Episode #22: Ask Me About My Vow of Silence: Thomas Merton, the True Self, and a Faith Without Easy Answers

Episode SynopsisThomas Merton entered a Trappist monastery seeking a life of prayer, contemplation, and silence. He somehow became one of the most widely read spiritual writers of the twentieth century.In this episode of Subversive Orthodoxy, Travis and Professor Robert Inchausti explore the life and spiritual imagination of Thomas Merton, author of The Seven Storey Mountain. The conversation becomes deeply personal as Inchausti recounts discovering Merton as a young man searching for a Christianity intellectually and spiritually capable of confronting the world as he actually experienced it.Merton offered a faith willing to live with difficult questions. His Christianity had passed through literature, modernism, war, suffering, doubt, and the search for an authentic interior life. For Inchausti, reading Merton felt less like encountering a religious spokesman and more like discovering someone who had “read your mail.”That story leads into Inchausti’s own journey toward Catholicism, Dostoevsky’s influence on his conversion, late-night conversations over bottomless coffee at Denny’s with his friend Gary, a Vietnam veteran who introduced him to more of Merton’s writings, and eventually a confrontation at Gary’s funeral over whether serious questioning strengthens or threatens religious faith.Through Merton’s life and Inchausti’s own story, the conversation asks what happens when Christianity takes suffering, doubt, literature, history, and the life of the mind seriously—and whether an honest search for truth can itself become a path toward faith.Key themes in the episode Thomas Merton’s restless path from writer and intellectual seeker to Trappist monk The Seven Storey Mountain and why it became a spiritual phenomenon  Merton’s refusal to offer easy religious certainty  Professor Inchausti discovering Merton at twenty years old  Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, and Inchausti’s movement toward Christianity  Why Merton made Catholicism intellectually possible for him  Merton’s unusual honesty about his own spiritual development  The difference between receiving religious answers and learning how to ask serious questions  Gary, a Vietnam veteran whose experience of war demanded a faith capable of facing suffering  Late-night Catholic conversations over bottomless coffee at Denny’s  Literature as a way of confronting tragedy, ambiguity, evil, and faith  The intellectual life as part of spiritual formation  Why serious Christian faith has room for doubt, difficulty, and unresolved questions  Inchausti’s confrontation at Gary’s funeral over the value of books and intellectual inquiry  Merton as a lifelong spiritual companion rather than simply an author Inchausti once read  The kind of Christianity at the heart of Subversive Orthodoxy: a faith capable of looking directly at realitySend us Fan MailSupport the showContact: [email protected]: @subversiveorthodoxyHost: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnationCo-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.