From The New Yorker-On December 10, 1941, a young man named Thomas Merton was received as a novice by a monastery in Kentucky, the Abbey of Gethsemani. Precisely twenty-seven years later, he died by accidental electrocution in his room at a retreat center in Bangkok, Thailand. He entered the monastery three days after Pearl Harbor; he died a month after Richard Nixon was elected to his first term as President. It had been an eventful time.
Merton was a remarkable man by any measure, but perhaps the most remarkable of his traits was his hypersensitivity to social movements from which, by virtue of his monastic calling, he was supposed to be removed. Intrinsic to Merton’s nature was a propensity for being in the midst of things. If he had continued to live in the world, he might have died not by electrocution but by overstimulation.
Thomas Merton was born in 1915, to parents living in the French Pyrenees. His American mother, Ruth, who would die of cancer when Thomas was only six, was a Quaker and an artist, though a less ambitious one than his father, Owen. Owen, a New Zealander, had great hopes to make a career as a painter, some of which he later realized. Living in Catholic France, married to a Quaker, he wanted his son baptized in the Church of England. This was done, bequeathing to Thomas a certain confusion about religious affiliation right from the outset.
More here-
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/thomas-merton-the-monk-who-became-a-prophet
