Thomas Merton's Living Thoreauvian Legacy

By Alda Balthrop-Lewis, Guest Contributor | Edited by Russell C. Powell

The ink drawing pictured here (right) is held in the Merton Archive in Louisville, Kentucky, among a large number of abstract ink works that Thomas Merton made in the 1960s. He called these works calligraphies or graffiti. This drawing is one of four that paraphrase Henry David Thoreau.

Merton, one of the best-known religious writers of the twentieth-century United States, lived an international childhood in France, England, Bermuda, and New York. He was orphaned at the age of 16, and ten years later, in 1941, he entered Gethsemani Abbey, a Trappist monastery in rural Kentucky. In 1948—at the age of 33—he published an autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, which became an unexpected bestseller. The following year, with the publication of Seeds of Contemplation, a series of meditative reflections on contemplative prayer, Merton cemented his standing as a leading guide to spiritual practice for the American public.

In 1950, Merton read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. He became a naturalized American citizen around the same time. He wrote later, to the novelist Henry Miller, that Thoreau was “one of the only reasons why I felt justified in becoming an American citizen.”

“a few are riding, the rest have been run over.”

These words, made with a brush in calligraphic ink on paper, are a paraphrase of the “sleepers” passage in Thoreau’s “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” the second chapter of Walden. In that passage, Thoreau describes a key feature of the railway as it was being constructed through Walden Woods during the time he lived there: wooden railway ties—called sleepers—were laid one after another, forming a stable road upon which the rails could run. In Thoreau’s use, they become an analogy for society. Many of us are ourselves sleepers, he suggests, over whom the railroad and the economy run. He writes, “And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon.”

But things in this system are not fixed. Some of the sleepers sleepwalk from time to time. When this happens, the sleepwalker is run over by the railway cars. Everyone acts like this is a tragedy, Thoreau says, but it's actually just what the railroad does—it runs over the ones who try to wake up alone. 

The promising engineering fact with which Thoreau ends this passage is that “it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds.” Workers had to use force to keep the sleepers in place. And in his hopeful imagination, “this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.” Thoreau’s strategy of resistance to injustice always appeals to this structural observation—that those who are now laid low might organize ways to stand up, not sleepwalking one at a time, but instead at once, together. The image of the railroad illustrates why and how our coordinated action might end our domination.

This was the idea to which Merton’s calligraphy was appealing. As Merton underwent a period that scholars often call his “turning toward the world” in the late 1950s and into the 60s, he became increasingly interested in the world beyond Gethsemani Abbey and wrote more and more about social issues, including the war in Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement. 

Merton’s artistic experiments also transformed. His father had been a painter, and Merton had learned from his parents that art was contemplation. When he entered the abbey, he began drawing religious figures: Christ crucified, Mary veiled. In the 1960s, these line drawings turned to pure abstraction. He wrote, “one who makes such nondescript marks as these is conscious of a special vocation to be inconsequent, to be outside the sequence and to remain firmly alien to the program.”

Merton’s vocation—the question of what God was calling him to do with his life—had always been a matter of great interest to him, and in this period, he was coming to understand it in new ways. A selection of his abstract drawings was published in his 1966 book of essays, Raids on the Unspeakable, as breaks between chapters. In the last essay of the book, Merton insists that rather than viewing the drawings as works of art, the viewer should see them as signs without meaning. They “came to life” at some moment, but they do not signify that moment. They are the marks of an artist, not meant to recall him. Nor are they meant to be judged or considered a product of Merton’s own judging. In short, according to Merton, these drawings are purposely useless abstractions.

In the Merton Archive, we find among these purposefully useless abstractions those four drawings in which, rather than making inconsequential marks, Merton paraphrases Thoreau, expressing a complaint about the inequities of the modern economy written first from Walden Woods. Here, the legacy of Thoreau’s activism—his sleepers and our train—lives on. And yet, Merton’s own reproduction of Thoreau’s words is so very fragile, so very forgotten: a drawing on paper, dead trees, housed in an archive, rarely seen. 

For Thoreau, as for his friend and teacher Ralph Waldo Emerson, ideas were more than could be expressed in any sentence or book. In Emerson’s most famous addresses, such as “The American Scholar” and “The Divinity School Address,” he expresses this idea, in part, as a right relationship to books and learning. Rather than being “bookworms” or “bibliomaniacs,” we are called to set our study in the context of the nature that it responds to and the actions we take in light of it. In “The Divinity School Address,” this message became especially famous when Emerson applied it to Christian theology. His concern was that religious people—by fixating on long-ago revelation—act “as if God were dead.” Instead, he wrote, what we are called to do is to believe and act as if all things can be made new. “Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing.”

We must breathe the breath of new life through the forms already existing. Merton’s memory of Thoreau’s resistance lives only in an archive and may, in some sense, be dead, but contemporary resistance to an economy in which a few are riding and the rest have been run over is not so very hard to find.

A photograph (also small and easily overlooked) taken in the Port of Newcastle on Australia’s east coast in November 2025 gives me something like hope along these lines. Australia is one of the world's largest fossil fuel exporters, and the coal exported from Newcastle each year accounts for one percent of global annual carbon emissions. Australians in Newcastle are organizing to end the development of new fossil fuel projects across Australia, and to tax fossil fuel exports to fund a just transition for coal workers who are already losing their jobs as coal declines. The “Rising Tide Handbook” explains that their strategy is to use civil resistance to end coal exports from Newcastle by 2030. 

In 2023, 109 people were arrested in kayaks blockading the port. In 2024, 7,000 people attended over 10 days, and 170 people were arrested for blockading the port. In 2025, there were 8,000 people, 181 arrests, 3 coal ships turned around, and 10 ships rescheduled, making the 2025 blockade the largest act of climate-based civil disobedience in Australia’s history. Rising Tide is growing and learning, and they remind us that while a few are riding, and the rest have been run over, in Thoreau’s image, there are signs “that they may someday get up again.”

Alda Balthrop-Lewis is an associate professor of religion at Florida State University, where she studies ethics: the norms, principles, relationships, and practices that people use in trying to live well. In her book Thoreau's Religion (Cambridge, 2021), she focused this work on environmental ethics. Her research has been published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and the Journal of Religious Ethics. You can read her essays at Overland and Earth Island Journal.