Word: gethsemani
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...himself. What he had chosen, at the age of 26 and as a new convert to Roman Catholicism, was the silent and anonymous life of the Trappist monks, who rise early, work hard, eat little and pray much. When he entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, however, his abbot decreed that Merton should continue writing-as he had since the age of ten. Merton was ordained a priest in 1949, the year after his first major book, The Seven Storey Mountain, had become a bestseller and thrust him permanently into a life of books, articles, poems...
Fascinated by Zen. Merton's wide-ranging, eclectic mind could touch upon the Beatles or the Bomb, but for a quarter of a century he never left the Abbey of Gethsemani, except for trips to the doctor or drives with visiting friends around neighboring Kentucky hills. In fact, for almost a decade, with his ab bot's permission, he had withdrawn from much of the community life, living Thoreau-like in a small hermitage on abbey property more than a mile from the main buildings. This year he was finally granted a leave of absence from Gethsemani...
Thomas Merton, the compleat bohemian who became a Trappist monk at 26, has carried on an astringent "dialogue with the world" ever since. In his 24 years as a member of Kentucky's Abbey of Gethsemani, he has built a seven-storey mountain of poems, autobiography, reflection and translation that attests to his continuing concern for mankind at large. In this collection of essays and letters, Merton punctures the white liberal's complacent participation in the civil rights movement as a kind of self-indulgence that is of "no interest to the Negro." In his view, what...
...monks of Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey, near Bardstown, Ky., have a thriving mail order business in cheese, fruit cakes, hams, bacon and summer sausage. They are noted for their cheese, which is made according to a secret formula originated at the Trappist monastery in Port du Salut, France, 700 years ago; only two monks at Gethsemani know the secret, the cheesemaker and an apprentice...