Why am I a Monk?

This quote from Thomas Merton arrived in my box courtesy of Gail Wiggin. This is his reply to the question, "Why are you a monk?" It bears consideration both for its clear-eyed detachment, and yet its inner sense of vocation. We might ask ourselves the same question, "Why are we monks?"

[to Margaret Randall, June, 1967]

“... Every once in a while someone wonders why I am a monk, and I don't want to be always justifying the monk idea because then I get the false idea that I am a monk. Perhaps when I entered here I believed I was a monk, and kept it up for five, ten, fifteen years, even allowed myself to become novice master and tell others what it is all about. No more. I have nothing to say about this institution except that I wonder if it has any future, at least as it is, and also I am really not that much part of it now. I live alone in the woods and have as far as feasible for me copped out of the monastic institution as well as out of the civil inst. Of course, that too is a delusion. But as far as I am concerned the question "why do you have to be a monk?" is like a question "why do you have to live in Nebraska?" I don't know. It's what the karma added up to, I guess. Here I am, and it would not be physically easy for me to get somewhere else, but on the other hand I have what I want: a certain amount of distance, silence, perspective, meditation, room to do the things I know I must do. I would go nuts trying to do them in the city ...”

Thomas Merton. The Courage for Truth: Letters to Writers, Christine M. Bochen, editor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993): 220.