The Seeker and the Monk
For reasons I cannot fully ascertain, I’ve been slow to get into Thomas Merton. As in: it just hasn’t happened for me yet. Once, in my early years of literary exploration, I picked up The Seven Storey Mountain. It’s a book People Like Me are supposed to have read; I was aware of this. But I couldn’t get past the first few pages before setting it aside. At some point, I must have given my copy away.
Several years ago, I gave Merton another try with The Wisdom of the Desert. (It wasn’t bad, though in that particular genre I’d heartily recommend this book first.) I also read Robert Hudson’s strange and wonderful The Monk's Record Player: Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966. It was easily one of my favorite books of 2018—I think about it still—but that affection has more to do with Hudson and Dylan than with Merton, I’m sorry to say.
It’s possible my puzzling disinterest in everyone’s favorite Trappist monk has something to do with Merton’s later flirtations with Zen Buddhism, an approach to life that, generally speaking and with all due respect, leaves me cold. But there’s more to Merton than that—so much writing and living came before—and I’m not quite ready to give up on getting to know him.
Which brings me to Sophfronia Scott and her book The Seeker and the Monk: Everyday Conversations with Thomas Merton (Broadleaf). Scott is perhaps an unlikely “friend” to Merton. A Black female Protestant mainliner with Baptist roots, it’s not immediately apparent what she would have in common with this French-born son of a Kiwi who cavorted through his younger years before converting to Catholicism and becoming a monk. Besides the biographical differences, there are the equally important temperamental ones. If they were to meet at a cocktail party, Scott muses, “I’d probably find Merton boisterous and slightly boorish. Later, I’d likely describe him to friends as having that entitled, mansplaining kind of tone that makes you keep your distance.”
And yet, Scott tells us that at a certain point she found herself thinking about Merton all the time. “I just have this monk who follows me around,” she recalls telling an audience at a writing conference in Grand Rapids. “And he kind of mentors me and gives me advice.”
The Seeker and the Monk is conceived as a “conversation” between Scott and Merton, with chapters covering a range of themes that appear in Merton’s private journals. By focusing on these journals as opposed to his more popular books, Scott helps us get to know Merton the man, unfiltered and unedited.
Want an example? There’s a famous passage in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (a marvelous title for a book, if you ask me) in which Merton recounts a street-corner epiphany that marked a turning point in his life. In that moment in downtown Louisville, this monk who had so publicly withdrawn from the world was suddenly overcome by the recognition “that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.” So significant was this mystical experience in Merton’s life—and, later, in the imaginations of his readers—that if you visit that street corner today, you will find a historical marker.
One year after the epiphany, though, Merton returned to Louisville and had a very different experience. “Hated the town. It was hot and stupid,” he writes in his journal. “Everywhere the world oppresses me with a sense of infinite clutter and confusion…”
It’s a jarring reversal. But as Scott reminds us, it’s also an understandable one—if we’re willing to be honest with ourselves about our own complexities and contradictions. Merton’s epiphany came at a particular moment in time. I don’t doubt the experience was spiritually significant, and he certainly carried that sense with him. But life didn’t permit him to remain there on that street corner forever. Nor, certainly, did he remain as grumpy as the journal would find him, back in Louisville the following year. That too was a moment in time.
Our spiritual and literary companions are, without exception, human beings who have undergone seismic (if sometimes subterranean) shifts throughout the course of their lives. Sometimes we like those changes; praise be to God. Other times, though, we hate them. We’d prefer to flash-freeze these teachers of ours in some earlier stage, before that book, before that debacle, before that tragic last act.
But that’s not how life works. Every author, and every person, contains multitudes. Including Thomas Merton. So it seems just and right to grapple with these men and women in all their glorious complexity—and to keep on grappling, as long as it takes.
