January 31, 1915

Thomas Merton (January 31, 1915 to December 10, 1968)  was one of the better known Catholic writers of the last century. He wrote over fifty books in his life, including poetry. 

From poets.org we learn his parents were artists, and both died before he was grown. His guardian was wealthy and Merton traveled widely, and studied in England, then enrolling at Columbia. There in advanced study he wrote about William Blake before he fell in love with a monastery in Kentucky and found a setting in which he could thrive. 

There is speculation about his death and here we quote  a source I was not familiar until the research for this post. The words are mainly those of Ed Rice, an artist and close friend of Merton's:

"I last saw Merton in the late summer of 1968, a few months before his death," Rice says. "I had been travelling around America working on a photographic book, and on my way home I stopped at Gethsemani and spent several days with him. He told me he finally was going to Asia, that he had been dreaming about it for a long time. He was not in good health, but he was still enthusiastic about the trip, looking forward to meeting holy people like the Dalai Lama. He had a long list of holy people to see in India, Japan, Vietnam and Indonesia. I believe he managed to see most of them."

....."Merton was a mystic in the classic sense, in the sense that the Desert Fathers were, or anybody else who seeks God on a personal basis. His mystical practices were similar to those of most holy men, whether European or Asian. There is a common thread that unites them. ...
"In another experience, in Sri Lanka, he was visited by the Gautama Buddha, the original Buddha upon whom contemporary beliefs are based. This is an amazing thing, for Merton or any other Westerner, to meet Buddha face to face. It's also amazing that not a word of this has ever been spoken by the so-called Merton scholars......
The depth of his openness and commitment to Eastern religions came out clearly in the last words of his life, in the lecture he delivered at the Conference of Benedictine and Cistercian Abbots, on December 10, 1968, at Samutprakan, just south of Bangkok. Merton spoke on Marxism and Monastic Perspectives. The night before, few of the participants were able to sleep because of continued yowling of cats from nearby roofs; Merton's laughter over the cat noise could be heard echoing in the night air. As he began his lecture, he noticed with some nervousness that a Dutch television crew was moving into place; because of all the controversy about his peace activities he had promised his Abbot to stay clear of the press.

He got to his main point at the end of the lecture. "What is essential in the monastic life is not embedded in buildings, is not embedded even in a rule...It is concerned with the business of total inner transformation...all other things serve that end...
"...the question of Asian monasticism for Christians should not be interpreted in terms of just playing an Asian part or an Asian role. .......I think we have to go much deeper than this.
"...And I believe that by openness to Buddhism, to Hinduism, and to these great Asian traditions, we stand a wonderful chance of learning more about the potentiality of our own traditions, because they (the Asians) have gone, from the natural point of view, so much deeper into this than we have. The combination of the natural techniques and the graces and the other things that have been manifested in Asia, and the Christian liberty of the gospel should bring us all at last to that full and transcendent liberty which is beyond mere cultural difference and mere externals ...."

"I will conclude on that note, Merton said. That note seems to have been a clear proposal for a blending of the religions, and for the mutual advantages such a blending should bring. The world's best- known monk was speaking out and the television cameras were there.

After his talk, Merton said he would take questions later, "so I will disappear," he said, obviously not realizing the true meaning of his words. He had a bath -- and later was found dead on the floor with a tall electric fan lying across his body. The official theory was that he had stumbled getting out of the bath and grabbed the fan for support. A faulty electric cord was found inside the fan; the current was strong enough to produce a heart attack.
"There has been a lot of gossip about this," Rice says, "whether he was killed accidentally, or by an enemy. He had many enemies; the CIA feared he had connections in religious circles in Asia that might have an adverse effect on the U.S. war effort in Vietnam; the FBI felt the same kind of fear over his role in the peace movement in America; neither side in Vietnam liked him; the Communists, both Russian and Chinese, were suspicious of him.
.... And of course, there were enemies, some of them powerful, within his own Church, even with his own Order. And the latter probably felt even more justified in their opposition during Merton's Asian trip.
....[O]r it could have been what it was said to have been, just an accident. Having lived on and off in Asia for some sixteen years, I am always a little sceptical of anything I hear. And I do know, there are lots of defective electrical appliances lying around. ...I suppose it's something we will never know. There was no autopsy. The man who hated the war in Vietnam was shipped quickly back to the United States, via Vietnam, along with casualties of the war, in a U. S. Air Force plane. Merton was buried in the Trappist cemetery at Gethsemani in a very simple grave....