The Legacy of Thomas Merton
An Interview with Br. Patrick Hart, OCSO
Page 1 of 2
Br. Patrick Hart of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Nelson County, Kentucky, is a native of Green Bay, Wisconsin. He entered the community at Gethsemani in 1951 after having been a Brother of the Holy Cross for four years, during which time he had begun studies at the University of Notre Dame. He received a B.A. in philosophy from that university in 1966. In the summer of 1968 he was appointed secretary to Thomas Merton, with special responsibilities for looking after his publishing and correspondence as Merton prepared to travel to Asia for a meeting of monastic leaders. After Merton’s accidental death in Thailand on December 10 of that year, Br. Patrick continued in his role as secretary. Over the past thirty-five years he has edited more than a dozen of Merton’s books, overseen the editing of Merton’s personal journals, and most recently published Merton’s complete correspondence with the Benedictine monk and scholar Jean Leclercq. Br. Patrick was a founding editor of The Merton Annual and served for eleven years as editor of the journal Cistercian Studies (now Cistercian Studies Quarterly).
The following is an edited version of the transcript of a telephone interview he had with Sr. Mary Margaret (Meg) Funk on the morning of December 6, 2004.
The following is an edited version of the transcript of a telephone interview he had with Sr. Mary Margaret (Meg) Funk on the morning of December 6, 2004.
Meg: First of all, Patrick, I want to thank you for doing this. You have seen various “incarnations” of Thomas Merton, including his public personality as an artist and his more private life as a monk who was known to his confreres as Father Louis. What do you think was his major contribution to monasticism?
Brother Patrick: Well, I think it was his concern about getting past the rigidity and overemphasis on the ascetical and penitential character of Trappist life. He wanted to get back to a Benedictine spirit as this was spelled out so well by our Cistercian fathers in the twelfth century. Before Merton’s time, at Gethsemani at least and probably at most other Trappist monasteries, we were still living the seventeenth-century Trappist reform. Merton felt that there was more to monasticism than that. He wanted to get back to the pure sources, so he began translating the works of the Cistercian “evangelists”: Bernard of Clairvaux, Aelred of Rievaulx, Guerric of Igny, and William of St. Thierry, as well as ones who were less well-known, like Amadeus and Isaac of Stella. And there were the women Cistercians, too, such as Lutgarde. Merton wrote a book about her, entitled What Are These Wounds? Anyway, he wanted to get beyond all the rigidity, and to do this he even went back beyond the Cistercians to the roots of the Christian monastic movement, to John Cassian and the Desert Fathers, to the works of Pachomius, Evagrius, the Gregorys, and so forth. In brief, I think his contribution was to get back to the pure sources of monasticism.
Meg: His work has been helpful to all of us. I know I’ve continued to be enlivened by reading his journals, which reflect all of that research.
Brother Patrick: Yes, they spell it out, don’t they? Or consider Merton’s exchange of letters with Jean Leclercq, recently published under the title Survival or Prophecy? In a sense, it was through Leclercq that it all began. He was visiting Gethsemani in the early 1950s, working on the critical edition of the works of St. Bernard, and he discovered some unpublished things here in our vault of rare books and manuscripts. Now Merton had recently been made Master of Scholastics, that is, of the student monks, and his office was in the vault where all these wonderful manuscripts were housed. There were handwritten manuscripts from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, and then some of the first printed books from the fifteenth century, the so-called incunabula. And this was a great resource for Merton. I’m sure that his being in the presence of these manuscripts inspired him to dig into them.
Meg: Patrick, you’ve edited so much of Merton’s work—his journals, books, correspondence—how would you describe his genius? What was its source?
Brother Patrick: I think it was because he had such great exposure. First of all, he was well-educated. He went to good schools in England and France, and then to Columbia University in this country. He was exposed to some of the best teachers, men like Mark Van Doren and Daniel Walsh at Columbia, and even to fellow students who were very alive intellectually. All this was a real stimulus along the way. So Merton’s real genius, I think, came from his exposure. He read so widely. He was interested in everything. You know, I was just reading recently that his first interest in Hinduism came when he was at Cambridge, or maybe even before that when he was at his prep school, Oakham. He was one of the few who were standing up for Gandhi back in the 1930s. And a bit later, at Columbia, he got to know the Hindu monk Brahmachari, who was apparently a great scholar and who became a good friend of Merton and his fellow student Bob Lax. Brahmachari wasn’t trying to convert Merton, to have him become a Hindu. He said, go deeper into your own tradition. Read The Imitation of Christ and St. Augustine’s Confessions. That would have been around 1937. I think it was partly because of Brahmachari’s influence that Merton became a Catholic, which is a very interesting twist.
Meg: Could you say something about Merton as a writer, an artist?
Brother Patrick: Well, he was born with great gifts. He knew how to write, but he also worked at it. You know, he kept a journal of his student years. Even at his prep school he was winning prizes for his short stories, and he would illustrate them himself. So he was indeed an artist. He was that to begin with and, I think, a born writer in the sense that he had to write. Just as we have to breathe, Merton had to write. He had this need to express, to articulate, to externalize it all in some way. And he liked to go back and read his journals after a year or so.
Meg: What made him so fitting as a dialogue partner with many different traditions?
Brother Patrick: Well, he was always interested in other faiths. There is no question about it. When he was Master of Scholastics and then later when he was made the Master of Novices, he took a real interest in the local people. He was telling our Guestmaster that we ought to invite Baptists and Disciples of Christ and Episcopalians to the monastery. So that’s how it began. He would invite them—people like the Baptist scholar Glenn Hinson and members of the Disciples of Christ like Bill Paulsell—and these kinds of persons are still coming to the abbey after all these years. They were very much influenced by Merton and by the way he reached out to them. This was in the 1950s, before there was much talk of ecumenism. Then came Vatican II, and ecumenism was in the air. But there was also his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, published already in 1948. This book created a lot of interest among educated people because they saw that Merton was somebody who could write well. He wrote about his spiritual journey in a way that people could identify with. It was about his search, his constant searching. As he says at the end of that work, Sit finis libri, non finis quaerendi: Let this be the end of the book, but not of the search. I think his whole life was a search.
Meg: So his best-known book was that early one about his life?
Brother Patrick: Yes. I think that’s why his best writing is in his autobiographical works, when he is writing about his own life and, in his journals, about how he views things day by day, how he sees things. This shows the paradox of Merton, too. He was so honest and frank about everything. He certainly was critical about many things, but he felt he had to get them outside of himself to see them more objectively—to see them as they really were.
Meg: Could you say more about what the paradox was?
Brother Patrick: I’d say the paradox of Merton was that he was searching for greater solitude, and yet there was another side of him, the social side. He needed people and he needed friendship. He needed to be in contact with people. Just consider the fact that he wrote so many letters, thousands of letters. We’ve published five volumes of them, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg. These letters and the journals reflect Merton’s real thinking because when you’re writing a journal or you’re writing letters, you’re not thinking of censorship.
Meg: What was that all about?
Brother Patrick: Merton was exposed to two kinds of censorship: Trappist and then diocesan. The Abbot General of the Trappists appointed the censors, though it’s interesting to note that toward the last year of Merton’s life there was no longer the requirement of censorship. We called them readers, but . . .
Meg: Yes, the whole business of the Nihil Obstat and the Imprimi Potest.
Brother Patrick: Right. Merton first came across this when he was still a student at Columbia, not yet a Catholic. He had picked up a book by Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, and he didn’t want to read it once he noticed that it had undergone the process of censorship. But he did eventually read it and found it most enlightening.
Meg: Could you say some more about how his artist’s eye equipped him to be a dialogue partner with people of other traditions?
Brother Patrick: Merton was unquestionably an artist. He saw things. There is an exhibit right now at Bellarmine University in Louisville on the Zen Calligraphy and Zen Photography of Merton. Bonnie Thurston has written in one of her articles that Merton saw things in a Zen way. He really observed things. In other words, he paid attention; he became aware and mindful. Maybe his interest in Zen and in Buddhism in general was related to that. And he wanted to understand these other traditions so that he could learn from them. I recall that when he was getting ready to go to the Far East he said, “I’m hoping to bring back some of their wisdom, some of their techniques and their ways of praying and entering into the Silence.” It wasn’t that he wanted to change any doctrines. He wanted to learn more about their methods so that he could deepen his own monastic experience. He didn’t deny that there were differences in doctrine; he wasn’t trying to wash that away. But he felt that people like the Sufi mystics can teach you how to pray from the heart, to enter into the heart and not worry about the creeds and doctrines that divide us. On the experiential level, the level of how we experience God, Merton felt we have much in common.
Meg: I’d next like to know if there is any trace of proclamation in Merton’s motivation for engaging in dialogue. As you no doubt know, there’s a big debate among people in dialogue today. Some say that there should be an agenda to proclaim in the sense of inviting others to see and even embrace the truth of one’s own tradition. But I don’t see any motivation of this sort in Thomas Merton. Do you think he had any?
Brother Patrick: No, I really don’t. I think that he wanted people to remain what they were and continue in their own beliefs. He didn’t tell people that they should become Catholic or should do this or that. They should go more deeply into their own tradition. He is very similar to the Dalai Lama in this respect. It’s what Brahmachari had once told him: go deeper into Catholicism and you’ll find a common stream with other faiths.
Meg: Merton was certainly involved with many other faith traditions: Theravada, Tibetan, and Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Judaism, Taoism, Confucianism, Eastern Orthodoxy. His books and articles on these traditions are still being printed and reprinted around the world. Of them all, do you feel he was most attracted to Buddhist thought and practice?
Brother Patrick: Well, I’m a little unsure about this. He was interested in so many things. He read the Chinese classics you know, in translation. He was fascinated by Taoism. He said that the book he enjoyed writing the most was The Way of Chuang-Tzu. He didn’t know the Chinese characters so he was working from translations—French, German, and Italian—but he checked things out with some Chinese scholars. He was very accurate. He said that Taoism was really the source of the spirit of Zen. But I think it was actually Tibetan Buddhism that he was getting more and more interested in. I picked this up from his Asian Journal. Maybe this was due to his contact with the Dalai Lama in India and his meeting other Tibetan monks there. This seems to be the direction he was going towards the very end of his life. But he would read them all: Hindu authors, and the Sufi mystics of Islam. He had a universal mind. He just was interested in all traditions, and he felt they all had something to contribute.
Meg: Some people feel that he was drifting away from the Catholic faith. Are they right?
Brother Patrick: No, I don’t think there was any wavering away from the Catholic faith. He was steeped in his own tradition. That’s why he was able to do all this safely. He could reach out and explore other traditions and learn from them, and then celebrate the gifts that they brought to his own tradition.
Meg: You mentioned the importance of Merton’s conversations with the Dalai Lama. He writes about these in The Asian Journal in a way that reveals his engaged intellect and his deep spirituality. Do you think Merton was an enlightened person in addition to being an intellectual and artistic genius?
Brother Patrick: I think so, I really do. For one thing, there was the experience of enlightenment or breakthrough when he stood before the statues of the reclining Buddhas at that site in Sri Lanka. That was an esthetic experience, but it was also spiritual, deeply religious. How do you distinguish the esthetic and the spiritual, the secular and the sacred? You can say what you want about that, but I think the two did merge.
Meg: Was he enlightened even before that?
Brother Patrick: I think so. I think his whole monastic life prepared him for it. I remember when I entered the monastery in 1951. All the monks would spend time sitting in meditation and Merton would be utterly motionless for half an hour without even twitching an eyebrow. I’d see him sometimes sitting alone in the church where I could observe him and I would think to myself how wonderful it was that he could sit still for so long and obviously be in prayer and meditation. And that was long before all of us monks had real training in meditative sitting. The memory of this is still fresh in my mind.
Meg: Was this after the early morning Vigils?
Brother Patrick: Yes, between Vigils and Lauds.
Meg: We also know that Merton was fascinated by the work of Dr. Reza Arasteh, especially his book Toward a Final Personality Integration.
Brother Patrick: Yes, but you know, I’ve never read that book. I suppose I should. I should actually read all the books of Merton’s library, but to read all of them would take a lifetime. A person could barely find time to read all the books that Merton himself wrote. Perhaps he wrote too much, but his works are incredibly influential. I was just speaking with the director of the Merton Archives. He told me that there have already been 250 master’s and doctoral dissertations written on Merton. They have almost all of them on the shelves of the Merton Center at Bellarmine, and there are more coming in all the time. Can you imagine? At least a dozen students are working on such dissertations right now. Nobody goes out soliciting this kind of work; it’s just totally unsolicited.
Meg: Let’s talk a bit about Merton and monastic renewal. Do you think he was moving toward a monasticism without form? Do you think he would have advocated a lay monasticism?
Brother Patrick: You know, I’ve been thinking about that. Without form? No, I don’t think so. I do think we had too much structure in the past, and there was a reaction against that to less structure on the part of many monks. But for novices in training Merton would certainly have insisted on some kind of discipline. I recall that after Merton’s death his former novice Ernesto Cardenal had an interview in the New York Times about the kind of monasticism called for in the future. He said that he had once discussed this with Father Louis, Thomas Merton, and Merton said the first rule would be that there would be no rules. Well, I can see Merton saying that with a twinkle in his eye. To be realistic, some rules would be necessary just to enable people to live together.
Meg: You spoke of the way Merton would sit for long periods in meditation and prayer. Could you say something about the way he described his prayer in that letter to the Sufi scholar Abdul Aziz?
Brother Patrick: Yes. That’s so beautiful. That’s a wonderful correspondence. I recommend it to everybody to read because it’s the only time when he talked about how he himself prayed.
Meg: And you think that was his daily practice?
Brother Patrick: Yes, I think so.
Meg: In this way he could teach others to pray, but who was his teacher?
Brother Patrick: Well, he didn’t have a Sufi teacher. I was recently talking with my confrere Fr. Jim Conner about that, and he said Merton didn’t have any single teacher. I think it was his whole dialogue with the East that was his teacher, but also his own tradition. Look at the desert tradition of early Christian monasticism. Merton drew deeply from that.
Meg: Let’s talk some more about monastic renewal. Do you think Merton reformed monasticism from observance of rules to something more experiential, to practice and to engagement with world issues?
Brother Patrick: I’m sure that he helped. He was one of those in the forefront of renewal, but he didn’t do it single-handedly. There were other people, you know. In Europe there was André Louf and also Jean Leclercq, plus García Colombás from Montserrat—all sorts of people in that early renewal in the mid-60s. In this country, too. I think you know Armand Veilleux; his studies on Pachomius were very important. But Merton was probably the best-known of them all because he just published so much.
Meg: And did he lead the bandwagon to get others more engaged with all of the issues?
Brother Patrick: Yes, he did. That’s why he had so many things going at the same time. It was almost impossible to try to keep up with him. You might think that it would be only ecumenism and that this would be sufficient, like reaching out toward the Orthodox, the Eastern Christians. But there was also his interest in the early Celtic monasticism of the sixth century. He was digging into that, teaching himself Early Irish so he could translate their poetry. He had an inquisitive mind that just knew no bounds. He was a kind of universal person. There’s no one quite like him. Never in my life have I met anyone with such a variety of interests, so many. And he could see connections among them all. That was the thing—he was always bringing out the connections. He could also read the German poet Rilke and was giving talks on him. All this was happening just shortly before he got interested in issues of social justice. The plight of the blacks in this country became a real issue with him. We were beginning to have blacks join the community and he knew that they were not being treated as equals, so here too was something that had to be addressed. And then John Howard Griffin was filling him in with information about what was going on about race in the rest of the country, so he was getting interested in social issues. This was right before the nuclear threat. And then, of course, he came out very strongly against the war in Vietnam.
Meg: Let’s move on for a while to some questions about your own experience. You’ve been an editor, a collaborator with so many scholars and publishers. Did you expect this to happen to you?
Brother Patrick: Not at all. It was the biggest surprise of my life. I had been appointed Merton’s secretary shortly before his trip to Asia, and then he died. That was thirty-six years ago. The abbot said that he hoped I would continue on, doing things like answering any letters that came in, since the abbot wasn’t a letter writer. But I had no idea of what lay ahead. Of course, Merton had set up a trust, and then we also discovered all the unpublished manuscripts that were lying around. It was very helpful that there were a couple publishers on the board of trustees, so they were interested in producing the books based on these manuscripts and on ones that other people wanted to write about Merton. There was no soliciting of manuscripts. People were just volunteering for it. There was also a lot of interest at universities—students wanting to write master’s and doctoral dissertations. These started appearing, about a dozen each year. All this took a great deal of time, which is why it was a wise decision to set up the Merton Center at Bellarmine to handle all the archival requests that came in.
Brother Patrick: Well, I think it was his concern about getting past the rigidity and overemphasis on the ascetical and penitential character of Trappist life. He wanted to get back to a Benedictine spirit as this was spelled out so well by our Cistercian fathers in the twelfth century. Before Merton’s time, at Gethsemani at least and probably at most other Trappist monasteries, we were still living the seventeenth-century Trappist reform. Merton felt that there was more to monasticism than that. He wanted to get back to the pure sources, so he began translating the works of the Cistercian “evangelists”: Bernard of Clairvaux, Aelred of Rievaulx, Guerric of Igny, and William of St. Thierry, as well as ones who were less well-known, like Amadeus and Isaac of Stella. And there were the women Cistercians, too, such as Lutgarde. Merton wrote a book about her, entitled What Are These Wounds? Anyway, he wanted to get beyond all the rigidity, and to do this he even went back beyond the Cistercians to the roots of the Christian monastic movement, to John Cassian and the Desert Fathers, to the works of Pachomius, Evagrius, the Gregorys, and so forth. In brief, I think his contribution was to get back to the pure sources of monasticism.
Meg: His work has been helpful to all of us. I know I’ve continued to be enlivened by reading his journals, which reflect all of that research.
Brother Patrick: Yes, they spell it out, don’t they? Or consider Merton’s exchange of letters with Jean Leclercq, recently published under the title Survival or Prophecy? In a sense, it was through Leclercq that it all began. He was visiting Gethsemani in the early 1950s, working on the critical edition of the works of St. Bernard, and he discovered some unpublished things here in our vault of rare books and manuscripts. Now Merton had recently been made Master of Scholastics, that is, of the student monks, and his office was in the vault where all these wonderful manuscripts were housed. There were handwritten manuscripts from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, and then some of the first printed books from the fifteenth century, the so-called incunabula. And this was a great resource for Merton. I’m sure that his being in the presence of these manuscripts inspired him to dig into them.
Meg: Patrick, you’ve edited so much of Merton’s work—his journals, books, correspondence—how would you describe his genius? What was its source?
Brother Patrick: I think it was because he had such great exposure. First of all, he was well-educated. He went to good schools in England and France, and then to Columbia University in this country. He was exposed to some of the best teachers, men like Mark Van Doren and Daniel Walsh at Columbia, and even to fellow students who were very alive intellectually. All this was a real stimulus along the way. So Merton’s real genius, I think, came from his exposure. He read so widely. He was interested in everything. You know, I was just reading recently that his first interest in Hinduism came when he was at Cambridge, or maybe even before that when he was at his prep school, Oakham. He was one of the few who were standing up for Gandhi back in the 1930s. And a bit later, at Columbia, he got to know the Hindu monk Brahmachari, who was apparently a great scholar and who became a good friend of Merton and his fellow student Bob Lax. Brahmachari wasn’t trying to convert Merton, to have him become a Hindu. He said, go deeper into your own tradition. Read The Imitation of Christ and St. Augustine’s Confessions. That would have been around 1937. I think it was partly because of Brahmachari’s influence that Merton became a Catholic, which is a very interesting twist.
Meg: Could you say something about Merton as a writer, an artist?
Brother Patrick: Well, he was born with great gifts. He knew how to write, but he also worked at it. You know, he kept a journal of his student years. Even at his prep school he was winning prizes for his short stories, and he would illustrate them himself. So he was indeed an artist. He was that to begin with and, I think, a born writer in the sense that he had to write. Just as we have to breathe, Merton had to write. He had this need to express, to articulate, to externalize it all in some way. And he liked to go back and read his journals after a year or so.
Meg: What made him so fitting as a dialogue partner with many different traditions?
Brother Patrick: Well, he was always interested in other faiths. There is no question about it. When he was Master of Scholastics and then later when he was made the Master of Novices, he took a real interest in the local people. He was telling our Guestmaster that we ought to invite Baptists and Disciples of Christ and Episcopalians to the monastery. So that’s how it began. He would invite them—people like the Baptist scholar Glenn Hinson and members of the Disciples of Christ like Bill Paulsell—and these kinds of persons are still coming to the abbey after all these years. They were very much influenced by Merton and by the way he reached out to them. This was in the 1950s, before there was much talk of ecumenism. Then came Vatican II, and ecumenism was in the air. But there was also his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, published already in 1948. This book created a lot of interest among educated people because they saw that Merton was somebody who could write well. He wrote about his spiritual journey in a way that people could identify with. It was about his search, his constant searching. As he says at the end of that work, Sit finis libri, non finis quaerendi: Let this be the end of the book, but not of the search. I think his whole life was a search.
Meg: So his best-known book was that early one about his life?
Brother Patrick: Yes. I think that’s why his best writing is in his autobiographical works, when he is writing about his own life and, in his journals, about how he views things day by day, how he sees things. This shows the paradox of Merton, too. He was so honest and frank about everything. He certainly was critical about many things, but he felt he had to get them outside of himself to see them more objectively—to see them as they really were.
Meg: Could you say more about what the paradox was?
Brother Patrick: I’d say the paradox of Merton was that he was searching for greater solitude, and yet there was another side of him, the social side. He needed people and he needed friendship. He needed to be in contact with people. Just consider the fact that he wrote so many letters, thousands of letters. We’ve published five volumes of them, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg. These letters and the journals reflect Merton’s real thinking because when you’re writing a journal or you’re writing letters, you’re not thinking of censorship.
Meg: What was that all about?
Brother Patrick: Merton was exposed to two kinds of censorship: Trappist and then diocesan. The Abbot General of the Trappists appointed the censors, though it’s interesting to note that toward the last year of Merton’s life there was no longer the requirement of censorship. We called them readers, but . . .
Meg: Yes, the whole business of the Nihil Obstat and the Imprimi Potest.
Brother Patrick: Right. Merton first came across this when he was still a student at Columbia, not yet a Catholic. He had picked up a book by Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, and he didn’t want to read it once he noticed that it had undergone the process of censorship. But he did eventually read it and found it most enlightening.
Meg: Could you say some more about how his artist’s eye equipped him to be a dialogue partner with people of other traditions?
Brother Patrick: Merton was unquestionably an artist. He saw things. There is an exhibit right now at Bellarmine University in Louisville on the Zen Calligraphy and Zen Photography of Merton. Bonnie Thurston has written in one of her articles that Merton saw things in a Zen way. He really observed things. In other words, he paid attention; he became aware and mindful. Maybe his interest in Zen and in Buddhism in general was related to that. And he wanted to understand these other traditions so that he could learn from them. I recall that when he was getting ready to go to the Far East he said, “I’m hoping to bring back some of their wisdom, some of their techniques and their ways of praying and entering into the Silence.” It wasn’t that he wanted to change any doctrines. He wanted to learn more about their methods so that he could deepen his own monastic experience. He didn’t deny that there were differences in doctrine; he wasn’t trying to wash that away. But he felt that people like the Sufi mystics can teach you how to pray from the heart, to enter into the heart and not worry about the creeds and doctrines that divide us. On the experiential level, the level of how we experience God, Merton felt we have much in common.
Meg: I’d next like to know if there is any trace of proclamation in Merton’s motivation for engaging in dialogue. As you no doubt know, there’s a big debate among people in dialogue today. Some say that there should be an agenda to proclaim in the sense of inviting others to see and even embrace the truth of one’s own tradition. But I don’t see any motivation of this sort in Thomas Merton. Do you think he had any?
Brother Patrick: No, I really don’t. I think that he wanted people to remain what they were and continue in their own beliefs. He didn’t tell people that they should become Catholic or should do this or that. They should go more deeply into their own tradition. He is very similar to the Dalai Lama in this respect. It’s what Brahmachari had once told him: go deeper into Catholicism and you’ll find a common stream with other faiths.
Meg: Merton was certainly involved with many other faith traditions: Theravada, Tibetan, and Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Judaism, Taoism, Confucianism, Eastern Orthodoxy. His books and articles on these traditions are still being printed and reprinted around the world. Of them all, do you feel he was most attracted to Buddhist thought and practice?
Brother Patrick: Well, I’m a little unsure about this. He was interested in so many things. He read the Chinese classics you know, in translation. He was fascinated by Taoism. He said that the book he enjoyed writing the most was The Way of Chuang-Tzu. He didn’t know the Chinese characters so he was working from translations—French, German, and Italian—but he checked things out with some Chinese scholars. He was very accurate. He said that Taoism was really the source of the spirit of Zen. But I think it was actually Tibetan Buddhism that he was getting more and more interested in. I picked this up from his Asian Journal. Maybe this was due to his contact with the Dalai Lama in India and his meeting other Tibetan monks there. This seems to be the direction he was going towards the very end of his life. But he would read them all: Hindu authors, and the Sufi mystics of Islam. He had a universal mind. He just was interested in all traditions, and he felt they all had something to contribute.
Meg: Some people feel that he was drifting away from the Catholic faith. Are they right?
Brother Patrick: No, I don’t think there was any wavering away from the Catholic faith. He was steeped in his own tradition. That’s why he was able to do all this safely. He could reach out and explore other traditions and learn from them, and then celebrate the gifts that they brought to his own tradition.
Meg: You mentioned the importance of Merton’s conversations with the Dalai Lama. He writes about these in The Asian Journal in a way that reveals his engaged intellect and his deep spirituality. Do you think Merton was an enlightened person in addition to being an intellectual and artistic genius?
Brother Patrick: I think so, I really do. For one thing, there was the experience of enlightenment or breakthrough when he stood before the statues of the reclining Buddhas at that site in Sri Lanka. That was an esthetic experience, but it was also spiritual, deeply religious. How do you distinguish the esthetic and the spiritual, the secular and the sacred? You can say what you want about that, but I think the two did merge.
Meg: Was he enlightened even before that?
Brother Patrick: I think so. I think his whole monastic life prepared him for it. I remember when I entered the monastery in 1951. All the monks would spend time sitting in meditation and Merton would be utterly motionless for half an hour without even twitching an eyebrow. I’d see him sometimes sitting alone in the church where I could observe him and I would think to myself how wonderful it was that he could sit still for so long and obviously be in prayer and meditation. And that was long before all of us monks had real training in meditative sitting. The memory of this is still fresh in my mind.
Meg: Was this after the early morning Vigils?
Brother Patrick: Yes, between Vigils and Lauds.
Meg: We also know that Merton was fascinated by the work of Dr. Reza Arasteh, especially his book Toward a Final Personality Integration.
Brother Patrick: Yes, but you know, I’ve never read that book. I suppose I should. I should actually read all the books of Merton’s library, but to read all of them would take a lifetime. A person could barely find time to read all the books that Merton himself wrote. Perhaps he wrote too much, but his works are incredibly influential. I was just speaking with the director of the Merton Archives. He told me that there have already been 250 master’s and doctoral dissertations written on Merton. They have almost all of them on the shelves of the Merton Center at Bellarmine, and there are more coming in all the time. Can you imagine? At least a dozen students are working on such dissertations right now. Nobody goes out soliciting this kind of work; it’s just totally unsolicited.
Meg: Let’s talk a bit about Merton and monastic renewal. Do you think he was moving toward a monasticism without form? Do you think he would have advocated a lay monasticism?
Brother Patrick: You know, I’ve been thinking about that. Without form? No, I don’t think so. I do think we had too much structure in the past, and there was a reaction against that to less structure on the part of many monks. But for novices in training Merton would certainly have insisted on some kind of discipline. I recall that after Merton’s death his former novice Ernesto Cardenal had an interview in the New York Times about the kind of monasticism called for in the future. He said that he had once discussed this with Father Louis, Thomas Merton, and Merton said the first rule would be that there would be no rules. Well, I can see Merton saying that with a twinkle in his eye. To be realistic, some rules would be necessary just to enable people to live together.
Meg: You spoke of the way Merton would sit for long periods in meditation and prayer. Could you say something about the way he described his prayer in that letter to the Sufi scholar Abdul Aziz?
Brother Patrick: Yes. That’s so beautiful. That’s a wonderful correspondence. I recommend it to everybody to read because it’s the only time when he talked about how he himself prayed.
Meg: And you think that was his daily practice?
Brother Patrick: Yes, I think so.
Meg: In this way he could teach others to pray, but who was his teacher?
Brother Patrick: Well, he didn’t have a Sufi teacher. I was recently talking with my confrere Fr. Jim Conner about that, and he said Merton didn’t have any single teacher. I think it was his whole dialogue with the East that was his teacher, but also his own tradition. Look at the desert tradition of early Christian monasticism. Merton drew deeply from that.
Meg: Let’s talk some more about monastic renewal. Do you think Merton reformed monasticism from observance of rules to something more experiential, to practice and to engagement with world issues?
Brother Patrick: I’m sure that he helped. He was one of those in the forefront of renewal, but he didn’t do it single-handedly. There were other people, you know. In Europe there was André Louf and also Jean Leclercq, plus García Colombás from Montserrat—all sorts of people in that early renewal in the mid-60s. In this country, too. I think you know Armand Veilleux; his studies on Pachomius were very important. But Merton was probably the best-known of them all because he just published so much.
Meg: And did he lead the bandwagon to get others more engaged with all of the issues?
Brother Patrick: Yes, he did. That’s why he had so many things going at the same time. It was almost impossible to try to keep up with him. You might think that it would be only ecumenism and that this would be sufficient, like reaching out toward the Orthodox, the Eastern Christians. But there was also his interest in the early Celtic monasticism of the sixth century. He was digging into that, teaching himself Early Irish so he could translate their poetry. He had an inquisitive mind that just knew no bounds. He was a kind of universal person. There’s no one quite like him. Never in my life have I met anyone with such a variety of interests, so many. And he could see connections among them all. That was the thing—he was always bringing out the connections. He could also read the German poet Rilke and was giving talks on him. All this was happening just shortly before he got interested in issues of social justice. The plight of the blacks in this country became a real issue with him. We were beginning to have blacks join the community and he knew that they were not being treated as equals, so here too was something that had to be addressed. And then John Howard Griffin was filling him in with information about what was going on about race in the rest of the country, so he was getting interested in social issues. This was right before the nuclear threat. And then, of course, he came out very strongly against the war in Vietnam.
Meg: Let’s move on for a while to some questions about your own experience. You’ve been an editor, a collaborator with so many scholars and publishers. Did you expect this to happen to you?
Brother Patrick: Not at all. It was the biggest surprise of my life. I had been appointed Merton’s secretary shortly before his trip to Asia, and then he died. That was thirty-six years ago. The abbot said that he hoped I would continue on, doing things like answering any letters that came in, since the abbot wasn’t a letter writer. But I had no idea of what lay ahead. Of course, Merton had set up a trust, and then we also discovered all the unpublished manuscripts that were lying around. It was very helpful that there were a couple publishers on the board of trustees, so they were interested in producing the books based on these manuscripts and on ones that other people wanted to write about Merton. There was no soliciting of manuscripts. People were just volunteering for it. There was also a lot of interest at universities—students wanting to write master’s and doctoral dissertations. These started appearing, about a dozen each year. All this took a great deal of time, which is why it was a wise decision to set up the Merton Center at Bellarmine to handle all the archival requests that came in.
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Sr. Mary Margaret Funk, OSB, was the executive director of the MID board from 1989-2004. She was prioress at Our Lady of Grace Monastery in Beech Grove, Indiana and is the author of a number of books, including Thoughts Matter and Islam Is . . ..
Fr. Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a monk at Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey in Trappist, Kentucky, and one of the principal architects of interreligious and intermonastic dialogue. His writings include such classics as The Seven Storey Mountain, New Seeds of Contemplation, and Zen and the Birds of Appetite.