Handsome, strapping, saintly, serious, sexy, and a little bit dangerous, â??like a rugged Spencer Tracy with a tonsure and a cassock.â? Thatâ??s how filmmaker Ben Eisner once described the famous monk who grew up an orphan with no religion, fathered a child out of wedlock, and lived a debauched, drunken, womanizing life before turning beatnik peace activist, anti-war and civil rights crusader, and hermit on the grounds of a Kentucky monastery. At 51, he fell in love with a nursing student half his age whose letters he burned before flying off to meet with Buddhists in Thailand, where, two years later, a faulty fan electrocuted him as he emerged from the bathtub.
Somehow this same monk, so clearly suspended between the holy and the oh-so-human, turned into one of the most influential Catholic writers of the 20th century.
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