But that house, the Abbey of Gethsemani, would not, over the long run, prove to be the home that Merton had hoped it would be. For one thing, he suffered profound anxiety about his writing. He loved writing and believed that he was good at it, but it was not clear whether writing was compatible with the highly communal life of Gethsemani. Would he not, by writing, set himself apart from his brothers in unhealthy ways? His abbot encouraged him to write, and when his autobiography, “The Seven Storey Mountain,” appeared in 1948 and quickly became a best-seller, the abbot’s wisdom was surely confirmed.

Or was it? To be sure, “The Seven Storey Mountain” was a magnificent advertisement for Catholicism in general and for monastic life in particular—almost every monastery in America saw a massive upsurge in postulants in the years following the book’s publication—and all of the book’s considerable royalties went straight into the bank account of the abbey. However, the more Merton wrote, the less time he had to spend at the common work, leaving more for his brothers to do. One of the subsequent abbots sought to remedy this situation by making Merton the master of novices, which gave him a lot of teaching to do—a responsibility which Merton gladly accepted, surely out of obedience, but also, I suspect, because it was a relatively trivial matter to convert the lectures he gave the novices into books.

After years of this kind of tension, Merton begged to be allowed to become a hermit, living alone on some remote corner of Gethsemani’s property. This most thoroughly un-Trappist request was granted. It was probably the best solution that, practically speaking, could have been achieved. Merton collected some of his talks to novices under the title “No Man Is an Island”—a title either aspirational or ironic or both.

One of the novices who, inspired by “The Seven Storey Mountain,” sought to join the community of Gethesemani remembered that, when Merton welcomed them, he said, “The life of a monk is a semi-ecstasy and forty years of aridity.” That young man said, “It didn’t frighten me.” And yet he would depart from the monastery after only two years, bound for the Catholic priesthood, but in a more public mode.

His name was Ernesto Cardenal. He was a native of Nicaragua, and ten years younger than Merton. They bonded over their shared love of poetry, and over a connection with Columbia University, where Cardenal had come to study in 1947, just as Merton was completing his autobiography. Over the course of Cardenal’s time at Gethsemani, they developed a plan: Cardenal would attend a seminary in Cuernavaca, Mexico, be ordained as a priest, and then establish a new monastery there, one that would be deeply concerned with seeking justice in the grossly unjust societies of Central America. And Merton would be released from his commitments to Gethsemani and join Cardenal there.

Throughout the second half of the nineteen-fifties, Merton had come to believe that his monastic isolation had made him inattentive to the evils of the world. Cardenal had not been the only influence on him in this respect but eventually became an important one. Merton very much looked forward to this new life, and to its renewal of the political commitments that had meant so much to him in his youth. In October of 1959, he wrote to Cardenal to say that he prayed daily “that this venture may be successful for the glory of God. One must expect obstacles and difficulties but there seem to be so many indications that this is God’s will and I trust He will bring it to completion in His own way.” Gradually, the two men began to treat Merton’s move to Mexico as inevitable. Cardenal wrote, “I can only imagine how difficult the departure from Gethsemani must be for you”—as though it had already happened.

But it did not happen. The leaders of Merton’s order refused his request to be transferred, and for a time forbade him to communicate with Cardenal. The dream faded and then died. Cardenal became a priest, and then, later, the Minister of Culture in Nicaragua’s Sandinista government for nearly a decade. When, in 1984, he refused a papal order to leave his government job, Pope John Paul II defrocked him. As for Merton, he moved not to Mexico but to his little two-room hermitage, near the end of 1961.

The seven years of life remaining to Merton would be enormously fertile, productive, and destabilizing—as those years were for the whole country. What Merton’s mind and heart sought, in those years, was a certain convergence of commitments, a potentially harmonious joining of beliefs and practices that most people thought irreconcilable or, at best, inevitably separate.

Perhaps the central question for him was: What contribution can the contemplative make to peacemaking, especially in a bellicose age? He wrote to Cardenal often on this topic. “As to politics and the world situation, a little news comes through sometimes and then long periods of silence. . . . Yet I wonder if I really know less than those who get the papers.” It’s obvious that “the world is full of great criminals with enormous power and they are in a death struggle with each other. . . . What can come of it? Surely not peace.” He understood that “we must pray and be joyful and simple because we do not after all understand most of it. . . .But let us avoid false optimism, and approved gestures, and seek truth.”

Denied the opportunity to join Cardenal in Cuernavaca, Merton sought truth primarily through writing. He wrote a long prose poem, “Original Child Bomb,” about the aftereffects of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and an elegy for the four little girls killed by the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Alabama. He published a selection from his journals in which he reflected largely on politics and public events and titled it “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.” He stayed in his hermitage. Though the most famous activist priests of that era, the brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, considered Merton a kind of mentor and guide, they could not convince him to join their protests. In his journal, he wrote, “I definitely want to keep out of anything that savors of a public ‘appearance’ to semi-public or anything, especially in America.”

But he renewed another old interest—and this one did take him into the public world. When he was in the midst of his campaign for a hermitage, he found himself thinking and writing about the Desert Fathers of the fourth century—many of them were hermits, after all—and when he published “The Wisdom of the Desert,” his small book recounting and retelling their stories, he wanted to ask the great Zen master, D. T. Suzuki, to write an introduction to the book. (He had exchanged a series of letters with Suzuki in 1959.) This idea was firmly rejected by his Trappist superiors, and Merton ended up writing his own quite eloquent and illuminating introduction, but the request marked his fascination with what the various contemplative and mystical traditions might have in common—and what the elements they shared might give to the world.