Word: gethsemani
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...exhilaration that approached ecstasy -"with Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny, of being at last on my way after years of waiting and wondering and fooling around." Trappist Monk Thomas Merton, the best-known Christian mystic of this century, had been given leave from Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky to participate in a conference of monastic leaders near Bangkok. The trip was also to be a long-awaited personal encounter with the spiritual disciplines of the East, particularly the esoteric forms of Buddhism that Merton wished to explore in India with the exiled lamas of Tibet...
...from a shower, Merton touched a defectively wired room fan and was electrocuted. His death prompted friends to speculate whether Merton would ever have returned to the U.S. from his enthusiastic plunge into Buddhism. The answer now seems to be yes, though he might not have returned to Gethsemani itself...