I’ve never
been much of a Mertonologist, though I know there are entire societies worldwide
that exist only to praise his lowly, Trappist name.
For he was a Trappist (also known as Cistercian), a bona fide hermit, bestselling author, cult figure, and
many other things besides. I think he probably wrote many hundreds, perhaps thousands, perhaps even millions of pages and is
still writing them right now, even as we speak, though he was electrocuted in Thailand back in 1968. Always known to be clumsy, he grabbed a
poorly-wired electric fan to steady himself when getting out of the bathtub. Don’t
touch those things while wet, Thomas.
I don’t know, nor
do I particularly want to know, all the details of Thomas Merton’s life history, except that when he was young, he was Bad, and when he was older, he was Good.
I am not sure if he was poisonously good or not, but good he must’ve been,
living in that hut and all.
I read a
hilarious account written by Joan Baez in which she and her spiritual mentor
Ira Sandperl witnessed the good Brother Thomas (or Brother Louis, as he was
variously known) put away two
cheeseburgers, an order of fries and more than a couple of shots of Irish
whiskey (let’s hope it was Irish, for God’s sake, and not that other stuff),
while telling them that he had fallen in love with a woman in Lexington and wanted
to go sneaking away to see her.
No one “sees”
someone they are involved with. I think it involves considerably more than
seeing. Other senses are involved. It’s funny that when you look up accounts of
Thomas Merton’s infamous affair, many INSIST that it “wasn’t consummated”,
while others insist that it obviously was. Or perhaps should have been.
Obviously, the
only thing sexier than having sex is NOT having sex. We knew this in Grade
Nine, for God’s sake, while fumbling frantically around in the back seat. An
elbow in the eye was a fair price to pay for a digit in the right place. Or
don’t you remember?
While I could
never get through a Merton biography
because I don’t think they’re honest enough, and while I could not get through The Seven Storey Mountain to save my
bloody life, I might be able to get through this semi-bio by Mark Shaw. It’s
got an unfortunate True Confessions title (Beneath
the Mask of Holiness: Thomas Merton and the Forbidden Love Affair that Set Him
Free) that has serious Mertonologists hopping mad, hopping up and down in
their faux habits which they wear to Mertocon conventions (in which everyone
dresses up as the monk of their choice).
It’s just the
good parts, folks, though of course to avoid lawsuits the author has had to put
it all in context: how this great man and spiritual giant became human and
proved, to himself and to the entire world, that he was Humble and Contrite and
got away with bloody murder because he was so famous and the abbey needed the
money.
Surely that must have been part of why this enigmatic spiritual genius got away with
such murder, and why he wasn’t chucked out for frolicking in the green woods
with a 25-year-old woman and lying about it (his dishonesty and deceptiveness,
in the long run, being the more serious sin).
Merton got
himself into this delicious mess when his back gave out and he was confined to
the hospital for surgery. An attractive young student nurse gave him back rubs,
sponge baths, etc., and one can understand the attraction: someone who hasn’t
been touched in 20 years is suddenly getting all this professionally-sanctioned
hands-on attention from a young woman.
Attraction
quickly gave way to . . . attraction.
Margie Smith
was completely awed by the grinning Catholic Buddha/walking contradiction that
was Merton, who by this time was the most famous Trappist hermit in the history
of the world. He was literally twice her age, and had a very big thing (sorry!)
about his vow of chastity, so that in the next few months he pushed it as far
as he could without – we think – or so we are told - “breaking” it.
I have a
little bit of problem with a grown man NOT having sex with a woman he is madly
in love with. It seems somehow indecent. It reminds me of Bill Clinton and his
famous statement, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” because in
his humble opinion blow jobs did not qualify as “sexual relations”. It’s a fairly common practice for men to have
anal sex with a woman, particularly a virgin, then deny he “had sex” with her
because he used a relatively (though not entirely) non-standard orifice. I have
read more than once that this practice is particularly common in fundamentalist
Christian circles, where “purity” is prized but perhaps a little ill-defined.
You can have
sex with a knothole, men. ‘Fess up. Friction will do it. But there is a certain
prissy sense of tiptoeing around, of walking along the line instead of stepping over it. For some obscure reason
I find this infuriatingly dishonest.
We define
“sex” and “consummation” in some pretty strange ways. I have no problem with the
act that legally defines it, but it can and often does happen with no orgasm,
at least not for the woman. That’s dreadful. A man with a talented hand can get
you there without even undressing you. You see, we live in a sexually-limited
society which is secretly still appalled at the whole thing, or at least doesn’t
care two figs if a woman is sexually satisfied or not.
I get that
feeling with Merton. He couldn’t get away from his feelings, but at the same
time he skated around them. He was playing the naughty boy, the bad monk acting
out, while secretly hoping his abbot would grab it and get him back to where he
belonged. But he played his young would-be lover, too, perhaps even played her
for a fool.
This excerpt
from the Thomas Merton Confidential book kind of sums up the whole thing, with the
same sentiments repeated over and over as he refuses to decide either way and
deceives everyone in his monastic world.
“As May ended,
Merton was frenzied as he attempted to sort out his feelings after a second secret
interlude, where “we got ourselves quite aroused sexually” and he suffered “a
great deal of confusions, anguish, indecision and nerves.” He decided, “I
cannot let this become a sexual affair, it would be disastrous for both of us.”
Placing at least part of the blame on Margie and her “being too curious . . .
and too passionate for me (for her body to tell the truth was wonderful the
other day, ready for the most magnificent love)”, Merton, praying he could
resist her, recalled more talks about the need for the love to be chaste. He
was fearful of another meeting alone on the Gethsemani grounds, and told her it
was unwise.”
They keep
meeting, though meeting right on the grounds
seems like lunacy to me, not to mention more than a little “nyaa, nyaa,
look what I’m getting away with”. They meet every place they can, which is
pretty hard because he is not supposed to leave the abbey or venture very far from
his hermit’s hut. His writings about his passionate, illicit interlude, which
are surprisingly candid for someone who must have known it would eventually be
published along with all his other writings, are full of references to
eroticism, kissing, and “making love”, though stopping short of “real” sex in
the form of intercourse (which is, after all, the only true sex).
“He admitted
later that night that any step toward a ‘fully involved erotic and sexual love
for (Margie) – completely fulfilled and frequently so’ would affect his life
and vocation as never before. This was because he knew the loving affection he
had for her – ‘with the explicit sacrifice
of sex and of erotic satisfaction’ – was more in harmony with God’s love than
against it. Did Merton’s words mean no consummation of the relationship had
occurred?”
Perhaps the
question is academic. But isn’t it true that he shouldn’t have been doing
anything that wasn’t acceptable for his abbot to see? What about the most powerful monastic vow of all: obedience? This stuff wasn’t acceptable by anyone’s reckoning. If they weren’t having sex,
some serious friction must have been going on. It bothers me just to read about
it, even creeps me out. The most alarming passage recounts their wangling
office space from a psychologist, drinking champagne, and (at least Margie)
getting naked. You almost HOPE he jumps over the wall at this point, because the
whole thing is beginning to seem downright agonizing and masochistic. Not to
mention hypocritical and dishonest.
One fact which
often isn’t mentioned in recounting this strange interlude is the power
imbalance between a student nurse in her 20s and one of the most famous and
revered spiritual leaders of the 20th century. Even more
shocking is the fact that Margie Smith was engaged to be married at the time, her
fiancée having just been shipped over to Vietnam. It gets harder and harder to see this
as the wonderful (and, of course, unconsummated) romantic interlude that
humanized the great guru and made him Even More Wonderfully Spiritual (because now wonderfully human) than ever.
What seems to
have happened is that he gradually lost interest in Margie, after having broken
it off a number of times (citing his precious vow of chastity. This begins to
remind me of one of those wretched Southern debutantes attending a “purity ball”).
He renewed his vows and pledged himself once again to being the most famous and
gregarious hermit in the world.
One wonders
about Margie. By all accounts, she pulled herself together and married (though
not to the same guy she was engaged to: did stories of Thomas somehow cause a
rift, I wonder?). I have yet to encounter anything written about this strange
interlude that is at all critical of Merton, though it is obvious to me that a
51-year-old spiritual giant is no match for a confused, already-romantically-committed
student nurse. And what about all the sexual dangling and lack of fulfillment,
which may have carried on right to the end? Was that fair to her? Was it all just a
titillating game? Was he dangling HIMSELF as the ultimate, unattainable prize?
We’ll never
know, because the guy grabbed an electric fan while soaking wet, and
thus was instantly delivered by the powerful slingshot of a few thousand volts
to that great and unfathomable mystery on the Other Side.
Post-blog thoughts. I found out, to my great consternation, that there is only one YouTube video I can find featuring the real Thomas Merton giving a real talk. It takes place in Thailand in 1968. Shortly after this talk, feeling a little limp in the heat, he decided to take a shower (or bath depending on which Merton legend you buy into). Then came the encounter with the electric fan that ended his life. So Merton's last spoken words, in public anyway, were "let's go grab a Coke or something." Kind of makes me love him a whole lot more.
ADDENDUM. The death of Thomas Merton
Twenty
seven years later, on the same day that he had arrived at the monastery - December 10th, 1968 -
Merton died in Asia.
On December 8th,
the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Merton made his last journal entry, and
said Mass at St. Louis Church in Bangkok.
Merton had been invited to the Bangkok conference
of Benedictine and Trappist Abbots. He left for Samutprakarn, 29 miles south of Bangkok, for
the Sawant Kaniwat (Red Cross) Conference Center,
arrived in the afternoon and was housed on the ground floor of Cottage Two.
On the 2nd day of
the conference (December 10th), Merton presented his paper, “Marxism and
Monastic Perspective”. The paper had been on his mind for many weeks, and he
was somewhat nervous by a Dutch television crew that had turned up to film his
lecture. (His abbot had ordered him to avoid the press.)
Merton’s paper
dealt with the role of the monk in a world of revolution …
“to experience the
ground of his own being in such a way that he knows the secret of liberation
and can somehow or other communicate it to others.”
Finishing the
talk, Merton suggested putting off questions until evening, and concluded with
the words:
“So I will disappear.”
He suggested
everyone have a coke.
At around 3 PM Father Francois de
Grunne, who had a room near Merton’s, heard a cry and what sounded like someone
falling. He knocked on Merton’s door, but there was no response. At 4PM, Father de Grunne,
worried that something was wrong, looked through the louvers in the upper part
of the door and saw Merton lying on the terrazzo floor. A standing fan had
fallen on top of him. The door was forced open.
There was the
smell of burned flesh. Merton, clearly dead, was lying on his back with the
five-foot fan diagonally across his body. The fan was still electrically
volatile.
A long, raw
third-degree burn about a hand’s width ran along the right side of Merton’s
body almost to the groin. There were no marks on his hands. His face was
bluish-red, eyes and mouth half open. There had been bleeding from the back of
his head. [see footnote]
The priests gave
Merton absolution and extreme unction.
Merton’s body was
dressed and laid out, and the abbots attending the conference maintained a
constant vigil for him.
“In death Father
Louis’ face was set in a great and deep peace, and it was obvious that he had
found Him Whom he had searched for so diligently.” (Letter from the abbots
attending the Bangkok to the Abbot of
Gethsemani)
The next day Merton’s body was taken to the United States Air Force Base in Bangkok and from there flown
back to the United States in company with dead
bodies of Americans killed in Vietnam.
An official declaration of Merton’s belongings came with his body and read:
1 Timex watch, $10.
1 Pair Dark Glasses in Tortoise frames, nil
1 Cistercian Leather Bound Breviary, nil
1 Rosary (broken), nil
1 Small Icon on Wood of Virgin and Child, nil
At the end of the funeral Mass at Gethsemani, there was a reading from The
Seven Story Mountain, concluding with the book’s prophetic final sentence,
“That you may become
the brother of God and learn to know the Christ of the burnt men.”
His brother monks buried Merton in their small cemetery next to the abbey
church.
- Beth Cioffoletti, louie louie blog
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