Was Thomas Merton a Prophet?

Thomas Merton speaking publicly just hours before his death by accidental electrocution

 WAS THOMAS MERTON A PROPHET?

Speaking publicly at Sawang Kaniwat, a Red Cross retreat center, at Samut Prakan, Thailand, just hours before his death by accidental electrocution, Thomas Merton, showing his usual insight, expounds (0:00):

“Man living under certain economic conditions is no longer in possession of the fruits of his life. His life is not his. His life is lived according to conditions determined by somebody else. And I would say that on this particular point, which is important indeed in the early Marx, you have a basically Christian idea. Christianity is against alienation. Christianity revolts against an alienated life.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywE6bhApcSk  

—Mary Jo Chmielewski, “Thomas Merton,” YouTube video, 3:27 minutes, February 1, 2015

Merton’s words draw parallels and coincidences between Karl Marx, the ideological enemy of the Roman Catholic Church, and Christianity.

Was Merton a prophet?

Alan Jacobs, writing in The New Yorker, certainly thinks so. He relates that Merton began to perceive himself as a “guilty bystander” negligent of his responsibility as a member of the human race to address the burgeoning evils in the world, and when Merton was drawn to the Ernesto Cardenal’s activist enterprise, it was symptomatic of his emergent self-understanding. Despite the restrictions and constraints of monastic enclosure, Merton continued to make his way as a seeker in the world. He engaged in left-leaning politics and delved into oriental religious traditions. He spoke his truth as he discovered it.

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Merton was a remarkable man by any measure, but perhaps the most remarkable of his traits was his hypersensitivity to social movements from which, by virtue of his monastic calling, he was supposed to be removed. Intrinsic to Merton’s nature was a propensity for being in the midst of things. If he had continued to live in the world, he might have died not by electrocution but by overstimulation.

…Over the course of [Ernesto Cardenal’s] time at Gethsemani, they developed a plan: Cardenal would attend a seminary in Cuernavaca, Mexico, be ordained as a priest, and then establish a new monastery there, one that would be deeply concerned with seeking justice in the grossly unjust societies of Central America. And Merton would be released from his commitments to Gethsemani and join Cardenal there.

Throughout the second half of the nineteen-fifties, Merton had come to believe that his monastic isolation had made him inattentive to the evils of the world. Cardenal had not been the only influence on him in this respect but eventually became an important one. Merton very much looked forward to this new life, and to its renewal of the political commitments that had meant so much to him in his youth. In October of 1959, he wrote to Cardenal to say that he prayed daily “that this venture may be successful for the glory of God. One must expect obstacles and difficulties but there seem to be so many indications that this is God’s will and I trust He will bring it to completion in His own way.” Gradually, the two men began to treat Merton’s move to Mexico as inevitable. Cardenal wrote, “I can only imagine how difficult the departure from Gethsemani must be for you”—as though it had already happened.

But it did not happen. The leaders of Merton’s order refused his request to be transferred, and for a time forbade him to communicate with Cardenal. The dream faded and then died. Cardenal became a priest, and then, later, the Minister of Culture in Nicaragua’s Sandinista government for nearly a decade. When, in 1984, he refused a papal order to leave his government job, Pope John Paul II defrocked him. As for Merton, he moved not to Mexico but to his little two-room hermitage, near the end of 1961.

The seven years of life remaining to Merton would be enormously fertile, productive, and destabilizing—as those years were for the whole country. What Merton’s mind and heart sought, in those years, was a certain convergence of commitments, a potentially harmonious joining of beliefs and practices that most people thought irreconcilable or, at best, inevitably separate.

Perhaps the central question for him was: What contribution can the contemplative make to peacemaking, especially in a bellicose age? He wrote to Cardenal often on this topic. “As to politics and the world situation, a little news comes through sometimes and then long periods of silence....Yet I wonder if I really know less than those who get the papers.” It’s obvious that “the world is full of great criminals with enormous power and they are in a death struggle with each other. ...What can come of it? Surely not peace.” He understood that “we must pray and be joyful and simple because we do not after all understand most of it. ...But let us avoid false optimism, and approved gestures, and seek truth.”

Denied the opportunity to join Cardenal in Cuernavaca, Merton sought truth primarily through writing. He wrote a long prose poem, “Original Child Bomb,” about the aftereffects of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and an elegy for the four little girls killed by the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Alabama. He published a selection from his journals in which he reflected largely on politics and public events and titled it “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.” He stayed in his hermitage. Though the most famous activist priests of that era, the brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, considered Merton a kind of mentor and guide, they could not convince him to join their protests.

…[Rowan Williams] focusses his inquiry on something Merton wrote in “The Sign of Jonas,” one of the first books he worked on after entering Gethsemani: “I have to be a person that nobody knows. They can have Thomas Merton. He’s dead.” Williams says, “Truth can only be spoken by a man nobody knows, because only in the unknown person is there no obstruction to reality: the ego of self-oriented desire…seeking to dominate and organize the world, is absent.” Williams believes that it is this distinctive absence that helps us to understand how Merton “could give almost equal veneration to Catholic and Buddhist traditions.”

…He was his contradictions: the person in motion who seeks stillness; the monk who wants to belong to the world; the famous person who wants to be unknown.

Merton lived the public world, the world of words and politics, but knew that living in it had killed him. (“Thomas Merton is dead.”)

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https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/thomas-merton-the-monk-who-became-a-prophet

—Alan Jacobs, “Thomas Merton, the Monk Who Became a Prophet,” The New Yorker (December 28, 2018)

 

Monastic Enclosure Sign at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemane

Whether or not we consider Merton a prophet or not depends largely on how we define prophecy.

This link covers the subject of Biblical prophecy rather thoroughly:

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Biblical prophets are persons who convey a message from God, or teach the Word of God. In addition, sometimes God gave them a prophecy of the future to convey to the people of their time. In some cases, God used them in a miracle (e.g., Moses, Elijah the prophet, etc.).

A true prophet proclaimed the message given to him, as the “seer” beheld the vision of God (Numbers 12:6; 12:8).

Thus a prophet was a spokesman for God; he spoke in God’s name and by his authority (Exodus 7:1). He is the mouth by which God speaks to men (Jeremiah 1:9; Isaiah 51:16), and hence what the prophet says is not of man but of God (2 Peter 1:20-21; compare Hebrews 3:7; Acts 4:25; 28:25).

Prophets were the immediate organs of God for the communication of his mind and will to men (Deuteronomy 18:18-19). The whole Word of God may in this general sense be spoken of as prophetic, inasmuch as it was written by men who received the revelation they communicated from God, no matter what its nature might be. The foretelling of future events was not a necessary but only an incidental part of the prophetic office. The great task assigned to the prophets whom God raised up among the people was “to correct moral and religious abuses, to proclaim the great moral and religious truths which are connected with the character of God, and which lie at the foundation of his government.”

Any one being a spokesman for God to man might thus be called a prophet. Thus Enoch, Abraham, and the patriarchs, as bearers of God’s message (Genesis 20:7; Exodus 7:1; Psalm 105:15), as also Moses (Deuteronomy 18:15; 34:10; Hos. 12:13), are ranked among the prophets.

The 70 elders of Israel (Numbers 11:16-29), “when the spirit rested upon them, prophesied.”

Asaph and Jeduthun “prophesied with a harp” (1 Chronicles 25:3).

Miriam and Deborah were prophetesses (Exodus 15:20; Judges 4:4).

The title of prophet was thus a general application to all who have messages from God to men.

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https://christiananswers.net/dictionary/prophet.html

—“What is a…prophet in the Bible? and who is one?” ChristianAnswers.net, December 13, 2021

Another explanation of Biblical prophecy is given at this link:

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In a general sense, a prophet is a person who speaks God’s truth to others. The English word prophet comes from the Greek word prophetes, which can mean “one who speaks forth” or “advocate.” Prophets are also called “seers,” because of their spiritual insight or their ability to “see” the future.

In the Bible, prophets often had both a teaching and revelatory role, declaring God’s truth on contemporary issues while also revealing details about the future. Isaiah’s ministry, for example, touched on both the present and the future. He preached boldly against the corruption of his day (Isaiah 1:4) and delivered grand visions of the future of Israel (Isaiah 25:8).

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https://www.gotquestions.org/prophet-Bible.html

—“What is a prophet in the Bible?” Got Questions: Your Questions. Biblical Answers.

As a rule, Biblical prophets are persecuted.

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Usually, the prophets God sends are despised and their message unheeded. Isaiah described his nation as a “rebellious people, deceitful children, children unwilling to listen to the Lord’s instruction. They say to the seers, ‘See no more visions!’ and to the prophets, ‘Give us no more visions of what is right! Tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions’” (Isaiah 30:9–10). Jesus lamented that Jerusalem had killed the prophets God sent to them (Luke 13:34).

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—Ibid.

According to Jewish legend, for example, Isaiah was sawn in half by order of King Manasseh of Judah.

Elijah’s persecution by Queen Jezebel of Israel is compellingly documented in Scripture. He escaped in a flaming chariot.

Although not everyone speaks God’s truth as directly revealed to them, many do play a prophetic role because the truth they speak is confirmed by the good fruits it bears in the lives and deeds of those who hear it—in this respect, anyone who speaks truth and thereby calls its hearers to bring their lives into conformity with God’s law and God’s will are prophets.

 

Thomas Merton was a seeker who spoke truth, truth that resonates until today and that continues to bear good fruits. He influenced many for the better while concomitantly inciting indignation and opposition in the Roman Catholic Church. The hostility and resistance lasts to the present day. In defining aspects of his singular calling, therefore, Merton donned the identifying garb of the Biblical prophets.

Yes, Merton was a prophet.

 

 

Downtown Louisville, Kentucky Memorial to Thomas Merton