Illness is a Place

I’m reading a wonderful book called “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” by Paul Elie. It is a four-part, simultaneous biography of four great spiritual writers who were also social activists and great thinkers: Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor.

I’m learning so much about these four friends. How fascinating that they corresponded, read each other’s work, acted and interacted on behalf of their Catholic faith, social justice and literature.

One of the gems in last night’s reading is from Elie’s section on Flannery O’Conner who wrote, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and a famous collection of stories called, “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” Elie writes about the late part of O’Connor’s life when she was ill and disabled but writing to make sense of her life even in that. He quotes O’Connor as saying,

“In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company, where no body can follow.”

We sometimes talk about illness as a battle or a struggle and here, O’Connor sees sickness also as a place that can be inhabited. Very nice.

Thomas Merton Affair

It was only a year ago that I learned about Thomas Merton’s affair. He was in his 40’s, already a writer and spiritual celebrity of sorts. He was a cloistered monk at Gethsemane in Kentucky. He had written Seven Story Mountain and other books. He was celibate and spiritual and married to the Catholic Church.

Then hospitalized for back problems he fell in love with a nurse. And she with him. They resisted, connected, pulled back, cried, committed, talked, broke up, tried again and loved each other. The relationship was consummated in a garden near the hospital and again near the Abbey. Some others knew and some sort of knew and others didn’t know at all.

And then the Master of the Abbey got wind, confronted Merton, “How could you?” and he had to choose. This amazing man of God didn’t have an easy time. He saw her again, quit again, cried, begged, wrote about it, tossed and turned, left only to come back and finally chose the Church and his life of monasticism and writing over her. But not easy, not sanely. He was never the same.

Two years later—allowed to travel to Asia—perhaps a consolation from his Abbott? Merton made one of his greatest speeches and then died suddenly in an accidental electrocution. We know from his journals that he was still grieving the loss of his great love. His pain was relieved.

But I have always wondered about “Her”. Who told her? How did she grieve? She lost him and then lost him again. Did she know of his despair? And did she know his prayer of faith and doubt?

It helps me to know that even Thomas Merton was never Thomas Merton.

Thomas Merton's Prayer

My Lord God,

I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that, if I do this, you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadows of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Thomas Merton
Thoughts in Solitude, p. 83