Into the Cloud of Unknowing

On December 10, 1941, a twenty-six-year-old writer named Thomas Merton drove through the Kentucky hills to the Abbey of Gethsemani. He had tasted literary success in New York, enjoyed the jazz clubs of Harlem, and built a reputation as a promising intellectual at Columbia University. Yet something relentless pulled him toward silence. When the heavy monastery doors closed behind him, Merton stepped into a life of radical obscurity — no audience, no applause, no clear sense of what God would do with him there.…