Learning To Love, Page 2

  Though Merton’s love for M. is a prominent motif, the journal documents other aspects of his life and thought as well. The journal is a record of what Merton was reading and writing, the reading often leading to writing. Immersion in the writings of Albert Camus resulted in a series of essays. A fascination with William Faulkner led first to informal talks to the monks and then several essays. Early in 1967, he came across the story of Ishi and wrote a review of Theodora Kroeber’s Ishi in Two Worlds (1964) for The Catholic Worker (March 1967), then a handful of essays (which were collected and published posthumously in 1976 under the title Ishi Means Man). Merton’s interest in indigenous peoples led him to study the Cargo Cults and to read anthropology. Though Merton lived in the relative isolation of the hermitage, he was hardly alone. His companions included a host of writers he read with interest, enthusiasm, and pleasure – writers such as René Char, Edwin Muir, Rainer Maria Rilke, Eugenio Montale, Jean-Paul Sartre, T. S. Eliot, John Milton, and Louis Zukofsky. He corresponded with old friends and developed new contacts, including feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, whom Merton described as “the most fiercely anti-monastic person” he knew. She sent him the manuscript of The Church Against Itself and challenged him to rethink and defend his monastic vocation. The struggles of the 1960s – the war in Vietnam, racial conflicts, changes in the church, monastic reform – all captured Merton’s attention. He was increasingly disturbed by what he saw happening in America: as he wrote in September 10, 1967, “A feeling of great violence is in the air everywhere.”

  As this journal ends in October 1967, we leave Merton reflecting on his “lifelong homelessness, rootlessness.” Merton was feeling an urge to travel. Of course, the abbot would not approve of Merton’s participation in the meetings and conferences to which he was receiving invitations; Merton vacillated between frustration and a sense that it was for the best. Plans for a new monastic foundation in Chile were under way and once again he was tempted to go to Latin America and live there as a hermit. Dom James refused permission. Merton acquiesced, seemingly content “to live here and meditate and take advantage of the silence of the woods.”

  Reading Gaston Bachelard’s philosophical reflection on space, Merton thought about places in his life: Gethsemani, where he felt like “an alien” despite being so identified with “this strange place”; the hermitage, which Merton felt was “OK”; and a new place toward which he felt some ambivalence – the Merton Room at Bellarmine College in Louisville (which became the Thomas Merton Studies Center), which struck Merton as a place “Where my papers live. Where my papers are more than I am.” The Merton Room, he remarked, was an image of his lifelong homelessness: “A place … in which a paper-self builds its nest to be visited by strangers in a strange land of unreal intimacy.” Meanwhile he was hard at work on a long poem, Geography of Lograire, in which he was locating himself in a larger world, hoping that it would be his “final liberation from all diaries.” “Maybe that is my one remaining task,” he mused.

  “A Midsummer Diary for M.”

  “A Midsummer Diary for M.,” one of two additional accounts Merton wrote during the summer of 1966 about his relationship with M., appears as an appendix in this volume. Merton entrusted to his friend, James Laughlin, the second account, written in July 1966 and entitled “Retrospect.” “Retrospect” was not made available for publication. Merton shared both accounts with M. He started “A Midsummer Diary” on June 17 and wrote feverishly for a week, producing thirty-two pages of single-spaced typed text – some twenty-three thousand words. When he began, he was still reeling from two experiences that shook him deeply: an intense visit with M. on June 12 and a confrontation with the abbot on June 14. The visit with M. scared him. To make matters worse, one of the monks had overheard a call to M. and reported Merton to the abbot. Merton went to Dom James and owned up “to the phone calls.” Though the abbot was “kind and tried to be understanding to some extent,” he called for “a complete break.” “A Midsummer Diary” shows Merton struggling with the inevitable separation.

  “A Midsummer Diary” is part journal, part love letter. It presents a picture of Merton as M.’s lover: passionate, tender, vulnerable, melancholy, full of longing, lonely, confused, and anguished. The diary also reveals Merton as the hermit monk struggling to make sense of this passionate love and searching for ways to reconcile love and solitude, turning his loneliness for M. into a dimension of “a general loneliness” that is his “ordinary climate” and insisting that “love and solitude must test each other” in one who seeks solitude. Solitude is an act, Merton writes, not something one undergoes “like standing in a cold shower,” and it is the act of a person in all his or her needfulness. “The only solitude is the solitude of the frail, mortal, limited, distressed, rebellious human person, made of his loves and fears, facing his own true present” and opening himself to others and to God. At the heart of solitude is mystery and the solitary is called to “return to the heart of life and oneness, losing himself not in the massive illusion but simply in the root reality … plunging through the center of his own nothingness and coming out into the All which is the Void and which is … the Love of God.”

  Recognizing the conflict between his love for M. and his commitment to solitude, he appears convinced that, in some mysterious way, the two realities can be reconciled:

  If I could have both solitude and M. (it might be theoretically possible), then I would certainly take both. But as in concrete fact the issue becomes a choice: then I choose both in another form. She will be my love but in this absurd and special way.

  An evasion of the hard reality? A profound insight into solitude transformed by love? Probably both. Perhaps Merton comes closest to the heart of the matter when he consigns what he is experiencing to the realm of mystery, admitting that “I will never really understand on earth what relation this love has to my solitude. I cannot help placing it at the very heart of my aloneness, and not just on the periphery somewhere.”

  Some Personal Notes (“Notebook 17”): The Beginning of 1966

  Merton was in the habit of keeping working notebooks into which he copied notes from his reading, reflected on what he found there, jotted down ideas for what he was writing, drafted poems, made lists of work done and planned, and occasionally recorded more personal reflections in journal-like entries. “Notebook 17” (October 1965-early March 1966) is unusual among his notebooks in that it is actually a journal. The first section of “Notebook 17” (October–December 1965) was published as an appendix in the preceding volume of Thomas Merton’s journals, Dancing in the Water of Life, edited by Robert E. Daggy. The remainder of “Notebook 17” appears in this volume. The themes that Merton takes up “Notebook 17” – hermit life, solitude, and freedom – weave their way in and out of his primary journal.

  This volume ends with “A Postscript,” a selection from another notebook Merton kept between March and July 1966.

  Editor’s Reflection

  Though this volume chronicles a relationship, it tells but one side of the story: Merton’s. He was clear about his own desire to tell his story:

  I have no intention of keeping the M. business entirely out of sight. I have always wanted to be completely open, both about my mistakes and about my effort to make sense out of my life. The affair with M. is an important part of it – and shows my limitations as well as a side of me that is – well, it needs to be known too, for it is a part of me. My need for love, my loneliness, my inner division, the struggle in which solitude is at once a problem and a “solution.” (May 11, 1967)

  Merton’s openness – in this journal as in others – is admirable. But his personal candidness intrudes on the privacy of people in his life. This is especially true of M. because of the nature of their relationship. It seems important to acknowledge that the account that we read here is Merton’s: it reflects his recollection and is shaped by the meaning he finds in and gives to this relationship. Merton shapes the narrative. M. has no voice of her ow
n here. She remains an anonymous figure in this volume, deliberately identified by the editor as M. (though Merton used her name), not to diminish her but to acknowledge the privacy that is her due.

  This journal, like the others, deserves to be read as a chapter in Merton’s life story, its significance neither discounted nor permitted to dominate the Merton story. Thomas Merton was a complex and paradoxical figure – monk, spiritual master, social critic, and an ordinary human being. This journal shows him as he was: capable of profundity and pettiness, sensitivity and self-absorption, insight and illusion, focus and distraction. What sets him apart is the expansiveness of his spirit and his candor. Perhaps by telling his story, he invites us to reflect on our own stories. In learning to love, Merton was made to explore the very depths of solitude and freedom, and, perhaps, by sharing his exploration with us, he invites us to do the same.

  Editor’s Note: Editorial intrusions have been kept to a minimum. Merton’s journal, “A Midsummer Diary,” and “Notebook 17” appear as written with two exceptions: the use of initials for certain names and a few deletions, made to protect the privacy of the individuals involved. Deletions are duly noted in the text with “[ … ].” All other ellipses are Merton’s own. Identifications and brief explanatory notes appear in brackets as do translations of foreign language passages. Longer explanatory notes appear in footnotes; these have been used sparingly. Merton had the practice of dating each journal entry and indicating that he was beginning a new entry with a symbol of a cross (+). Though this symbol is not reproduced in this volume, spacing between entries reflects Merton’s own divisions. Except for “A Midsummer Diary,” the content of this volume has been transcribed from Merton’s own hand. In the few instances in which it has been impossible to decipher Merton’s script, the missing word is noted as “[indecipherable].”

  Merton took the epigraph for this journal from a poem entitled “E Alma que Sufrio de Ser su Cuerpo” [“The Soul That Suffered from Being Its Body”]. See César Vallejo, Poemas Humanos Human Poems (trans. Clayton Eshleman [New York: Grove Press, 1968]; Spanish ed., Paris, 1939).

  General Editor’s Note: For the sole purpose of protecting the privacy of persons still living, the members of the Merton Legacy Trust and the Abbot of Gethsemani have asked Christine Bochen, the editor of this volume of the journals, to delete a very few brief passages involving the invasion of other persons’ privacy, and to indicate the deletion ellipses within editorial brackets.

  – Patrick Hart, O.C.S.O.

  Tu pobre hombre vives, no lo niegues

  Si mueres, no lo niegues

  Si mueres de tu edad! ay! y de tu epoca.

  You poor man, you live; don’t deny it,

  if you die; don’t deny it,

  if you die from your age, ay! and from your times.

  César Vallejo

  PART I

  Being in One Place

  January 1966–March 1966

  The one thing for which I am most grateful: this hermitage …. I am just beginning to really get grounded in solitude.

  March 23, 1966

  January 2, 1966. Feast of Holy Name of Jesus

  It has been raining steadily for almost 36 hours. This morning toward the end of my meditation the rain was pouring down on the roof of the hermitage with great force and the woods resounded with tons of water falling out of the sky. It was great! A good beginning for a New Year. Yesterday in a lull I was looking across the valley at black wet hills, sharply outlined against the woods, and white patches of water everywhere in the bottoms: a landscape well etched by serious weather.

  Working on an essay for Hildegard Goss-Mayr ([for] Der Christ in der Welt). Reading E. A. Burtt’s book, sent by him from Cornell – and galleys of a good book on the Church trans[lated] from Dutch [The Grave of God: Has the Church a Future? New York, 1967]. The author is an Augustinian, R. Adolfs. Still have Endo Mason’s excellent book on [Rainer Maria] Rilke and England. Reading Romans in lectio and finding it difficult (chs. 5–6). Finished a curious journalistic book on the liberation of Paris – a symbolic event! Hitler was set on annihilating the city and his military evaded the order. De Gaulle and the communists, etc. One cannot help admiring de Gaulle, even though he is a stubborn ass. There is something providential about his character. He was just reelected President of France in December. I like him better than Churchill, anyway!

  January 3, 1966

  The weather cleared up a bit. Tonight the half moon is shining. Last month I had an attack of what was practically dysentery. I decided it was no use even thinking of going to Nicaragua (to help [Ernesto] Cardenal at Solentiname), but today a letter came urging me to come anyway. I decided I would maintain my consent and trust completely in God. In any case it is such a fantastic proposition – they must go directly to the Pope to try to get me there (because of Dom James [Fox’s] impossible and absurd attitude on all such things). Rome may or may not say “yes.” God alone knows what will happen. In any event, my only job is to make my own decision and it is “yes” to the project as far as I am concerned. I will go if I am sent. I consent to it gladly if it is God’s will, in so far as this will be a chance to leave everything and give myself to God in such a way as to live for others, and bring the contemplative life to Central America, and so on. As for my health, though, I will certainly have to be extremely careful of dysentery. I will simply have to pray to God and trust Him entirely. I made all this the intention of my mass, said mass as attentively and fervently as I could, asking nothing but the grace to do God’s will and offering myself with Christ to the Father. Was especially moved at the words “et sacrificium Patriarchae nostri Abrahae [the sacrifice of our Patriarch Abraham]” – it was my desire to make this inner consent a sacrifice of faith like that of Abraham. And I resolved not to play around with my imagining of Solentiname – good or bad – but simply to pray that I may do God’s will whatever it is. Certainly I am not taking any special joy there. It would be a real sacrifice to leave this hermitage and the real security I have here. And a real risk with my back as it is and my guts as they are.

  January 5, 1966. Vigil of Epiphany

  Steady rain all day. It is still pouring down on the roof, emphasizing the silence in the hermitage, reinforcing the solitude. I like it. Did a little work on the book about Abbé Monchanin – which I am supposed to review (have been dragging my feet because this review is supposed to be in French). In a way his Indian venture was a failure. Nothing came of the ashram. Yet one cannot judge. Certainly he was a great liberator and had the right idea about Christianity in Asia.

  I read an account by Hervé Chaigne of the (communist-sponsored) peace conference in Helsinki last summer. Peace conference! The general idea was that all the Third World should take up arms against American imperialists. This would promote “peace”!! I don’t mind them calling for world revolution if they want to call it by its right name – but to call this a peace movement!… No nonsense about non-violence and conscientious objection either.

  The thing that depresses me is that H. Chaigne, hitherto a Gandhian, didn’t say a word about non-violence. He approved the whole thing and seems to have bought the Chinese Marxist line all the way.

  What can be the meaning of a genuine peace movement in the middle of all these people who make war in the name of peace (for the nine-millionth time!)?

  January 8, 1966

  Full moon obscured by clouds but visible from time to time and winds and flakes of snow on my face in the dark. It is about 25. Reading the [Robert] Schinzinger book of [Kitaro] Nishida’s, [Intelligibility and the] Philosophy of Nothingness (almost unobtainable. Fr. [William] Johnston finally got a copy from Schinzinger himself) and a good study on Rilke and death by W[illia]m Ross.

  Ed Rice came yesterday, got up to hermitage in the late afternoon. We had supper together in the hermitage and a good talk.

  Bob Gerdy died of a heart attack on the street outside his apartment a few days ago (end of December some time). He had been an editor
of The New Yorker for a long time. I think back to the summer of 1940 when Rice and I and Gerdy and Knight hitchhiked together from Olean to Cleveland and stayed with some relative of Gerdy’s.

  January 10, 1966

  Feast of St. Paul the First Hermit – he has dropped out of our calendar, but I commemorated him in the office anyway and will say his Mass.

  Saturday was v[ery] cold all day. Drove out with Rice to Edelin’s Hollow and saw the sunny silence and stillness of the place, still very attractive to me. (It has been given to the monastery by Edelin now. Was surveyed in the summer. Do not know what the plans for it are!) Rice took pictures. We came back and had supper in the hermitage. It was a cold night. Yesterday, Sunday, it warmed up again. Rice left in the afternoon.