time do not have to fight. In the overall assessment of his life, his courage is never in question.

A Technical Note.
A large, defectively wired fan killed Merton with a current of 220 volts. It is believed he may have attempted to move it while still wet from a shower or that, slipping on the stone floor of his room, he had reached out to the fan to support himself.

If either supposition is correct, his hands would have been inevitably burned along with other parts of his body. In fact, while his torso was severely burned, his hands were untouched. Which obviously means that he had not tried to grasp or adjust the fan, and that when he collided with it he was not fully conscious: it being impossible to imagine anyone falling against a large electric fan while conscious without thrusting out his hands for protection or support.

A likelier explanation is that, dazed by a stroke or heart attack, he fell against the fan in his convulsion, the front of his body first to come in contact with it.

The seizure itself could not have been "accidental"—that would merely beg the question of why. It must have been purposeful in expressing symbolically some major conflict in Merton's psyche. From that standpoint we could interpret the attack as suicidal, or semi-suicidal—as doubtless many such in essence are.

Seen in this light, his death—and life—assume another dimension, and the approach taken in the following pages is corroborated by the actual circumstances of his demise.

Contents