Thomas Merton End Game

To recap on my previous post. Our hopeless romantic, love struck poet, hermit, and radically inclusive author activist was for a few brief moments sailing in the exhilarating waters of starry-eyed bliss. But whether he knew it or not, heading straight for the wrong side of the abyss. Perhaps this wild love affair could have lasted at least for a while, had it not been for the unlikely choice of the venue for their passionate get-togethers. Our guy Merton had become, or perhaps always was, what my father used to call “a risker and a chancer.”

He was, by this point, living alone in a little hermitage within the hallowed grounds of the monastery where he had spent much of his adult life. Surreptitiously smuggling his young lover into the hermitage was, to say the least of it, a high-risk strategy. But this is precisely what he did. Would one of the other monks taking a nightly stroll and pondering the stars discover the unthinkable? Love can be blind, but our audacious rebel must have considered this as a real possibility.

Who knows exactly how the shocking truth got exposed, but one way or another, it wasn’t long before the Abbot became painfully aware of what was going on, just a stone’s throw away from his own holy dwelling place. Merton had arrived at the outer extreme of what, by any measure, had been a very long leash for a Trappist monk. Certain dispensations from the monk’s strict code had been given over the years because of our mystic man’s strange double-sided calling from God. After all, who could doubt the tremendous benefit to the world of his spiritual writing? And a blind eye or two was also likely applied to some of his other antics along the way.

But a passionate affair conducted within the monastery grounds was never going to fly, much less get whitewashed away. Crunch time had arrived. Merton got well and truly confronted. The game was up. He would have to either abandon his love interest or pack his bags and leave the monastery and the monk’s life forever, with no prospect of return.

His diaries reveal that although he was not accepting of this ultimatum, he knew he had run out of rope. The rebel monk had concocted a wicked brew, and the aftertaste was bitter indeed. Although shattered by having to end the relationship. End it, he did.

Enough correspondence continued between the two former lovers for the news to arrive a short while later that she was going to marry another man. The dark nights were back for our hermit, and as his journals reveal, lingered painfully in him for the rest of his days.

This has led to some speculation about the nature of his death. Officially, he died from accidental electrocution in December 1968, in a hotel room in Thailand. Some have suggested that it may have been by his own hand because of some of his darker diary entries. While possible, this proposition is likely the creative musings of other poetically minded souls who may know a thing or two about the dark place themselves.

What is clear is that, like so many other brilliant and creative people, Merton had plenty of brushes with internal suffering. Perhaps it is this convergence between suffering and the innate sunlight within that made him such a compelling and trailblazing writer about spirituality and inclusion. His trials and tribulations were many, but his legacy is that of a brilliant writer who saw God shining like the sun in everyone. Now, it just doesn’t get any better than that!  

– Cormac Stagg, author of The Quest for a Humble Heart