To pick up where we left off in the previous post. Yep, you heard it right, our beloved book writing, beer drinking, champion of inclusion, and non-violence, fell head over heels in love aged fifty-three, with a nineteen-year-old nurse who had cared for him while he in hospital.
After he recovered, the completely smitten Merton pursued this relationship with all the heart longing gusto that young love can produce. Letters of love prose got exchanged, only to be outdone by the passionate nights that soon followed. Now you don’t have to be a monk to realize that by this stage Merton had thrown the celibacy code, and a bunch of other rules that monks live by out the window. Or, at the very least, placed them in a dusty drawer somewhere near the bottom of his love-struck mind.
He had become a serial rule breaking rebel—my kind of guy—I mean you just got to love the audacity of this fella. An audacity that I think is not born out of a particular desire to be a rebel monk, but by the one and only absolute rule that his Louisville spiritual experience had burned into his very soul. That we are all people walking around shining like the sun. When that is your central code, pretty much all other pesky rules, usually man-made, get tossed into the fiery flames of spiritual revolution.
Nevertheless, this was, as they say, a situation that was probably never going to end well, and it didn’t. Obviously, it is possible that a love affair between a middle-aged man and a much younger woman could flourish into a happy life together. Such things do occasionally happen without ending in tears. But a middle-aged Trappist mystic monk who is effectively already married to a strange yet spiritually destined purpose of serving God as a hermit monk while receiving the applause of the world for his writing. Well, maybe not so much. This strange cross-pollination of hermit and famous author was almost guaranteed right from the get-go to be an absolute showstopper for this budding romance. Clearly for the new love to flourish, he would have to abandon the old entirely, and this was always going to be a bridge too far for our guy. Of course, it’s possible that he could have divorced himself from monistic life and continued writing. But in Merton, the two vocations were inseparably linked.
Then there were the potential spoilers of the booze bouts, and his many dark nights of the soul, which today would probably get diagnosed as clinical depression. Heavy drinking and depression don’t make good bedfellows for romantic love. I say this because of my long and wounded experience with both. Suffice to say, our hermit mystic had issues galore. But hey who doesn’t? That’s just part of being human.
Merton’s drinking and depression may well have been treatable or perhaps abated by the burning love he had for this woman. But his core identity as author and mystic hermit was part of his DNA. He could, it seems to me, no more seriously give up either of these than he could refrain from taking his next breath.
Who knows how much reasoned consideration our love-struck monk gave to the likely consequences of embracing this adventure of the heart? Not much, if any at all, I strongly suspect. Let’s face it, Merton was a poet, spiritual writer, and mystic. He lived, breathed, and moved in the language of the heart. Hard-nosed realism is not generally the domain of those so beautifully endowed.
Pascal said: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of…” This is a point about our guy that may be difficult to comprehend by many of his more—let’s just call them cool-hearted detractors. Merton operated from the realm of love. Love for God, love for all people, and now love for this young woman. A man of reason might well have seen the folly of this situation and the likely painful outcome. But a love-struck monk with the heart of a poet, soul of a hermit, and spirit of mystic was almost bound to press on no matter the likely consequences. So, press on, he did, at least for a little while, until an inevitable ultimatum left him wounded for the rest of his days. More about that is my next post…
– Cormac Stagg, author of The Quest for a Humble Heart
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