December 10, 2008

Another book about Merton? This one’s well worth the read

By David Gibson, Catholic News Service

Forty years after Trappist Father Thomas Merton’s death, “so many different people are still sifting through his spiritual journey and finding parts that aid their own,” writes Morgan Atkinson in “Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton.” The subtitle is significant because this book focuses in a unique manner on a spiritual journey—or, better, journeys: Merton’s, Atkinson’s and the reader’s.

“Soul Searching” is not a biography. Nonetheless, it conveys the story of a man who in late 1941 at age 26 left a rather wayward life behind to join the Trappist monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Little did he know that he was soon to be recognized as one of America’s foremost writers on spirituality, following the 1948 publication of his best-selling autobiography, “The Seven Storey Mountain.”

Today, long after Father Merton’s accidental death during a trip to Asia, the vast body of his writing on spirituality and major social issues continues to illuminate, guide and challenge so many!

“I don’t know that we have caught up with him yet,” says Sister Kathleen Deignan, a Sister of Notre Dame. “To me he’s someone who moves ahead. The horizon keeps expanding as he recedes from us.”

Sister Kathleen, a religious studies professor at Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y., is one of some 30 people Atkinson interviewed whose reflections are shared with this book’s readers. Those interviewed include friends and associates of Father Merton, and experts on his life. Atkinson refers to them as the “choir,” but their assessments are hardly identical.

Atkinson, a longtime filmmaker, has created a one-hour DVD documentary about Father Merton, also titled “Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton.” PBS plans to broadcast it Dec. 14. The publisher terms the DVD and the book “companion” works, and the DVD is included with the book.

But why have the book at all then? Atkinson explains that squeezing more than 60 hours of interviews into an hourlong video left a lot of “very rich material.” He writes: “A book including a far wider sampling of the insights from these interviews offers a great opportunity to share more about this important man and his spiritual journey. If you accept that premise, read on.”

Having viewed the DVD and read the book, I encourage you to “accept that premise.” I relished the book’s ability to make clear that while Father Merton was a cloistered monk and even, at times, a hermit, in so many ways his pilgrimage is our pilgrimage, his quest is ours.

Atkinson says “the main voice” he wanted people to hear was Father Merton’s, “speaking in the personal, conversational manner of his journals.” But Atkinson “wanted to complement this with the thoughts of a mix of people who would not simply praise the good monk and great writer but would help present the complexity of this man.” In this, I believe Atkinson succeeded.

I confess that from a young age I admired Father Merton, not because I felt he always had final answers for my biggest questions but because so many of his questions resembled my own. I viewed him as a courageous searcher.

Jonathan Montaldo recalls Father Merton once saying, “I need something that I don’t even know yet, something that I don’t even know that I don’t have.” Montaldo, resident director of the Merton Institute Retreat Center near Gethsemani, was one of those Atkinson interviewed.

“Soul Searching” affords readers an opportunity to look inside Father Merton, so to speak. Atkinson writes that Father Merton, “despite his extraordinary gifts, had an abundance of human foibles with which most of us struggle.” In fact, says Atkinson, this “struggle with his humanity” is what “makes (Father Merton’s) writing and life so interesting.”

Father Merton possessed a “spiritual curiosity” that manifested “something that characterized him in general,” according to Bonnie Thurston, a founding member of the International Thomas Merton Society.

Holy Cross Sister Elena Malits of St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Ind., thinks Father Merton “was a compulsive writer” who “had to discipline himself not to write.” Father Merton “adamantly refused to let himself be called a conservative or a liberal,” she notes.

Do we need another book about Thomas Merton? I asked myself that question when this book arrived. But reading it was a happy experience. Better than that, it provided a refreshing opportunity to revisit a man who had a marvelous way of pointing ordinary people like me toward a deeper spirituality.
“Societies need people who can stand outside the system and look at it from a different perspective. I think Merton did that,” comments Brother Paul Quenon, a monk at Gethsemani. I think he is right.

David Gibson was the founding editor of Origins, Catholic News Service’s documentary service. He retired in 2007 after holding that post for 36 years.