One March, not long after we were married, my wife put on her birthday wish-list The Seven Storey Mountain, the autobiography of the late Trappist monk and social activist Thomas Merton. I can't recall what prompted Jill's sudden curiosity; perhaps a friend or a reviewer had commended the book. Perhaps hours at home each day listening to the babbling of a toddler (our first child) made her hungry for more challenging fare.

Soon I stood in Waldenbooks, scribbled list in hand, considering my purchase. While I had recently finished three years at Princeton seminary, I registered only faint recognition of Merton's name, and I felt little inclination to read a chronicle of an intellectual-atheist turned Catholic priest, despite Graham Greene's cover endorsement of it as an autobiography with a pattern and meaning valid for all of us. I had, after all, thrown myself into my first pastorate in a rural Virginia Church of the Brethren, from which Merton's world seemed very far removed indeed. But this was Jill's wish-list, not mine. I got the book, in scribed and wrapped it, and gave it to her when her birthday rolled around.

Jill enjoyed the book, but she didn't seem overwhelmed by it. Still, knowing of my budding interest in spirituality, she told me I should read it. "You'd probably like it," she said.

In fact I found it slow going. Merton's depiction of a childhood spent with a wandering artist father and an emotionally distant mother failed to capture me. His youthful struggles seemed tedious, those of a person in a bygone era. Twenty pages into The Seven Storey Mountain, I gave up, mildly mystified by Merton's exalted reputation. This was a book, after all, that reviewers had likened to Augustine's Confessions! A classic it might be, one of those important works I should read, but I wasn't inclined to do that anytime soon.

Then something, long lost to memory, drew me back. How glad I now am. This time through I could hardly stop. And this time I found myself awed by Merton's painstaking, delighted discovery of God; his chance reading of a book on medieval philosophy that sent him to Catholicism; his growing, fiery passion for prayer; his sense of wonder and de light over his days in the spiritually rarefied air of the Kentucky monastery he soon made home. Not many months later, still warmed by the glow of Merton's account, I had an electric, charismatic experience of prayer that lives with me to this day.

My second, satisfying foray into the book, and my exploration of later writings, soon showed me that Merton was no plastic saint but rather a gritty, sometimes greatly mistaken, and always very human creature conscious of his dependence on his Creator, a man with impressive intellectual prowess who nevertheless discovered how much he needed redemptive grace. And my readings showed me a quirky paradox (one that would dog Merton all his monastic life): a monk enjoined to silence penned a book that became a publishing phenomenon.

Indeed, I would discover as I read more, the ironies abound: A man vowed to repudiate ambition achieved every writer's dream. A Catholic with a tonsured head in a strict religious order with medieval roots would soon write radical manifestos about race relations and the folly of nuclear war. A monk longing for a hermit's solitude found himself falling in love with a young nurse.

When I read through The Seven Storey Mountain for the first time— I have come back to it year after year since 1980—I not only understood Merton's appeal, I wanted to read more of his work. Later I would learn of some of his theological wanderings; I take serious issue with his dalliance with Zen Buddhism, for example. But still, I count myself a fan.

I am not alone. Interest in Merton's writings has continued unabated in more than five decades since The Seven Storey Mountain hit bookstore shelves in 1948, selling 600,000 copies its first year of publication, with multiple millions since. Merton, by one count, left be hind 6,000 posthumously published pages, including poems, literary criticism, and five volumes of letters—to ordinary people as well as to the cultural movers and shakers of his day. Merton bequeathed the reading world 60 books of his own, including best-selling books on contemplative prayer and the role of faith in social action. More than one hundred books have been written about him, a number by obscure academics, more than a few by spirituality writers of note (Henri Nouwen, for instance).

For this review essay, I could not hope to read everything Merton has ever written. But my shelves almost bend under the weight of the dozens of books I have collected over the years. Part of Merton's appeal, for me, for many, hinges on the heavily autobiographical flavor of many of those volumes. Ours is an autobiographical age; telling your story is not only indulged, it is even seen as a route to healing. That a number of Merton's books—The Sign of Jonas comes to mind—grew out of actual journals makes his writing that much more attractive in our day of narrative theologies and storytelling workshops and memoir-writing classes at senior-citizen community centers. Merton also wrote many books that are not autobiographical—books such as Contemplative Prayer, Mystics and Zen Masters, and The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers, which continue to find a wide readership—but his narrative writings will continue to hold the widest appeal.

Today, thanks to HarperSanFrancisco, readers can finally dive into the published journals themselves. Ever the compulsive writer, Merton kept handwritten journals through much of his life. Those tantalized by the crafted narrative quality of The Seven Storey Mountain, those who enjoyed later books that opened glimpses into Merton's monastic routine and daily struggles, have wanted access to the uncut story. Merton himself claimed that "my best writing has always been in my journals." Michael Mott, when he wrote his authorized biography, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, made use of the very same journals, leaking some of their more controversial revelations. But Merton's last will and testament had dictated that his diaries not be opened to public eyes until the official biography had been published and not before 25 years after his death. The monk was sensitive to his foibles and to the potential embarrassment of those he had written about.

One soon sees why: Merton doesn't mince words in these pages. The reader sees his struggles with his vocation, and especially his later longing for the life of a hermit that sometimes put him, to his great irritation, at odds with his superiors. The journals also reveal Merton's love of nature, his delight in monastic worship, his struggle with censorship, the Catholic Church's suppression of his anti-war writings, and his infatuation with Zen thought. If some of his reflections seem dated, many more are striking for their prescience.

In 1998, 30 years after Merton's death, HarperSanFrancisco released the seventh and final volume of the journals. Crucial years are missing from what we have; as a youth and a young man, Merton enjoyed reading old en tries and then tearing them out and throwing them away. But it is hard to imagine anyone wanting more; the seven volumes run to thousands of pages. Indeed, few will have the patience or ardor to read through all the entries. (Non-specialists will thank HarperSanFrancisco for The Intimate Merton, a one-volume selection that culls the best of entries from all seven volumes.) Still, in their sheer scope and range, the journals are valuable not only to Merton scholars but to all of those who have enjoyed his writings through the years and want to trace more clearly his development.

The earliest surviving journals come from the period of 1939 to 1941, during which Merton took his master's degree from Columbia University with a thesis on "Nature and Art in William Blake" and was soon teaching literature at St. Bonaventure College in Olean, New York. In his mid-twenties, he was al ready submitting manuscripts to publishing houses. Of one experimental novel, "Journal of My Escape from the Nazis," Merton ruefully observes in the journal, "it was the kind of book that I liked to write, full of double-talk and all kinds of fancy ideas that sounded like Franz Kafka."

This first volume, Run to the Mountain, offers mounds of Merton's reactions to heady literature, art films of his day, and New York theater. He was facile in many languages, a soon-to-be published poet, and a powerful essayist. He was also, by this time, profoundly Catholic. In his journals we see, along with ponderings on Ezra Pound and James Joyce, Merton's mystical attraction to Catholicism of the most traditional sort.

One late September day in 1939, Merton wrote, "I don't really feel like writing anything much at all. Can't feel that anything I would write would have any importance." But then he recalled his discovery of Saint Philomena, a child martyred in ancient Rome, whose bones were not discovered until the nineteenth century:

And it was impossible for me, reading this, not to suddenly feel the great power of this blessed martyr, kept, by Almighty God, so many centuries in oblivion. … What excuse is there for misery and unhappiness then, when there is the intercession before the throne of God of such a saint as this, who seems to be filled with such great love for all sinners and especially for those that love her that they at once feel it themselves, moving deeply within them, a sudden and obscure answer, bringing tears.

Not only her, then, but all the saints; not only the saints, but the angels, and above the angels, their Queen, Mary, the Mother of God and Queen of heaven sitting before the throne of God above the nine choirs and the seraphim, all filled with love and mercy and interceding for us before God himself who loves us most of all, because in Him is all love, and he gave his body and blood in sacrifice upon the Cross . …

The whole world is filled with the blood and anger and violence and lust our sins and self-will have brought upon us, my own sins as much as anybody else's: Hitler, Stalin are not alone responsible. I am too, and everybody is, insofar as he has been violent and lustful and proud and greedy and ambitious. The world is very unhappy and terrible now, but beyond it and in it and around it is still the Love and Mercy of God, that only waits for our prayers. And now I am glad to have written something.

We also see Merton's growing agony over a monastic vocation, a struggle that would last till his death, kept alive by what Newsweek religion editor Kenneth Woodward has called Merton's "uncaged mind." In the years this volume spans, Merton had tried to join a Franciscan monastery and become a priest, but his frankness about his youth (including fathering an illegitimate child while he was a student at Cambridge in England) led the representative of the order to suggest politely that Merton withdraw his application. Merton concluded, hastily, that his vocation to monkhood was closed forever.

But the call nagged and persisted, and he increasingly longed to join one of the most rigorous orders, the Order of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance (also called Trappists), where he was to find his spiritual home. The first volume ends with his train journey from St. Bonaventure to Gethsemani, the Trappist monastery nestled in the Kentucky hills. In a burst of ardor, Merton calls Gethsemani "the center of America … the axle around which the whole country blindly turns. I had wondered," he writes, "what was holding this country together, what has been keeping the universe from cracking in pieces and falling apart." Through its prayers and worship, he concludes, "It is this monastery."

The next volume, Entering the Silence, records Merton's formal en trance into the monastery as a postulant, only three days after his arrival on December 10, 1941, topping a long train ride. The journals from the time of his novitiate are sketchy; he tore up all but 14 pages. From the beginning of these pages we see Merton's utter absorption in and love of monastic life, a head-over-heels wonder that would later be tempered by run-ins with his superiors and by his growing conviction that modern Trappist life needed more contemplation and less activity. But just days after his formal admittance, in his first prose entry, we read this exalted depiction of the monks' chanting and praying in the Daily Office worship:

Not one word is lost, not one action is lost, not one prayer is lost, not one mis-sung note in choir is lost.

Nothing is lost.

What in the world would be wasted is here all God's, all for love.

I shiver in the night (not now that I have the postulants' white, wool habit) [but] for love—and I never hated less the world, scorned it less or understood it better

Because everything here is in a harmonious and totally significant context (every face is turned to God—every gesture and movement is His). Thus everything in the world outside is also significant, when brought into relation with this!

That last sentence proved to be prophetic. When Merton entered the monastery, he thought he was bidding farewell to writing, which had been his consuming passion; that was "of the world" in the pejorative sense. But his first abbot suggested (or perhaps ordered, in the judgment of this volume's editor, Jonathan Montaldo) that Merton use his literary skills to publicize and promote the abbey. His voice—at least when it came to writing—would be far from stilled, and he would engage "the world outside" with unflagging intensity.

So it was that Merton did not confine himself simply to writing Trappist promotional pieces or lives of Trappist saints but also, at the encouragement of his superior (he was reluctant at first), began work on his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. He was still in his twenties when he began it.

The book became a bestseller by any accounting—even if the New York Times refused it a slot on their weekly bestseller list on the grounds that it was a "religious book." Disillusioned by global blood shed, eager for deeper values, Americans were searching, and they eagerly embraced Merton's message.

Needless to say, the approbation was not universal. "Tell this talking Trappist who took a vow of silence to shut up!" one disgruntled reader wrote. Merton himself had to struggle with his newfound notoriety, and it became his embarrassment.

In part, no doubt, that reaction arose as the reflex of a monk vowed to a hidden life. But not all. As the years passed, Merton would regret his romanticizing of monastery life, his anti-Protestant meanderings, and other aspects of the book that made him famous. He would continue to grow intellectually in remarkable ways, leaving him red-faced over earlier pronouncements.

But fame had its consolations. His list of correspondents grew, among them a Who's Who of mid-century arts and letters and politics: Boris Pasternak in Russia, Daisetz Suzuki in Japan, Jacques Maritain in France, poet Czeslaw Milosz (whose correspondence with Merton has been published in Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz, edited by Robert Faggen), Abraham Joshua Heschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. These and many others fed into Merton's rich thought-life, and he into theirs.

And they fed into his writing. In December 1946, presumably at work on the manuscript that would become The Seven Story Mountain, Merton wrote,

Let me keep silence in this world, except insofar as God wills it. Let me at least disappear into the writing I do. It should mean nothing special to me, nor harm my recollection. The work could be a prayer; its results should not concern me.

Almost a year later, the wrestling continues:

I think God does not want me to write any more the way I have written be fore—taking an idea and working it out in cold blood. … If God gives me something directly and spontaneously about Himself, I will write it. Otherwise I will keep quiet. That means no more volumes of poetry for a long time perhaps, and it may mean little or no variety, and it might mean complete silence. However, I see nothing for me to write that is not simply a song about His love and about contemplation. Everything else bores and fatigues me and dries me up.

But in part because of the stimulus pro vided by his voluminous correspondence, that estimation would soon change. In deed, in the next volume, A Search for Solitude, covering the period from 1952 to 1960, we see Merton's social conscience awakening. We see him becoming far from bored with matters other than contemplation: He be gins to turn his gaze, and his writer's focus, to war, racial prejudice, and a culture hell-bent on acquiring material things.

This third volume of the journals includes an oft-quoted Merton passage found in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, but this time in its original form. Merton had made a trip from Gethsemani to nearby Louisville to check on the printing of a guide for postulants (those living at the monastery in a kind of trial stay):

Yesterday, in Louisville, at the corner of 4th and Walnut, [I] suddenly realized that I love all the people and that none of them were, or, could be totally alien to me. As if waking from a dream—the dream of my separateness, of the "special" vocation to be different. My vocation does not really make me different from the rest of men or put me in a special category except artificially, juridicially. I am still a member of the human race—and what more glorious destiny is there for man, since the Word was made flesh and came, too, a member of the human race!

In a counterpoint that runs through the journals, the entries in this volume also trace Merton's anguished longing for solitude even as his list of visitors and correspondents lengthens. Merton kept much of this journal while maintaining an incredible pace working as master of scholastics; that is, he trained monks studying for priestly ordination. Then he became master of novices, teaching aspirants who were readying for perpetual vows as monks. And of course, he kept the full monastic Daily Office (corporate prayers held seven times a day), and performed his share of manual labor (part of the Benedictine monastic ideal). Perhaps it is no wonder that Merton's desire for a hermit's solitude intensified during this time!

His longing did eventuate in his being granted approval to live as a hermit. Merton began to call his hermitage—to which he increasingly re treated with the blessing of his superior—"St. Anne's." "One thing is certain," he writes in March 1953. "Days of Recollection and afternoons at St. Anne's, Mass and the [Daily] Office, and the terror of the dark, all are given to me for one thing: that I may find Christ and know Him, Who is 'made to us power and wisdom from God.'"

And yet at the same time, Merton's mind, always restless, ever searches for new stimulation. "I must get to know something of modern physics," he writes in 1957:

Even though I am a monk, that is no reason for living in a Newtonian universe or, worse still, an Aristotelian one. The fact that the cosmos is not quite what St. Thomas and Dante imagined it to be has, after all, some importance. … Modern physics has its repercussions in the monastery, and to be a monk one must take them into account, although that does nothing whatever to make one's spirituality either simple or neat. One must get along without the security of neat and simple, ready-made solutions. There are things one has to think out, all over again, for oneself.

The reader also finds in this volume the first traces of a (to me) worrisome at traction that would flower in the years to come: Merton's affinity for and fascination with Zen Buddhism. In November 1957, we see him considering a Zen Koan which has in the decades since become the object of endless parodic variations: "What sound is made by one hand clapping against itself?" For Merton, writing be fore the explosion of Western interest in all things Buddhist, this provocative, enigmatic aphorism brought fresh insight. He reflected,

That is where I think Zen is smart: in its absolutely fundamental psychological honesty. This honesty is inseparable from the interior poverty and sincerity that Christ asked for when He said, "Can you believe? All things are possible to one who can believe."

Merton's unique vocation is perhaps summed up no better elsewhere than in this poignant entry from December 29, 1959, one of the last entries in volume 3:

Read some of [poet and novelist Charles] Peguy's "Mystery of the Holy Innocents" to the novices last evening. And, alone in the woodshed on St. Stephen's Day, some Emily Dickinson, my own flesh and blood, my own kind of quiet rebel, fighting for truth against catchwords and formalities, fighting for independence of the spirit, maybe mistakenly, what the hell, maybe rightly too. Who else in Amherst in 1859 said anything worth being remembered? Said anything that remains living and natural now?

The very great thing Emily D. has done: she has hidden and refused herself completely to everyone who would not appreciate her and accept her on her own terms. Yet who "knew" and "saw" her. But she gave herself completely to people of other ages and places who never saw her but who could receive her gift anyway, regardless of space and time. It is like hugging an angel.

We see Merton as the "quiet rebel" even more in volume 4. Early in this period of entries, covering 1960 to 1963, there is an astonishingly vivid meditation on nature, followed by Merton's reflections on his "rebellions":

The first chirps of the waking birds—le point vierge of the dawn, a moment of awe and inexpressible innocence, when the Father in silence opens their eyes and they speak to Him, wondering if it is time to "be"? He tells them, "Yes." Then they one by one wake and begin to sing. First the catbirds and cardinal and some others I do not recognize. Later, song sparrows, wrens, … last of all doves, crows.

With my hair almost on end and the eyes of my soul wide open I am present … in this unspeakable Paradise and I behold this secret, this wide open secret which is there for everyone, free, and no one pays any attention ("One to his farm, another to his merchandise"). Not even monks shut up under fluorescent lights, face to face with the big books and the black notes and with one another, perhaps no longer seeing or hearing anything in the course of festive Lauds.

Oh, the paradise of simplicity, self-awareness—and self-forgetfulness—liberty, peace. In this I have realized how silly and unreal are my rebellions, yet how unavoidable is the pressure and artificiality of certain situations that "have to be" be cause they are officially sacrosanct. Yet there is not need to rebel, only to ask mercy. To trust in mercy, which is what I have not done.

But the equilibrium he attained here was increasingly difficult to achieve. Merton was well into his forties now, and the early 1960s would see him wrestling more and more with the relationship of monks to a wider world. Victor Kramer, the editor of this fourth journal volume, Turning Toward the World, puts it thus:

Paradoxically, precisely when he longed for more solitude and often debated about how much he should continue to publish, [Merton] found himself asking complex questions about contemporary society, war, and the Church's role in the world. [He] was being drawn much more frequently into confronting questions about Christian responsibility during a time of rapid, and often surprising change in his culture.

Much of the material in this volume constituted raw material for Merton's book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, published in 1966, which would startle politically conservative and traditional Catholics with its questions about race relations and nuclear war. "I am," he writes,

perhaps at a turning point in my spiritual life: perhaps slowly coming to a point of maturation and the resolution of doubts and the forgetting of fears. Walking into a known and definite battle. May God protect me from it. The Catholic Worker sent out a press release about my article ["War Madness"], which may have many reactions or may have none. At any rate, it appears that I am one of the few Catholic priests in the country who has come out unequivocally for a completely intransigent fight for the abolition of war, for the use of nonviolent means to settle international conflicts. Hence by implication not only against the bomb, against nuclear testing, against Polaris submarines, but against all violence. This I will inevitably have to explain in due course. Nonviolent action, not mere passivity. How am I going to explain myself and defend a definite position in a timely manner, when it takes at least two months to get even a short article through the censors of the [Cistercian] Order, is a question I cannot attempt to answer.

And yet even as he was increasingly politically engaged, Merton yearned ever more deeply for solitude. In May 1960, he had recorded news of plans for a simple building three quarters of a mile from the monastery, intended to serve as an ecumenical retreat center as well as a hermitage for Merton. He would hold retreats there and bring visitors, and especially go there alone. Later that year, once it was built, he wrote,

This evening, after Office of the Dead, sat on the porch of the hermitage and watched the sunlight fade in the valley and saw the moon rise over the little maple saplings we planted on the east side yesterday. Extraordinary peace and silence. If I have any desire left in the world it is to live there and die there.

In the final three volumes of the journals, the to and fro between engagement and solitude appears almost frantic in retrospect: an up-and-down plot with a brutally anticlimactic ending. In volume 5, Dancing in the Water of Life, covering the period from June 1963 to June 1965, Merton's longing for solitude seems to be realized in a dramatic way. In late 1964 he records the decision of his abbot, Dom James, to give Merton permission to move toward his dream of a more eremitical monkhood:

He gave me permission to sleep at the hermitage without any special restrictions, though not necessarily all the time. The understanding is that I can spend the night there once in a while, when I wish to. Last night I did this for the first time. … It was most helpful. It finally helped me to get the noise and agitation of the Abbot's meeting out of my system. … Got up there around nightfall. Wonderful silence, saying Compline gently and slowly with a candle burning before the icon of Our Lady. A deep sense of peace and truth. That this was the way things are supposed to be, that I was in my right mind for a change (around the community I am seldom in my right mind). … I felt very much alive, real, awake, surrounded by silence and penetrated by truth. Wonderful smell of pre dawn woods and fields in the cold night!

Soon Merton is reflective, in part prompted by the prospect of the changes solitude may bring to his life and vocation, and perhaps also by his approaching fiftieth birthday. He thinks of his coming to Gethsemani almost 23 years earlier:

My fiftieth year is ending. If I am not ripe now I never will be. … I remember the words I said to Father Philotheus [just prior to Merton's traveling to Gethsemani in what he hoped would lead to a permanent vocation], which may have been in part a cliche, but they were sincere and I know at the time that I really meant them. They were unpremeditated: that "I want to give God everything." Until now I really have not, I think. Or perhaps in a way I have tried to. Certainly not too hard! I cannot say my life in the monastery has been useless or a failure. Nor can I say where or how it has a meaning. Nor will I probably find where and how the hermitage has a meaning. It is enough that there is the same mixture of anguish and certitude, the same sense of walking on water, as when I first came to the monastery.

So what is just around the corner, in volume 6? The title given to this volume, Learning to Love, offers a hint, for it was during this period, 1966-1967, that Merton's passionate attraction to a nurse who attended him after back surgery in March threatened to undo his commitment to the monastic life once and for all:

One week after the operation, Friday in Passion Week, I was able to get up and go out to walk a while on the grass. This made an enormous difference, as did the fact that I got a very friendly and devoted student nurse working on my compresses, etc. This livened things considerably. In fact, we were getting perhaps too friendly by the time M. went off on her Easter vacation, but her affection—undisguised and frank—was an enormous help in bringing me back to life fast. … I do feel a deep emotional need for feminine companionship and love. Seeing that I must irrevocably live without it ended by tearing me up more than the operation itself.

In the months that followed, Merton would, against his better judgment and in violation of his vows, explore this need for feminine companionship. The two exchanged letters, talked on the phone—not easy for a monk to manage in the structured, close community of Gethsemani—and spent time together in Louisville and at Gethsemani (apparently the affair was never physically consummated). Merton's friends, with mixed feelings and sometimes great reluctance, helped arrange the liaisons. However, as fellow monk and editor of the sixth volume, Patrick Hart notes, while their love blossomed, "almost from the beginning Merton knew that the relationship could not endure. He was, after all, a monk. … [The] journal entries [between April and September 1966] reflect his amazement and gratitude as well as his ambivalence and anxiety."

We see a Merton both frightened and bewildered. And certainly torn. He realized that things could get out of hand, that he could hurt M. (never identified by name in these published journals), that he was imperiling his vocation. While the two discussed marriage, Merton never really believed that was the answer. He knew something would have to be done, that he could not go on in an impossible, "absurd" situation. Yet he seemed powerless to break off the relationship.

The matter was soon taken out of his hands. On June 13, 1966, Merton discovered that a brother in the gatehouse had listened in on one of Merton's many calls to M. The monk had reported the matter to the abbot. Deciding not to wait until he was summoned, Merton went in and confessed the calls (how much else he revealed is unclear). The abbot was "kind and tried to be understanding to some extent— his only solution was of course 'a complete break.'"

Despite the abbot's clear instruction to the contrary, Merton still talked occasionally to M. on the phone. But the emotional intensity of the summer was gone, and Merton reclaimed his solitude. With time's distance he put it in a kind of perspective: he could be grateful for the relationship while "seeing the whole thing all at once in all its frank and pitiable confusion yet also in its goodness and joy—and above all its danger—so much greater than I realized." Many readers will be appalled by the way in which Merton seems never really to come to grips with what the consequences might be for M.

On March 23, 1966, before that turmoil began, Merton had written,

The one thing for which I am most grateful: this hermitage. The ability to spend at least half a day (the afternoon) here frequently, sometimes daily, since December 1960. Then sleeping here and having also the predawn hours since October 1964. Finally being here all day and all night (except for Mass and dinner) since August 1965. This last was the best, and I am just beginning to really get grounded in solitude (getting rid of the writer of many articles and books) so that, if my life were to be on the way to ending now, this would be my one regret: loss of the years of solitude that might still be possible.

And in September 1967, in the aftermath of his relationship with M., Merton made a commitment in writing, witnessed by the abbot, "to live in solitude the rest of my life."

Given what has just transpired, and given what the reader familiar with the outlines of Merton's life knows is soon to come, we may feel a mixture of amusement, impatience, and incredulity at Merton's lack of self-knowledge. How, we may wonder, could this monk who spent so much time in prayer and contemplation, this magnificently articulate writer who maintained a lifelong record of his consciousness, be seemingly oblivious to the pattern so apparent to any reader of these journals? Did he truly desire solitude? Yes—but he also truly desired its opposite.

Perhaps that is one of the great virtues of Merton's journals: that in them, exposed for all to see and expressed with a clarity and fluency most of us could never attain, are the contradictory movements of the heart, the self-delusion and the blessed insights, the spiritual fits and starts that are our lot on this earth. What would our own inner lives look like displayed on the page and running to seven volumes?

In any case, by now the reader has been trained to anticipate the note on which volume 6 ends, the restlessness following hard upon Merton's written vow to spend the rest of his life in solitude. He was getting itchy to travel. He wanted to respond to at least a few of the many invitations he received to speak and visit other monasteries. And with the election of a new abbot, recorded in volume 7, The Other Side of the Mountain, Merton had the opportunity to fulfill that desire.

The new abbot, elected in 1968, took a more congenial view of Merton's interests in traveling beyond the cloister walls, and perhaps took Merton's fervent professions of solitude with a grain of salt. Merton experienced a freedom he'd rarely known before—relishing, for instance, a trip to Louisville (occasioned by a proctologist's appointment that he relates with deadpan humor) that ended with him buying a Bob Dylan record, John Wesley Harding. Merton confesses to a bit of guilt over his purchases that day, but not so much to keep him from saying that the album was Dylan's best yet. And Merton was allowed in May 1968 to visit two monasteries in New Mexico and California.

Of far greater significance was a pressing invitation to attend a meeting of monastic superiors in Bangkok, Thai land, in December. It took months for a decision to come, but the abbot finally agreed to let Merton spend six months in the Far East, giving retreats at Cistercian monasteries and, especially appealing to Merton, making con tact with a number of Buddhist monasteries in India. He wanted to learn from the wisdom of Eastern religions firsthand.

Merton took the trip with all the wonder of a youngster. He describes the plane's take-off for the leg of his journey that would finally take him to Asia in terms both poetic and delighted: "The moment of take-off was ecstatic. The dewy wing was suddenly covered with rivers of cold sweat running backward. The window wept jagged shining courses of tears. Joy. We left the ground—I with Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny, of being at last on my true way."

And Merton did indeed find something on this trip. In Polonnaruwa, Ceylon, Merton ambles, barefoot, up to a religious site, a quiet hollow surrounded by trees dominated by massive stone statues of Buddha. The vicar general, Merton's companion, hangs back, not wanting to associate with the "paganism" such statues represent. But Merton walks on, to find himself,

knocked over with a rush of relief and thankfulness at the obvious clarity of the figures, the clarity and fluidity of shape and line, the design of the monumental bodies composed into the rock shape and landscape, figure, rock and tree . …

Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious. … I don't know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination. Surely with Mahabilipuram [where he had just visited] and Polonnaruwa my Asian pilgrimage has come clear and purified itself. I mean, I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don't know what else remains but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise.

Barely a week later, Merton would be dead. He was in Bangkok, where he delivered a paper titled "Marxism and Monastic Perspectives." What he read met with enthusiasm that morning, and he was looking forward to the afternoon discussion of the paper. But when he returned to his room and took a shower over the lunch break, apparently he reached for a floor fan with faulty wiring, and, still wet, was electrocuted.

The body arrived back at the abbey December 17. He was buried in the cemetery, his questions and agitation and great hunger for truth finally quieted.

For me, two salient lessons stand out from these journals and the rest of Merton's work. First, Merton helped me reclaim the intimate connection between social concern and spiritual piety. Al ways, and especially in later years, Merton al lowed "the world" with all its wars and struggles and delights to impinge on his praying and shape the way he put his questions. Other public writings already revealed that, but the journals do so with remarkable depth.

In one of Merton's earliest journal entries, from before he entered the monastery, he records an unpleasant conversation with a "liberal Franciscan." "Left wing stuff and economics bore me at the moment," he wrote somewhat petulantly. "But tied up with theology it must have some life, some value, some force." Faith without works of compassion, Merton would come to argue, is not only dead, but irrelevant.

Yet Merton, to the end of his life, was far from a mere activist. Which is the second great truth I take from what I have read of his writings over the years. Merton realized as few Christians do how non-negotiable is the contemplative dimension of the Christian life. Throughout the journals, we see a monk who hungered with remarkable passion for a deep and sustaining and empowering connection with God. He knew God was to be sought for himself, and this God continually, constantly confounds our little pieties. Merton to the end of his days immersed himself in worship, in Scripture, in prayer—both solitary and communal—and in reflection on the great writings of the church.

Even in his later years of agitation for peace and racial reconciliation, Merton knew the center of it all was not the causes, but the Spirit that brought energy and life and power. As a kind of chaplain of the peace movement, he constantly argued that activism by it self would implode or fizzle. "He who attempts to act and do things for the world," he wrote, "without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to live, will have nothing to give to others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions." Indeed, he writes in New Seeds of Contemplation, a favorite Merton book for many, "it was because the saints were absorbed in God that they were truly capable of seeing and appreciated created things and it was because they love Him alone that they alone loved everybody."

Because of my fascination with Merton, begun years ago with my wife's birthday wish-list, I recently visited the Abbey of Gethsemani, set amid the rolling "knobs" of rural Kentucky. I remember vividly the acres of woodland, the reverent chanting of the monks in the coolness of the spare, imposing abbey church. I saw a display case with the original, history-shaping publishing contract for The Seven Storey Mountain. And next to the church, I saw Merton's grave. But the memory of that gravesite is fuzzy indeed. A simple white cross marks his final resting place, but it looks no different from the crosses memorializing the other monks buried there.

Merton's legacy is not to be found in any shrine, but in the books he left behind, books that have deepened faith, encouraged prayer, and stressed that faith must be seen in action, both in daily life and in the fight against global injustice. Above all, the picture of a balding man quietly treading to his hermitage after prayers at the abbey church, or roaming his beloved Kentucky woods in silence, should continue to remind us that we cannot get by, whatever our calling in the world, without prayer.

Timothy Jones writes books on prayer and the spiritual life and leads retreats. He is a former associate editor of Christianity Today magazine. His books include Awake My Soul and A Place for God: A Guide to Spiritual Retreat and Retreat Centers (both Doubleday). He also recently cowrote The Next American Spirituality with George Gallup, Jr.

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