New Generation of Seekers Finds a Neglected Ascetic

While the nearby beach drew thousands, 18 people gathered this week in a Loyola Marymount University classroom to plumb the lessons of a charismatic Trappist monk who died almost 40 years ago.

Led by scholar and Anglican priest Donald Grayston, the group met to study Thomas Merton -- writer, contemplative and one of the few religious superstars of the 20th century. Called “Thomas Merton: Catholic Monk, Interfaith Pioneer,” the four-day course explored the legacy of a religious thinker who was admired by popes and the Beat Poets, who shuddered at the prospect of war, and who studied Gandhi and Buddhism as well as Scripture.

Although Merton spent most of his adult life at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, silent except for prayer and the clamor of making cheese, the monk spoke to millions through his prose and poetry.

Written at the direction of his abbot, Merton’s 1948 autobiography, “The Seven Storey Mountain,” sold 600,000 copies in its first year, making it one of the most popular accounts of a spiritual journey since John Bunyan’s 1678 “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” And in Merton’s lifetime, abruptly ended in 1968 when he was accidentally electrocuted in Thailand, he was that rare religious figure who was also a cultural icon, much as his friend the Dalai Lama is today.

But that was then.

“I had never heard of him,” said student Karen Pavic-Zabinski. The 55-year-old psychiatric nurse, a graduate student in theology at Loyola Marymount, signed up for the course after she heard Grayston speak in another class.

“It really appealed to me to have a specialist in Merton be my mentor in Merton,” the Valencia woman said.

Newly smitten, she has been reading as many of Merton’s multitude of books as she can. In them, she sees evidence of at least one mental breakdown, shortly after his ordination in 1949, followed by a spiritual recovery.

“The theme that has emerged in all his writing,” she said, “is that vulnerability is a precursor to enlightenment.”

Past president of the Thomas Merton Society of Canada, vice president of the international group and author of three books on Merton, Grayston agreed: “That period is Merton’s crucifixion and his resurrection.”

Grayston, 65, was 15 and perusing the shelves of his local Vancouver, Canada, library when the hopsacking cover of Merton’s “Seeds of Contemplation” caught his eye. Grayston had just discovered that there were Anglican monks and nuns. The book’s cover looked and felt like the coarse robe of a monk and appealed to his “medieval, romantic bent,” he said.

Later, at St. Michael’s, part of the University of Toronto, Grayston wrote his doctoral dissertation on the book and its sequel, “New Seeds of Contemplation.” Afterward, Grayston said, “I told Merton, ‘I’m retiring you. You’ve eaten up the last seven years of my life.’ But he keeps coming back.”

Formerly director of the Simon Fraser University Institute for the Humanities outside Vancouver, Grayston taught religious studies there until he retired last year. He also recently retired as vicar of St. Oswald’s Anglican Church, near Vancouver. He now heads a program that trains spiritual directors who function like life coaches for those seeking greater spirituality.

Born in France in 1915, Merton lost his American mother and his New Zealand-born father by the age of 15. A carouser as well as a seeker, Merton fathered an illegitimate child while a student at Cambridge University. Moving to the United States, he enrolled at Columbia University, where he spent time at the Black Horse Tavern and Corpus Christi Church, where he was baptized in 1938.

Merton was ordered by the Trappist abbot general to stop publishing his writing against the Vietnam War and nuclear proliferation, so he circulated his political writings privately.

“He didn’t break any laws, but he broke the stereotype of the good Catholic spiritual writer who will write about prayer but not about politics,” Grayston said.

Last year, a short biography of the still-controversial monk was dropped from the new American Catholic Catechism, due out in 2006. A bishop guiding the project said the Merton material was deleted because today’s young people had no idea who he was.

The International Thomas Merton Society has asked that Merton be reinstated, but Catholic officials said it was too late because the draft had already been sent to the Vatican for review.

Merton’s intense interest in Buddhism troubled some Catholic traditionalists.

He took the criticism with equanimity. In 1965, he mocked the fuss in “Day of a Stranger,” an account of his daily routine as the abbey’s first hermit: “What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe. Who said Zen? Wash out your mouth if you said Zen. If you see a meditation going by, shoot it.”

Grayston said he looks to Merton for guidance in “holding it all together.” Merton, he explained, found room for so many of the things that matter -- God, fellowship, politics, the arts, social justice, inter-religious dialogue and even falling in love, as Merton did in 1966 with a student nurse. Ultimately, he gave her up and reaffirmed his commitment to the religious life, Grayston said, “but after that, Merton never again doubted that he was lovable and capable of love.”

At Loyola Marymount this week, the four-morning course was offered for credit to theology graduate students.

It could also be taken as a noncredit enrichment course through the campus Center for Religion and Spirituality, part of LMU Extension.

Among the participants was Remi Aubuchon a 52-year-old television writer who is “seriously thinking about a midlife change and taking a degree in theology.”

For Aubuchon, Merton is like writer Joseph Campbell in understanding the importance of “the meta-story that is inside all of us,” the heroic struggle that people undergo to lead meaningful lives.

Also in the class was Nigerian-born Sister Domnina Okere of the Handmaids of the Holy Child Jesus. Previously unaware of Merton, the theology student told herself: “Let me know about a monk who is so close to contemporary things.”

Maria Grau of Palos Verdes took the course, not for credit, but as part of an effort to “find a better, deeper spirituality.”

She said that that desire remained in the background of a busy life until last year, when the older of her two sons, 21-year-old Evan, died inexplicably in his sleep.

“There was no more putting it off,” said Grau. Raised Catholic, she decided to look within her own church. Her sister led her to Merton.

“People are searching. Look who’s on television,” said Grau, alluding to the multitude of televangelists. Merton speaks to her in a way that fundamentalism does not: “There seems to be something in what he wrote that takes the traditional forms of prayer and worship one step further.”