The Many Paths to Merton
Sophfronia Scott’s engagement with the writings of Thomas Merton, particularly his journals, highlights the relevance of his ideas to today’s spiritual seeker.
Review by Emma McDonald
When I first attended the International Thomas Merton Society biannual meeting several years ago, I noticed the (perhaps unsurprising) conversation starter: what’s your “Merton story”? People shared how they first came to know the Trappist monk and prolific writer, when they first read his work, and why they stuck around for more. Everyone was gathered for presentations, conversations, and fellowship centered on Merton, so it was already evident that his work resonated in some way with all in attendance; however, it quickly became clear that it wasn’t the same reason for everyone. For some, it was his spiritual journey chronicled in The Seven Storey Mountain that drew them in; others admired his prophetic anti-war witness and incisive critique of the “false self.” Many saw in Merton an honesty often lacking in the church. Others, like me, gravitated toward his dialogue with Eastern traditions, seeing the mystical path as key for inter-faith understanding, or appreciated his contemplative spirit that sought solitude in nature and yearned for silence. Clearly, there are many paths that lead people to Merton.
In The Seeker and the Monk: Everyday Conversations with Thomas Merton, the award-winning novelist and essayist Sophfronia Scott tells her own Merton story. She first encountered Thomas Merton when she heard a passage from his well-known Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander quoted in a lecture. The passage captivated her so much that she requested the book from the library, only to find that the pages on which the quote appeared had been ripped from the book. This intrigued her further, setting her off in search of more Merton. While she began with the writer’s famous spiritual autobiography, Scott was soon drawn to the candidness of his journals, which began to be published twenty-five years after his death in accordance with the specifications of his will. Here, Scott found the “unvarnished Merton,” who was willing to make his vulnerabilities known to the world. Her book focuses primarily on those journal entries, engaging with Merton’s spiritual questions and social commentaries while adding her own contemporary reflections.
Early on, Scott addresses the question of why a White Catholic monk’s writings would be relevant to her, “a Black woman, not Catholic but Episcopalian, with Baptist notes from my childhood.” Scott explains that despite their many differences, his “searching nature,” so clear in his writing, resonated with her own faith. As she shares how her companionship with Merton unfolded, she demonstrates why his voice reverberates through contemporary America, even though he died half a century ago.
The book’s chapters loosely trace the arc of Merton’s life, beginning with his decision to enter the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky and become a Trappist monk at age 26, and ending with his untimely death in Bangkok, Thailand at age 53 in 1968. Readers familiar with Scott’s subject will know the details of his story already, but she reinvigorates her account with insights from his journals and links to her own experience. For instance, Merton’s eschewal of secular clothing for the postulant’s habit sparks an extended reflection on our contemporary preoccupations with possession and consumption. Scott worries about our attachment to our stuff—that the accumulation of more possessions is inspired by fear, and that it further alienates us from ourselves and from our communities. Not only does Scott connect her own experience of twenty-first-century pressures toward consumption with Merton’s writing on the subject, but she also contrasts the constant pull of consumption in her own context, Manhattanith the strikingly limited possessions that Merton left behind. For instance, she describes the denim jacket he is wearing in many photos. Worn from years of wear by two other monks before him, it was the only jacket he owned. Thomas Merton comes alive as a living, breathing person as Scott describes not only his jacket, but also the hermitage where he spent years in solitude, photographs he took, and the knobs surrounding the abbey.
By demonstrating the relevance of Merton’s own questions, confusions, and insights to her own spiritual life, Scott encourages readers to seek out Merton on their own terms.
Drawing connections to the Covid-19 pandemic, gun violence, and racism, Scott makes a compelling case for the relevance of this long-dead monk’s writing for the spiritual dimensions of twenty-first-century challenges. Her chapters on race, prayer, and epiphany contain overt, imagined conversations with Merton. In these dialogues, Scott addresses him as “Thomas,” which might strike some as a bit unusual, since friends called him “Tom” and his fellow monks knew him as “Fr. Louis.” She poses questions about the state of the world and what his reactions might be to misinformation and the rise of partisan news, and she recognizes in Merton’s own struggles with prayer challenges similar to her own. She interprets him generously and with charity: while she finds his call for dialogue to raise the racial consciousness of White people to be unrealistic even now, she surfaces echoes of her own frustrations in his indictment of White society’s blindness to its racism. Threaded throughout the book is Scott’s recognition of Merton’s commitment to truth-telling. Her engagement shows that while he did not always get it right, this dialogue with his ideas can help move us toward truth in the midst of our present difficulties all the same.
In many chapters, I found myself wishing for a more extended conversation between Scott and Merton. The Seeker and the Monk seems to be written for an audience unfamiliar with both writers, which leaves some topics covered in a fairly superficial fashion. The chapter on death, for instance, mentions Covid-19—but it left me hoping for further conversation on the spiritual challenges of the pandemic and its onslaught of death. Still, while it at times sacrifices depth, the breadth of topics that Scott covers show Merton’s versatility and productivity as a writer. The reader can catch a glimpse of his thinking on the environment, prayer, solitude, war, nonviolence, Buddhism, art, monastic life, egoism, race, friendship, love, ambition… just to name a few. Scott’s reflections show her subject as a human being: one who struggled with love and his sense of vocation, grieved the loss of dear friends, questioned the persistence of sin, and strove for solitude in a noisy world. As she journeys alongside him, it becomes clear that many of these same struggles are still obstacles for the spiritual seeker today.
Scott points out early on that her reflections on Merton offer her only own “constructed image” of the well-known monk. That is, her own experiences, spiritual yearnings, and deeply-held questions intermingle with the picture she presents, and her conversations with the writer she admires show how he can become what Sue Monk Kidd calls a “remarkably clear lens through which others glimpse their own self.” By demonstrating the relevance of Merton’s own questions, confusions, and insights to her own spiritual life, Scott encourages readers to seek out Merton on their own terms, to take up his work, see what resonates, and discover their own “Merton story.”
Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Emma McDonald is a third-year doctoral student in Theological Ethics at Boston College, where she studies bioethics and social ethics. Prior to matriculating at BC, Emma received her Master of Arts in Religion from Yale Divinity School and a Bachelor of Arts in Religion from Middlebury College. She was elected to the Board of Directors of the International Thomas Merton Society in 2021.
The Seeker and the Monk: Everyday Conversations with Thomas Merton was published on March 16, 2021 by Broadleaf Books. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy on their website here.
