On December 12, 1968, a short news item appeared in the Bangkok Post entitled “RC Monk Dies.” It simply stated that Father Thomas Merton had been the victim of a fatal heart attack. Although the article was only a few lines long and buried on page five of the newspaper, the event it reported would draw the attention of the entire world to Thailand and to the “Meeting of the Monks of Asia” that was taking place in Bangkok. The gathering was organized by AIM (Aide à l’Implantation Monastique) [1]and brought together seventy monks, nuns, and scholars from twenty-two countries in Asia, America, and Europe, along with journalists and television crews from three countries.

Unlike many others, Thomas Merton had always shown great interest in the activities of AIM, and thus there was general agreement that he should be invited to participate in the conference. After twenty years of contemplative solitude at the Abbey of Gethsemani, first in the monastery and then in his hermitage, it seemed that the time had come for him to spread his message not only through his writings, but also by meeting his contemporaries, whose anxieties he so strongly shared, even though he had stayed in his monastery. He once told me he thought an occasional visit to Asia and Africa would be possible, but always and only for matters related to monasticism. When I asked him to come to Bangkok and to speak about Marxism, he immediately recognized the importance of the topic and accepted my invitation with enthusiasm.



Fr. Louis (Thomas) Merton (center, white and black habit) and Fr. Jean Leclercq (to his right) at the December 1968 meeting in Bangkok. Copyright Merton LegacyTrust. Used with permission of the Merton Legacy Trust and the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University.

We had planned to travel together from California to Japan, but he had to make a trip to Alaska and elsewhere, and I also had to change my itinerary. He ultimately decided that he would visit Japan on his way home. His first stops in Asia were India and Ceylon [Sri Lanka]. My first destination in Asia was Japan, and in both Kyoto and Tokyo, where Merton was expected later, it became clear to me that he was no amateur when it came to Zen. The Japanese regarded him as an authority. I was told that a translation of his Mystics and Zen Masters was already in progress.

Before leaving the United States, he had been interviewed by the Los Angeles Times. The interview, published on December 22, 1968, quoted him as saying “If I get back without dying of amoebic dysentery or other interesting things. . .” [2] I arrived at Bangkok at the last minute and hardly had any time to talk to him about his trip. We made plans to spend an evening together before the end of the conference. He told me how happy he was to have met not only with the Dalai Lama, but also with some simple, ordinary hermits in the Himalayas. He was enchanted by Ceylon, where he came across a piece of property right next to a Buddhist monastery that he thought was perfectly suited for a Christian monastic foundation. (He always had some project in the works.) He was sorry he didn’t have a chance to visit the temple of Angkor or to go to Cambodia, but he was looking forward to visiting Barabudur in Indonesia.

Most of the monasteries in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand wanted him to come for a visit, or to preach their retreat, and he planned to accept as many of these invitations as he could. We were planning to be together in February for a Cistercian Studies meeting in the United States, but he was beginning to think about spending a longer time in Asia and asked me to tell the organizers of the February conference that he might not be able to make it.

In Bangkok his modesty came as something of a surprise to those who did not yet know him personally. They soon discovered that he was completely different from the image of him they had formed by reading his writings. At the very outset of the conference, when the planning committee asked him to be part of the evening panel that would pull together and reflect on what had taken place each day, he declined, saying that he was just a simple monk and did not want to be singled out. I had to tell him, “Father Louis, don’t forget that you are Thomas Merton.” He bowed graciously and accepted the invitation.

I often thought of Merton as a twentieth-century Saint Bernard, not only because his spiritual teaching was rooted in his own experience, but also because he had developed a style that spoke to a great number of his contemporaries—and, I am sure, will continue to speak to many more throughout the world in the years to come. He was also like Saint Bernard in that he was well aware of his gifts and recognized that he could misuse his talents. He did not allow either his gifts or his success to go to his head. He was wary of them, even joking about them, much as Saint Bernard did when he compared himself to a performer (ioculator) who walks on his hands with his feet in the air and does all sorts of amusing stunts to show that he doesn’t take himself too seriously, but actually pokes fun at himself in order to captivate his audience. As Saint Bernard wrote in one of his letters, “Ludam ut illudar—I will be funny so that others can make fun of me” (87:12).

We saw evidence of Merton’s self-deprecating humor on the very first night of the conference. It was suggested that we begin with an informal gathering of all the participants. Since the simultaneous translation service for the conference would only begin functioning the next day, the President of AIM asked me to translate from French to English. I apologized for my poor English, saying I was sure I was being asked to do this because I was the AIM’s clown. I added that I had asked Thomas Merton to help me, even though he was a poet. Merton immediately jumped in with a wisecrack that still rings in my ears: “All right. We shall clown together.” Those were virtually the last words he spoke to me.

He was also like Saint Bernard in that he had two distinct styles. He wrote effortlessly and beautifully, filling page after page with the perfect image, the provocative paradox, the trenchant observation, all of which came together to make his writing so engaging, poetic, and musical. But when he spoke to ordinary monks like us, he spoke a lively, colloquial American English that was quite different from his literary style. When editors and translators were given a transcription of his recorded presentation, they were surprised, even dismayed. Merton was not someone who “read a paper.” He had submitted an outline in advance, but did not follow it—and all the better! His warm and gentle voice, along with the transcript of his words, is the way we will remember his parting thoughts. He hinted at what those thoughts would be when, some six months earlier, he replied as follows to my invitation:

I will be glad to give a talk on Marxism and so on. Important indeed! I’ve familiarized myself pretty well with Herbert Marcuse, whose ideas are so influential in the “student revolts” of the time. I must admit that I find him closer to monasticism than many theologians. Those who question the structure of contemporary society at least look to monks for a certain distance and crucial perspective. Which alas is seldom found. The vocation of the monk in the modern world, especially Marxist, is not survival but prophecy. We are all busy saving our skins. [3]

The last words of his conference would resonate in a way he never suspected. “I believe the plan is to have all the questions for this morning’s lecture this evening at the panel. So I will disappear.” During the course of an hour and a quarter photographers, journalists, and television crews had focused on him. He was the only one who was treated that way. Even though all the fuss indicated the high regard everyone had for Thomas Merton, the monk in him—that is, Father Louis—wanted nothing more than to withdraw.

On the previous evening, during the course of an official reception for His Holiness the Supreme Patriarch of the Buddhists in Thailand, at which the Apostolic Delegate and the Abbot Primate of the Benedictines were present, Merton was seated next to Father Francis Acharya, a former Trappist of Scourmont and then of Caldey, who, along with Bede Griffiths, had founded the Christian-Hindu ashram of Kurisumala. Merton’s proximity to Father Francis was probably not planned, but it symbolized his admiration for and confidence in a simple monastic way of life that adapts itself to the traditions of the place where it is planted.

A couple of hours after his conference Thomas Merton was found lying on the floor of his room with a long burn mark on his right side caused by an electric shock. The first reaction, from a human point of view, was to think that his sudden death—which probably did not happen all that suddenly—was the fault of those who were responsible for his being so far away from his monastery, or of those who had given him permission to leave it. But it is also possible to conclude that an ordinary death would not have become someone like Merton.

How exactly did his death come about? We will never know exactly and with certitude. There are already a number of scenarios circulating—the sort of thing you expect when an extraordinary person dies. Some have begun spreading the rumor that the last moments of his life were in the presence of a statue of the Buddha. Others have suggested that he was assassinated like Martin Luther King had been. On the evening of his death two different versions were already being put forth by the media of Thailand and the United States. Papers in the United States only made mention of electrocution; those in Thailand spoke only of a heart attack. On both sides there was a desire to explain his death in such a way as to forestall certain hypotheses, none of which are all that significant. In all probability the death of Thomas Merton was due in part to heart failure, in part to an electric shock. Neither one nor the other alone would normally be fatal. The disproportion between the cause of his death and its consequences—the loss that it represents for the Church—is what makes his death both a mystery and a sign—more precisely, a God-given mysterious sign whose meaning we must strive to understand. What is certain is that God wanted him to die there and then: in Asia, at work, at the service of monasticism, of interreligious dialogue, of all humanity, of God.

That evening, as we kept vigil, Father de Floris, the President of AIM, promised Merton that he would do everything in his power to see that Christian monastic life was introduced as soon as possible in the country where his side had been wounded and where he had given his life. His body was taken away during the night. For the celebration of his funeral the day after his death we were joined by the Archbishop of Bangkok, the Apostolic Delegate, and Catholic laity, religious, and priests who came from the city and the surrounding countryside. The Abbot Primate spoke of the spirit and work of this monk, writer, priest, and prophet who throughout his life, “sometimes in strange and upsetting ways,” searched for God and strove to make him known, without ever having completely found him prior to the day when he entered into his resurrection.

Thomas Merton was anything but an ordinary person about whom one can easily make an objective judgment. In the presence of such stimulating greatness, about all one can do is respond. You are either for him or against him. He probably had few enemies, but he certainly provoked a lot of misunderstanding, even fear. There were some who questioned his insights and his bluntness. But now, as we come to see his life in union with Christ more clearly and to recognize that his life in Christ was the source of all his inspiration, these less important considerations can be put aside. Some poets have already suggested that the meaning of his message, which was sometimes hidden from the learned and the wise, can be found in the paradox of his being returned to his country in a jet that was carrying home the bodies of young soldiers killed in the war in Vietnam, a war that had caused him so much suffering.

A participant in the Bangkok conference who was frequently in contact with Merton remarked, “I was struck by his pure, childlike eyes.” Those words were echoed by a poet who wrote, “In his eyes I saw death beckoning, like a somber lily among the fresh flowers of spring.” Iam hiems transiit. I was not as struck as others.” [4]

To continue in this poetic vein:

The Hour—his Hour—had come.
Our newfound friend has died.
The one we only knew at the eleventh hour is now no more.
He came here to die among us.
That is how God wanted it,
And you do not argue with God.

But you are wrong, oh you of little faith!
He is not dead.
Our friend is sleeping.
He lives, he laughs, he smiles, just as he did when he was with us.
He is happy, divinely happy.
Let us be happy with him!
Blessed are you, Lord, thrice blessed!
Thomas Merton lives.

It seems that Merton joked about his death on the very morning of the day it would happen. But God gives no warning. He comes like a thief in the night, taking back what is his own. Everyone at the meeting in Bangkok saw the hand of God in Merton’s death. We were convinced that it was part of the divine plan of salvation, even though what is to come is still not clear. We might think of Merton as a chosen victim, offered in exchange for a blessing. We certainly did feel blessed, for during the rest of the conference we never stopped sensing that Father Merton continued to be present among us. I do not doubt that he, consecrated soul that he was, thought of his death as a sacrifice in the final moments of his life, a life that had been offered up for so long. When the time came, as he himself put it, he “disappeared.” But at the same time, and for all time, he remains.

Father Leclercq added the following handwritten note to his typed manuscript:

The vagaries of travel brought it about that I am posting this article from Gethsemani, after having celebrated the Eucharist in the oratory of Thomas Merton’s hermitage. It is Tuesday of the first week of Lent. The reading from Isaiah begins with these words: “Seek the LORD while he may be found, call upon him while he is near.” And in the Gospel the Lord, citing Psalm 8, says, “Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise for yourself.”

Gethsemani, 26 February 1969