Learning To Love

  Thomas Merton

  Learning to Love

  Exploring Solitude and Freedom

  Edited by Christine M. Bochen

  One thing has suddenly hit me—that nothing counts except love and that a solitude that is not simply the wide-openness of love and freedom is nothing. Love and solitude are the one ground of true maturity and freedom …. True solitude embraces everything, for it is the fullness of love that rejects nothing and no one, is open to All in All.

  April 14, 1966

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Part I: Being in One Place

  January 1966–March 1966

  Part II: Daring to Love

  April 1966–September 1966

  Part III: Living Love in Solitude

  September 1966–December 1966

  Part IV: A Life Free from Care

  January 1967–October 1967

  Appendices: A Midsummer Diary for M.

  June 1966

  Some Personal Notes

  January 1966–March 1966

  A Postscript

  April 1966

  Searchable Terms

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Thomas Merton

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  For most of his life Thomas Merton kept a journal. To date five volumes of his journals have been published; this is the sixth; a seventh, written in his final years, will appear shortly. Together these journals tell a story that spans more than thirty years in the life of this remarkable monk and writer. “Journals take for granted that every day in our life there is something new and different,” the young Merton wrote in 1940; a few days later he observed that “Every day is different, but also every day is the same.” Certainly when he entered the monastery in December 1941, he was able to confirm his intuition of each day’s sameness and difference. Each monastic day was intentionally meant to be the same as the next – structured according to a time-tried schedule of prayer, work, and study that created a framework designed to encourage persistence and fidelity in the monastic vocation even as it discouraged individuality. To that measure of monastic sameness Merton brought a poet’s eye and a mystic’s spirit as he looked around and within to notice and record what was different, what set that day apart from the ones that had preceded it – in the monastery, on the Kentucky landscape, in the world, and within his heart. Merton attended closely to the ordinariness of life and in doing so opened himself to its unexpected surprises. Compelling descriptions of the commonplace mix with astute, even profound, reflections of one who regularly penetrated below the surface of life to explore its inner depths. Glimpses of the realities of day-today life at Gethsemani are interspersed with visions of what monastic life could be. Acknowledgments of his own shortcomings and sinfulness appear alongside prophetic pronouncements against assaults on human dignity around in the world: against war, racism, totalitarianism, and inhumanity.

  This volume, which covers the period from January 2, 1966, to October 8, 1967, contains a mix of the expected and the astounding. What makes this journal strikingly different from the other journals is the story it tells of the well-known monk and writer, enjoying a life of solitude in a hermitage on the grounds of the monastery, who suddenly falls in love and enters upon a tumultuous and unsettling period unlike anything he had ever experienced before. In his journal, Merton writes, with remarkable candidness, of his relationship with M. – how they fell in love, what their relationship meant to him, and how their love challenged, threatened, and eventually deepened his experience of solitude. This journal falls into four parts:

  January–March 1966: a period of relative tranquillity during which his entries capture the ordinariness of his daily life in the hermitage;

  April–September 1966: a time of emotional intensity during which Merton experiences himself as “a monk in love”; he is initially swept away by his love for M. and her love for him, is then soon disturbed by the contradiction it implies, and finally struggles to reconcile this newly found love with his life of solitude;

  September–December 1966: a time of recommitment to the life he first chose when he entered the monastery, and now chose again as he reaffirmed his monastic vocation and rededicated himself to a life of solitude – aware that his love for M. was as much a “fact” in his life as was his vocation; and

  January–October 1967: a time during which Merton settled once again into the routine of life as a hermit and writer.

  Also included in the appendices to this volume are “A Midsummer Diary for M.,” which Merton wrote in June 1966, and a substantial portion of “Notebook 17,” written in January–March 1966.

  A Journal: January 2, 1966–October 8, 1967

  When Merton took out a new ledger and began this new journal, he was almost fifty-one years old and had been, for almost a quarter century, a monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani. During those years he had been away from the monastery only a few times. Yet he wrote of the issues facing people in his day with uncanny insight and counted among his friends people all over the world – making contacts and maintaining friendships through correspondence. A selection of his letters published in five volumes spans more than two thousand pages. He wrote many books, too numerous to name, though special mention must be made of his best-selling autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, published in 1948. During the 1950s and early 1960s, he wrote extensively on contemplation and prayer. Also in the late 1950s and early 1960s, much to the dismay of some of the very readers who had acclaimed his writings on spiritual topics, he began to address the social issues of his day: war, peace, violence, racism, and the abuses of technology. His stand was controversial in the Catholic church of his day, and for a time he was forbidden to publish on the subject of war and peace. Through his writings and example he demonstrated an openness to the wisdom of the world’s religious traditions and readiness to dialogue with individuals whose vision of life and of the holy differed from his own. He had withdrawn from the world to embrace a life of silence and longed for even deeper solitude, yet he was deeply concerned about the world in which he lived. He had chosen a life of solitude, yet he was a warm, affable person – one who enjoyed human contact and companionship. When, in 1965, he was given permission to live alone on the monastery grounds, his dream of being a hermit was finally realized. But he was no ordinary hermit, as this journal and the others show. He continued to write letters, receive visitors (only somewhat reluctantly), and write and publish widely: in 1966, Raids on the Unspeakable and Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander; in 1967, Mystics and Zen Masters. During this period, he also wrote a myriad of articles, prefaces, reviews, and poems, while his earlier work was being read in translation in Latin America, Europe, and the Far East.

  The entries of January – March 1996 show Merton learning how to be in the place for which he had longed during his life as a monk: a place of solitude that was his own. He was settling into the hermitage and enjoying the simple routines of daily life punctuated with prayer, reading, writing, walking, housekeeping, and just being. He was attentive to the ordinary, taking particular delight in his natural environment: observing the stars and constellations in the night sky, watching the ripples of water in his favorite creek, noting the antics of critters (birds, deer, woodchuck) with whom he shared the woods, and celebrating nature’s springtime awakening. Living close to nature nourished him spiritually. Though he seemed genuinely content in many ways, he was troubled in others. The escalation of the war in Vietnam grieved him; the abbot’s narrowness irked him and plans for a new monastic foundation tempted him; concerns about his health and the thought of impending
surgery disturbed him. Even his newly found solitude weighed heavily on him at times. There were moments when he felt alone, days when he was frustrated, times when he was keenly aware of his own hostility, desperation, and meanness. But he was deeply grateful for the hermitage and the elemental life it made possible: “To go out to walk silently in this wood – this is a more important and significant means to understanding … than a lot of analysis and a lot of reporting on the things ‘of the spirit’” (March 2, 1966). In the solitude of the hermitage, he was able to see himself more clearly, to realize how muddled and distracted he was, to admit how he was not free. Solitude invited him to let go of all that stood in the way of freedom – of involvements, of projects, “of all that seems to suggest going somewhere, being someone, having a name and a voice” (January 29, 1966). But that was not to be accomplished easily or quickly; he realized that he needed to embrace solitude, again and again. “What matters,” Merton wrote on January 29, 1966, just two days before his fifty-first birthday, “is to love, to be in one place in silence.” Read in retrospect those lines seem to auger what lay ahead: an invitation to learn about love, freedom, and solitude in ways he could not possibly have imagined.

  Merton left the hermitage to go to the hospital for back surgery on March 23. A week later he met M., a student nurse assigned to care for him, and they fell in love. In the weeks and months that followed, as spring turned to summer, they exchanged letters, talked on the phone when Merton was able to call, and spent some time together at Gethsemani and in Louisville. Their visits were few, hours alone fewer still. But, almost from the beginning, their love blossomed and, almost from the beginning, Merton knew that the relationship could not endure. He was, after all, a monk.

  Journal entries Merton wrote between April and September 1966 reflect his amazement and gratitude as well as his ambivalence and anxiety. That he should at this point in his life experience love in this way – with all of its passion and mystery – astonished and frightened him and, as one might expect, the experience also bewildered him. Recognizing in himself the “deep emotional need for feminine companionship and love,” Merton was discovering, apparently for the first time, what it felt like not only to love but to be loved by another.

  I have never seen so much simple, spontaneous, total love. And I realize that the deepest capacities for human love in me have never even been tapped, that I too can love with an awful completeness. Responding to her has opened up the depths of my life in ways I can’t begin to understand and analyze now. (May 9, 1966)

  Some years before, in his book The New Man, Merton had observed that the “vocation to charity is a call not only to love but to be loved,” insisting that “we cannot love unless we also consent to be loved in return.” What Merton had earlier realized intellectually he now knew experientially. And he recognized that the experience had the potential to transform him: “I feel I must fully surrender to it because it will change and heal my life in a way that I fear, but I think it is necessary – in a way that will force me first of all to receive an enormous amount of love (which to tell the truth I have often feared)” (June 3, 1966).

  He was “scared by so much love” and withdrew when he thought “it can’t possibly be real, there must be a catch in it somewhere.” There were other reasons to be fearful: he saw the contradiction, the risk, the duplicity, the potential for delusion, the possibility of it all getting out of hand. And though his spirit soared, he was also full of anguish and torment – for himself and for M. He thought of her pain and suffering and feared hurting her; he realized that it might be “in some ways worse for her” than for him.

  Between April and October 1966, Merton wrote a series of poems inspired by his love for M. Five of the poems that he copied into his journal are included in this volume. While Merton was critical of the view of his love for M. presented in his journal, noting on September 6 that what he wrote was “a bit distorted by self-questioning, anxiety and guilt … too much of a tendency to question,” he felt that the poems came closest to expressing what was in his heart. He shared these poems with M. and apparently could not help sharing them with others too. In April, he read “With the World in My Bloodstream” to the novices and later considered reading other poems on tape. When he told his friends Victor and Carolyn Hammer about the poems, they wanted to print them. A “very elegantly printed, strictly limited edition: a real work of art” might be a possibility, Merton thought, provided the identity of the poet was concealed. “Few people will have had such a memorial to their living love,” he remarked in “A Midsummer Diary.” Merton entrusted copies of the poems to his friend Jay Laughlin for safekeeping and eventual publication; in 1985, Laughlin oversaw the printing of Eighteen Poems in a limited edition of 250 copies by New Directions.

  The summer was something of a roller coaster for Merton (as it must have been for M.) – with intense highs and acute bouts of fear and anxiety. He was alternately amazed and appalled, elated and distraught. By September he seemed to see things more clearly (“Though I have admitted this verbally, today I could see in my ‘right mind’ that if I had been really aware of the meaning of my vows and my commitment I would not have let my love for her develop as it did at the beginning”) and he took responsibility:

  The wrong steps began with my first love letter, and the phone call on April 13 arranging to see her in town on the 26th.

  Yet even as I say this and admit it, there is a sense in which I see it was almost inevitable. I had fallen so deeply in love with her already that it was difficult to do otherwise – yet I suppose I could have made another choice. And yet too – I am glad I didn’t …. I can admit it was out of place, yet I cannot altogether repudiate everything about it. Least of all can I in any way repudiate, or seem to repudiate her. (September 4, 1966)

  Later in the day as he reread the journal to see if he “could make any sense out of it” he remembered more: how lonely he was for M. when he left the hospital, his “anxiety to hear from her” and the impact of her first letter, his distress at the passion that talking with her aroused in him, his “obscure sense that she was somehow supposed to enter deeply” into his life, their unrealism, imprudence, and carelessness, “the moments of miserable confusion.” He summed it up this way:

  The overall impression: awareness of my own fantastic instability, complexity, frailty, and the nearness to disaster in May and early June …. And in the end: respect for M. and for our love, gratitude for it, sense of the underlying reality and seriousness of it, sense of immense responsibility to her, desire for her happiness, realization also that in spite of all my hectic confusion (and her seductiveness), I owe a great deal to her love and this is a lasting reality that cannot be denied – and we do belong to each other. In a way for keeps! (September 4, 1966)

  Note the caveat: “In a way.” The next day Merton reflected further on “the really overwhelming experience of the summer,” admitting that it was an experience in which he did not fully recognize himself: “Sitting up and reading tonight through all this was, however, a kind of shattering experience in its own way – seeing the whole thing all at once in all its frank and pitiable confusion yet also in its goodness and joy – and above all in it danger, so much greater than I realized ….” It was a humbling experience:

  What I see is this: that while I imagine I was functioning fairly successfully, I was living a sort of patched up, crazy existence, a series of rather hopeless improvisations, a life of unreality in many ways. Always underlain by a certain solid silence and presence, a faith, a clinging to the invisible God – and this clinging (perhaps rather His holding on to me) has been in the end the only thing that made sense. The rest has been absurdity …. I will probably go on like this for the rest of my life. There is “I” – this patchwork, this bundle of questions and doubts and obsessions, this gravitation to silence and to the woods and to love. This incoherence!! (September 5, 1966)

  On September 8 he made a commitment in writing, witnessed by his abbot, “t
o live in solitude for the rest of my life” (September 10, 1966). Then, just days later, he called M., enjoyed talking with her, and soon felt guilty about the call, which involved “a certain duplicity.” Clearly the break was not complete, nor would it be final in the months that followed. They continued to have sporadic contact. Still the emotional intensity of the summer months was behind him, and in the months that followed his life gradually returned to “normal” as he set about the task of reclaiming his solitude. Though the romance ebbed, Merton’s affection for M. endured. In October, when Merton was again a patient at St. Anthony’s Hospital and M. visited him a few times, he admitted that he did not see her as much as he wanted to, but also that “really for the first time since April,” he could see “that the affair is no longer so intense” and he felt “much freer.” He began to see the relationship with M. as “an attempt to escape the demands” of his vocation: “Not conscious, certainly. But a substitution of human love (and erotic love after all) for a special covenant of loneliness and solitude which is the very heart of my vocation.” At the same time he was struggling to reconcile the two – his love for M. and his vocation to live love in solitude – as this passage, written in late November 1966, shows:

  Somehow in the depths of my being I know that love for her can exist with my solitude, but everything depends on my fidelity to a vocation that there is no use trying too much to rationalize. It is there. It is a root-fact of my existence.

  The last day of 1966 was a “dark, rough, depressed day but after a lot of anguish it ended in hope and comfort” and Merton began the new year with the resolve “to get back in right order” and to achieve an “inner detachment.” He was determined to recover what he had termed “a life without care” in his last address to the novitiate on August 20, 1965, just before he moved into the hermitage. Merton saw the phrase as descriptive of monastic life and indeed of Christian life, but most especially as expressive of the meaning of the hermit life. A life without care is synonymous with a life of inner freedom in which anxiety and concern about all things – work, prayer, relationships – are cast upon the Lord. A life without care is not a life characterized by disinterest, lack of involvement, or refusal to act responsibly. It is life lived “in right order.” For Merton, a life without care meant a life consistent with his commitment to solitude. Where M. was concerned, Merton succeeded more or less in getting his life back in “right order.” Certainly there were fewer calls and letters. Yet he continued to think of M. and remember their times together. It was apparent that as the new year dawned and unfolded he looked back with a little regret and much relief.