A New Book Tells The Story Of The Other Merton — Thomas’ Brother
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Thomas Merton and a trinity of his novices (1960). Photo via Thomas Merton Center.
(REVIEW) Few if any 20th century Roman Catholics had a greater impact on Christian spirituality than Thomas Merton, the iconic Trappist monk, mystic and ecumenist.
He lived at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Nelson County, Kentucky, from 1941 until his death by electrocution while on a 1968 trip to Thailand.
Merton’s bestselling 1948 autobiography, “The Seven Storey Mountain,” quickly became one of the more influential spiritual works of modern times. In all, he published dozens of books on multiple subjects, ranging from contemplation to social justice. More than 50 years after his death, he remains admired around the world.
What’s lesser known is the remarkable life of his brother, John Paul, who was almost four years his junior. John Paul makes appearances in “The Seven Storey Mountain” but mainly seems overlooked, a footnote in the Thomas Merton legend.
That’s partly because Thomas cast such a long shadow, partly because John Paul died very young — at 24, while serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II — and partly because John Paul left behind no books of his own.
Now, at last, he’s getting his due, thanks to a new book by William J. Meegan, 81, a retired clinical psychologist in Lexington, Kentucky, who also taught part-time at the University of Kentucky and Lexington Theological Seminary.
“Remembering the Forgotten Merton,” published by Wipf and Stock, grew over a period of about five years. It began when Meegan, a cradle Catholic and a regular retreatant at the Abbey of Gethsemani, decided to explore the Merton family tree.
Soon he wanted to know more about Thomas’ little brother. The more he discovered about John Paul, the more intrigued he became.
Understanding the younger Merton proved challenging, though. There was simply so much more information about Thomas, or Tom, as he was generally called. Tom was a larger-than-life figure who filled every room.
“One of the biggest problems I had was not getting distracted by Thomas Merton,” Meegan said. “I realized I was doing the same thing everybody else was doing: I was forgetting about John Paul.”
The junior brother was quieter about his faith but exemplified what Tom called “the law of love.”
Neither brother would have seemed destined for spiritual greatness. Theirs were lives of prep schools, mischief — and compounded tragedies.
Their father, Owen Merton, a native of New Zealand, was an itinerant painter who cared little about supporting a family. Their mother, Ruth Jenkins Merton, was an American interior decorator who’d met Owen while studying in France.
In 1921, when John Paul was 2, Ruth died of stomach cancer. From then on, John Paul saw little of his father or brother.
His father left him with Ruth’s parents, Sam and Martha Jenkins, in the Queens borough of New York City. Sam was a wealthy New York book publishing executive.
Owen took Tom along on his lengthy, peripatetic journeys to paint in Europe.
When the brothers were occasionally reunited, the results sometimes weren’t happy, especially early on.
John Paul “had a serene nature … a constant and unruffled happiness,” in Tom’s later telling. But Tom was unruly and combative, marked — he said in an early draft of “The Seven Storey Mountain” — by “a total indifference to all standards of conscience. All I knew was that what I wanted was good, because I wanted it, and that what I did not want was evil because I did not want it.”
One thing he tended not to want was John Paul, even though his little brother adored him. Meegan includes an affecting anecdote in which Tom says he and his friends would drive John Paul away with stones. Yet John Paul never ceased wanting to be with him.
Things would get even worse for both boys. When John Paul was 12, their dad died in London of brain cancer. While John Paul was still in his teens, the boys’ grandparents Sam and Martha Jenkins died as well, leaving John Paul, in effect, twice orphaned, given that the Jenkins had raised him.
Somehow, he never became hardened. In 1942, as he was about to be sent overseas as a combat airman, John Paul visited Tom at Gethsemani. At Tom’s urging, he was baptized as a Catholic despite having been raised an Episcopalian.
A few months later, in April 1943, his Wellington bomber crashed into the English Channel. It was the day before Palm Sunday. John Paul, mortally injured and his legs paralyzed, fought desperately to save his pilot. All told — I’ll leave you to read the eerie details — his death mirrored aspects of Jesus’ crucifixion.
To Meegan, the sacrificial manner in which John Paul died was a natural continuation of his mode of living.
“John Paul lived a law of love,” Meegan said. Unlike Tom, “John Paul didn’t write anything but a couple of letters. But he lived it.”
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.