Thomas Merton: A Monk in Action
Tuesday, July 21, 2026
Father Richard recounts how he came to know the work of Thomas Merton (1915–1968):
Thomas Merton has been a primary teacher and inspiration to me ever since I read his book The Sign of Jonas as a teenager. He was one of the most influential American Catholics of the twentieth century. It was Merton who reintroduced the Christian contemplative tradition to the Western church in the 1950s and 1960s. By living a contemplative life, Merton grew in love for God and all of God’s children and creation—so much so that he became committed to doing what he could for the common good. Amidst the societal disruptions of the 1960s, it was not enough for him to simply pray. He also devoted himself to action—writing, teaching, and collaborating with others—though he never lost his deep yearning for solitude and contemplation. [1]
As Merton began to seriously wrestle with the injustices plaguing the United States and the world, he published Seeds of Destruction, a book urging Christians to reflect on their moral responsibility to take a stand on issues such as racism, war, and poverty. His words speak to our moment as well. Merton writes:
The contemplative life is not, and cannot be, a mere withdrawal, a pure negation, a turning of one’s back on the world with its sufferings, its crises, its confusions and its errors….
I hold that the contemplative life of the Christian is not a life of abstraction, of secession, in order to concentrate upon ideal essences…. The freedom of the Christian contemplative is … the freedom to go out and meet God in the inscrutable mystery of [God’s] will here and now, in this precise moment in which [God] asks [humanity’s] cooperation in shaping the course of history according to the demands of divine truth, mercy and fidelity.
The monastic flight from the world [or what Father Richard calls ‘the system’] into the desert is not a mere refusal to know anything about the world, but a total rejection of all standards of judgment which imply attachment to a history of delusion, egoism and sin … a definitive refusal to participate in those activities which have no other fruit than to prolong the reign of untruth, greed, cruelty and arrogance….
Therefore it seems to me to be a solemn obligation of conscience at this moment of history to take the positions which are … in vital relation with the obligations I assumed when I took my monastic vows. To have a vow of poverty seems to me illusory if I do not in some way identify myself with the cause of people who are denied their rights and forced, for the most part, to live in abject misery. To have a vow of obedience seems to me to be absurd if it does not imply a deep concern for the most fundamental of all expressions of God’s will: the love of [God’s] truth and of our neighbor.
