On Dec. 10, 1941, the week of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Thomas Merton entered the monastic community of the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky.

I visited June 9, 2024.

I attended Catholic mass at the Abbey Church, along with a few dozen Trappist brothers and around 70 of the faithful.

As a committed Protestant, I remained at a respectfully distance.

In 1948 Merton published his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the first year on the way to becoming an international best-seller.

In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Merton writes about a transformative moment he experienced in downtown Louisville, in 1958.

Here’s a live video from the intersection of Fourth Street and what is today Muhammad Ali Boulevard, renamed after the Louisville native in 1978.

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

“Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts, where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time.”

According to The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University:

“This moment marked a pivotal moment in the monastic life of Thomas Merton as he turned from the world denying monk of The Seven Storey Mountain to the world embracing monk of the sixties as he began addressing many of the major issues of that time, some of which are as relevant today as when he penned them, if not more so.”

Today the intersection is called Thomas Merton Square.

On Dec. 10, 1968, the 27th anniversary of his entrance into Gethsemani, Merton was accidentally electrocuted in Bangkok, Thailand.

Follow this link to shop for Merton’s writings on Amazon.

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Pastor Jim Meisner, Jr. earned his M.Div. from the oldest HBCU seminary in the United States. He’s the author of the novel Faith, Hope, and Baseball, available on Amazon, or follow this link to order an autographed copy. He created and manages the Facebook page Faith on the Fringe.