In the April issue of Harper’s Magazine, Garry Wills (a writer I have long admired) wrote an intemperate screed about Thomas Merton (a writer I have admired even longer) in the guise of a review of Mary Gordon’s On Thomas Merton (Shambhala Publications, 2018). In his book Life and Holiness (1963), Merton made the important point that we need to avoid the stereotype of the “plaster saint,” one whose supposed goodness remains so simplistic as to be devoid of human frailties and complications. But Wills makes Merton out to be a very different kind of simplistic character: a cynical time-server who stayed in the Trappist Monastery for the fame. It’s a version of Merton, a complex man, monk, and person of faith, I don’t recognize from his writings, the work of his biographers, and conversations with people who knew him.
No doubt, Merton’s relationship with Margie Smith—the student nurse who was around half Merton’s age and who had formerly been in a convent—was all kinds of sloppy and many kinds of flawed. Few people know what effects the relationship had on Smith; she has understandably remained publicly silent on the matter. From Merton’s journals—and I agree with Mary Gordon that Merton’s journals are among his best writings—one can discern that the relationship was for him difficult and confusing, as well as energizing and an unexpected opportunity for growth. In the course of his thinking through what this relationship meant along with his vocation as a monk, he admittedly put on display some of the arrogance of which Wills accuses him, but there is much more there as well.
After the death of his mother, when Merton was six, he lived with one relative or another as well as in boarding schools. Before the end of his teenage years, his father also died. During much of his life after his parents’ death, he was effectively on his own. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to conjecture that, having experienced a sense of abandonment from the time he was very young, he was terrified of intimacy through much of his adult life. By all evidence, the relationship with Smith brought with it a vulnerability that he had all but forgotten. His relationship with her brought a kind of spritely language into his journals; here is part of the entry for May 4, 1966: “I just don’t know what to do with my life, finding myself so much loved, and loving so much, when according to all standards it is all wrong, absurd, insane. Yet here it is. And I can’t help coming back again and again to the realization that somehow it is not crazy—it makes sense.” On the one hand, an unmistakably adolescent voice emerges here, the sound of someone falling in love as if for the first time. On the other hand, one can also discern the devoted monk trying to make sense of this new experience as something breaking into his life from some kind of beyond. A few days later he writes that he has no compunction about wanting to spend his life with Smith, “for I do not feel it is in any way an infidelity to God, since I think our love comes from Him” (May 9, 1966). In the end, however, he broke off the relationship to remain a monk devoted to contemplative prayer, social justice, and interreligious dialogue.
One complication with closing oneself to intimacy is that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to do it selectively. If I close myself to intimacy in one part of my life, I’m most likely closing myself off in other parts of my life too. So how can I close myself off to others and remain open to God? The unlikelihood that I can do so provides one reason it makes sense that Jesus’ two great commandments are to love God wholly and to love one’s neighbor as oneself: all of these loves—of God, neighbor, and self—go together and call for integration. Reading through Merton’s journals, one easily gets a powerful sense of this surprising relationship with Margie Smith breaking him open in a way that he had never before experienced. The journal from his trip to Asia, from which he did not return alive, includes a powerful mystical experience, a moment of intimacy with the divine that I doubt he could have been open to had it not been preceded by the experience of love with Margie Smith. It isn’t that this breaking open could not have occurred in some other way, one less messy and difficult for all parties involved; rather, the point is that in Merton’s life, for better or worse and likely some of both, this is how it worked out. Merton’s life continues to provide an example of persistence in spiritual growth in the face of great difficulty for which I remain grateful.