ABSTRACT
Rainer Maria Rilke, in one of his poems, proclaims, “I live my life in widening circles.” That sentence exquisitely captures the life and the writing of Thomas Merton. Orphaned as a teenager, Merton believed that without the burden of parental controls he could become a free and sophisticated “man of the world.” Instead, in his first year of college in England, he ended up enslaving himself to his own selfish desires, placing himself and some of those closest to him in moral jeopardy. Later, as a college student at Columbia University in New York City, he converted to Catholicism and then, in an astounding turn, sought his freedom not by becoming a well-traveled and sophisticated intellectual, but by living within the confines of a strict monastic community at the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. His abbot, recognizing Merton’s talent, encouraged him to keep writing. And write he did! Caught up in the fervor of a convert, Merton first produced books reflecting a jingoistic Catholicism: the church, and especially the monastery, stood as a beacon of truth and sanity in a world lost in lies and confusion.
