Thomas Merton --Prayers and Contradictions

On January 31, 2015, we celebrate the centenary of the birth of Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and prolific spiritual writer. 

Merton’s life was full of paradox and contradiction. He was an extroverted New Yorker who entered the silent world of a Trappist monastery in the back woods of Kentucky.

 In making this choice, he left behind his ambition to become a writer, only to have his abbot sit him down at a typewriter and tell him to write. 

Deeply attracted to women he gave up female companionship in becoming a monk, only to fall in love and have a powerful love affair with a young woman when he was fifty-one years old.

He sought solitude in a hermitage even as his life and writing turned outward to society’s evils: war, violence, injustice.

Profoundly Christian, he discovered toward the end of his life the spiritual riches of Eastern religions.

One of the most famous prayers of Thomas Merton, and one of my favorite prayers is this—from his book: “Thoughts in Solitude.” Merton wrote:

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.

 Amen.

The Thomas Merton Affair

I’m on Cape Cod this week to read and write. A house and a beach and some woods all to myself. It’s heaven. I brought Thomas Merton with me. I think of him often. He is a writer and a spiritual director that I can truly take to heart. He was a writer, speaker, teacher, monk and a lover.

Yes, we often skip over that part when we tell his story but I think it’s central to who Merton is and was. The reason we can be so consoled by his spiritual advice is because we can know that he deeply knew all of our human and complicated struggles.

Thomas Merton had a love affair when he was in his 40’s. He was then already a writer and spiritual celebrity of sorts. He was a cloistered monk at Gethsemane in Kentucky and he had written his bestselling Seven Story Mountain and other books. He was 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 they made love there and in Merton’s cloister near the Abbey. Some other monks knew and some sort of knew and others didn’t know at all.

But then the Master of the Abbey got wind of the relationship and confronted Merton, “How could you?” he said, and he insisted that Merton make a choice. This amazing man of God didn’t have an easy time. He saw her again, cried, begged, swore off, went to find her, sent her away and went to find her again, and then left again only to come back. Finally he chose the Church and his life of monasticism. But it was not easy. He was a tormented man even while being one of the world’s most famous monks and a great spiritual teacher.

Two years later—Merton was allowed to leave the Cloister to travel to Asia. It was, perhaps, a consolation from his Abbott. In Asia Merton made one of his greatest speeches and then he died tragically by accidental electrocution. We know from his journals that even that year he was still grieving the loss of his great love. 

I have always wondered about his lover, the nurse, the other woman. How did she hear the news? How did she grieve? She lost him and then she lost him again. Did she know of his despair? And what did it mean to her to later read his great prayer of faith and doubt?

I think of Merton as a man who loved and suffered and lived in the grey of faith and morality. Somehow it helps me to know that even Thomas Merton was never really Thomas Merton.