📍Abbey of Gethsemani, 3642 Monks Road, Trappist, KY 40051, USA
1941 – 1968“I was born Thomas Merton on the 31st of January 1915 in Prades, France, the son of two artists. My mother died when I was six. My father died when I was fifteen. I was educated at Cambridge and Columbia, lived a dissolute life, converted to Catholicism in 1938, and entered the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky in 1941, becoming a Trappist monk at the age of twenty-six. I expected to disappear into the silence of monastic life. Instead I became one of the most widely read spiritual writers of the twentieth century. The Seven Storey Mountain, the journals, the writings on contemplation and social justice — these were written in the monastery's silence. I died in Bangkok in 1968, electrocuted by a faulty fan, on my first journey outside the monastery in twenty-seven years.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Sources: Mott, M. The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (1984), Houghton Mifflin; Merton, T. The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), Harcourt