Thomas Merton's Dissent, Written from a Monastery

The Abbey of Gethsemani sits in a valley of Nelson County, south of Louisville, surrounded by fields and woodlands that the Trappist monks have farmed since they arrived from France in eighteen forty-eight. It is one of the oldest active monasteries in the United States, and for most of its history it was largely unknown outside Catholic religious circles.

Thomas Merton changed that in nineteen forty-eight, when he published "The Seven Storey Mountain," a memoir of his conversion to Catholicism and his entry into Gethsemani as a novice. The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It made Merton the most widely read Catholic writer in America, and it made Gethsemani briefly famous.

Merton had come to the monastery in nineteen forty-one, intending, as he later wrote, to turn his back on the world. For nearly two decades that was roughly what he did. He wrote about contemplative prayer, about mysticism, about the interior life of monasticism. Then something shifted.

After his nineteen fifty-eight epiphany at Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, Merton began writing about the world he had tried to leave. He wrote about nuclear weapons in the early nineteen sixties and was ordered by his superiors to stop. He was in contact with the King family, and Martin Luther King Jr. had planned a retreat at Gethsemani shortly before his death. He wrote about the Vietnam War from inside the monastery while the war was being fought. He became one of the most substantial American voices against the war at a time when most of the country's institutions were still supporting it.

He died in Bangkok in December of nineteen sixty-eight. The decades of writing he left behind, dozens of books covering contemplation, politics, race, religion, and poetry, were produced almost entirely from the silence of this valley.

The monastery sells fruitcake and bourbon fudge. Visitors are welcome for retreats. The monks still farm.