In 1948 Thomas Merton became well known with the publication of his bestselling memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain, the story of his restless youth, culminating in his conversion and his entry into an austere Trappist monastery in Kentucky. In becoming a monk, he had intended to drown to the world, to become invisible, a nobody. It didn’t quite go that way. A stream of books on prayer and the spiritual life followed, but what he had assumed was the end was only the beginning of his spiritual journey.  

In 1958, ten years after his arrival at the Abbey of Gethsemani, he had an experience that opened new horizons. On an errand in downtown Louisville, he had a sudden apprehension of his union with all the people of the world. “It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.”  

His subsequent writings were marked by a new attitude of compassion and engagement with the world and its problems: racism, nuclear war, Vietnam. At the same time, he engaged in deeper exploration and dialogue with the religions of the East. That journey led him in 1968 into his first great foray out of the monastery—a trip to Asia to attend a conference on monasticism in Bangkok. That is where his journey ended. On December 10, 1968, following his talk at the conference, he died of an apparent accidental electrocution.  

“Merton was above all a man of prayer . . . who opened new horizons for souls and for the Church. He was also a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions.”  

—Pope Francis, addressing a joint session of Congress in 2015