The spiritual journey has become almost a cliché these days, what with boomers obsessing over their mortality and glomming onto everything from evangelical Christianity to American-style Buddhism in a fervent attempt to locate their souls. I’m as guilty as the next guy when it comes to jury-rigging a spiritual identity, flitting from the Vietnamese Buddhism of Thich Nhat Hanh to Taoist Lao Tzu to Methodist Charles Wesley to Tibetan Buddhist Sogyal Rinpoche and back again. There’s much to be learned from these fellows, but none of them packs quite the wallop you get from a visit with Thomas Merton.

For years I eyed Merton from afar, tasting his peculiar passion in small doses here and there (Raids on the Unspeakable, Mystics and Zen Masters) while relegating him to some lofty pantheon of impossibly enlightened people. Here was a guy, after all, who chose the most severe and rigorous cloister imaginable, a Trappist monastery where the very act of speech was limited. Mortals like myself cannot relate.

But after devouring the 50th-anniversary edition of his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (Harcourt Brace, 1998), I’ve changed my mind. It turns out Merton was every bit the bewildered seeker looking for something he could never quite put his finger on, the kind of guy you might meet in a bar posing as just another drunk intellectual. It gives a guy hope.

As elementary as it may seem to the more spiritually well-traveled among us, Merton’s odyssey, filled as it is with all manner of politely understated debauchery (including an illegitimate child conceived during a year at Cambridge), portrays our moral vulnerability in a way only guilt-ridden Christians can: 'Did I know that my own sins were enough to have destroyed the whole of England and Germany?' he writes at the first ominous signs of World War II. 'There has never yet been a bomb invented that is half so powerful as one mortal sin.'

Merton’s relentless self-flagellation rises above tedium and self-pity, though, and his journey becomes more inspiring than insipid as he eventually accepts his calling and navigates the narrow straits of Catholic orthodoxy, ever-convinced that God had no use for him. Only the hardest of hearts could keep from rooting for Merton.