A Monk Falls in Love

 

Through contemplative practices, we have been intimately awakened to the cannot-get-to-the-bottom-of-it nature of the life we are living.  James Finley, The Contemplative Heart 

 

I was literally shaken and disturbed-knowing clearly that I was all wrong, that I was going against everything that made sense in my life, going against all that was true and authentic in my vocation, going against the grace and love of God. Struggling desperately in my heart and knowing I was helpless, that things were moving in a certain direction and I had gone too far to turn back." Thomas Merton, Learning to Love,  Volume six 1966-1967   

 

I have been reading Thomas Merton’s journals.  Merton, a beloved Trappist monk known to many as a modern day mystic, philosopher, poet, and Catholic priest, kept account of his days in seven volumes of journals which were published 25 years after his death.  I have read the last two, the ones he wrote after living at the monastery at Gethsemane for 25 years and following the rule of St. Benedict with daily prayer and chanting, studying the sacred texts, writing and teaching, solitude, silences and communal living. At the start of the sixth journal, he moves into a small hermitage up the hill from the main living quarters away from the other monks in order to follow his calling into deeper solitude.  But only three months after moving into the hermitage, he unexpectedly falls in love with M. a young nurse who cared for him during a back surgery.  He was 52 and she was 19.  He carried on a mostly secret affair for six months before his abbot put an end to things.

 The affair deeply troubled Merton.  He was breaking his vows to his church, to his vocation, to his solitude, but he was helpless to stop loving M.  He is obsessed with her unable to sleep, focus on prayer and meditation, his writing both scholarly and spiritual.  It is not easy for them to be together and when they are apart he is desperate to be with her again.  He writes reams of love poems.  He knows the relationship can't last but still he has convinced he will somehow figure out a way that they can be together.  He will  reconcile his opposite desires to be with her and to be a hermit priest.  He thinks that God has brought them together so deeply wrought and pure is their love. 

The abbot eventually finds out about the affair and admonishes Merton to end it. At first Merton ignores the abbot but eventually he takes the ultimatums to heart and ends the relationship.  He knows he is hurting M. but starts to see that there really is no way to be a priest in love.  

 We don’t know M’s point of view about this affair since she never spoke or wrote about it publicly. We don’t know if she felt betrayed, her youth taken advantage of or if overtime she came to see Merton’s actions as manipulative and even abusive.  He was afterall over thirty years older than her, a revered monk whose writing on contemplation and deep spiritual practices had touched thousands of people all over the world.   It is clear in his journals that Merton is a man of the late 1960s when it comes to women.  He describes some women as “pretty” as if women can be reasonably graded on such a scale.  He gives no indication that he might have abused his power in this sitatuation but remains convinced the fact of his love means that it is good for M. Throughout the affair he believes he can care for her and does not see how selfish and self-serving his actions are. 

Soon after he ends the affair, Merton would leave Gethsemane traveling to California and then Asia to explore other possibilities for a hermitage.  It came as a surprise to him that he would want to leave and that the abbot would agree.  It was on these travels in Bangkok Thailand where he was speaking at a religious conference that he stepped out of the shower one afternoon, slipped on the wet floor, grabbed a light for balance, and was electrocuted.  

He didn’t any of this coming, the anguished unstoppable love affair, it’s abrupt end, travel to California and Asian, and then his death.  And doesn’t every life unfold in this kind of wild and unexpected can’t predict I-don't-know-what-I-am-doing way?  As much as we like to think that we are in control, that all our planning, preparing, saving, taking good care, trying to “be good” means that we are steering the ship, most of what will happen, the real and meaningful stuff, will be a surprise. Our lives unfold as they will in ways we have no control over.  The lover will turn out to be unable to love, the job will be lost, the house burned down, the child fall ill.  It’s not about eating right, saving enough money, making “good” choices. For the most part, life will happen to us in ways we could never have expected.  Merton is just like us even after 25 years of living as a cloistered monk.  

I am not sure what the lesson is here expect to say that perhaps what makes the most sense in all of this uncertainty is to aim to live more fearlessly today, to lean into the uncertainty and unfolding, to stop trying to make sure everything turns out okay, the way we want or expect.