Thomas Merton (1915–1968) was an American Trappist monk, writer and influential spiritual thinker of the 20th century. Living at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, he developed a particular interest in the Shakers and visited their former community at Pleasant Hill several times in the early 1960s. He photographed their buildings and interiors and studied their furniture and craftsmanship.
What fascinated Merton was the close relationship between belief, everyday life and making. Shaker simplicity was not conceived as a design style. Their furniture emerged from a religious culture that valued usefulness, careful workmanship and the avoidance of unnecessary ornament. Merton understood the particular beauty of a Shaker chair as an expression of this attitude. His famous remark about an angel being able to sit on it captures the idea that even an ordinary object could be made with extraordinary care.
Merton later contributed an introduction to Edward Deming and Faith Andrews’ Religion in Wood: A Book of Shaker Furniture (1966). His continuing engagement with Shaker life and thought was eventually collected in Seeking Paradise: The Spirit of the Shakers.