Thomas Merton at Fourth and Walnut

On March eighteenth, nineteen fifty-eight, a Trappist monk named Thomas Merton was running errands for the Abbey of Gethsemani, sixty miles south of here. He had been a monk for sixteen years. He had taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. He had largely withdrawn from the world. He was one of the most widely read Catholic writers in America, and he was standing on a street corner in downtown Louisville, watching strangers walk past.

What happened to him there he later described in his journal, and then in his nineteen sixty-six book "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander." He wrote that he was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that he loved all those people, that they were his and he was theirs, that they could not be alien to one another even though they were total strangers. He wrote: "There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun."

The corner was Fourth and Walnut, which is now Fourth and Muhammad Ali Boulevard. The city erected a plaque there in two thousand eight, on the fiftieth anniversary of the experience. It was renamed Thomas Merton Square. The plaque quotes from his journal.

Merton scholars describe the Fourth and Walnut epiphany as the pivot of his interior life. Before it, he had understood his monastic vocation partly as a withdrawal from a corrupt world. After it, he began turning toward the world, writing about nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, racism, and nonviolence, from inside a monastery. He corresponded with Martin Luther King Jr., with Joan Baez, with the Dalai Lama.

He died in Bangkok in December of nineteen sixty-eight at age fifty-three, reportedly from accidental electrocution by a faulty fan, though official reports cited heart failure. He had traveled there for an interfaith conference. He had been outside the monastery in the ordinary world more in those last years than at any time since he entered it.