In the last issue of The Journal I reported on the Thomas Merton Conference I attended in Louisville, Kentucky this past June. In this issue I would like to share my reflections on a period in Merton’s monastic life during which he was in a romantic relationship with a young woman. And even though the relationship ended before his premature death in 1968, I want to ask the question: Should Merton have married the young woman he was in love with?

Readers of the early Merton of The Seven Storey Mountain and Seeds of Contemplation may be shocked at such a question. In those books he seems to have achieved and described such a unity with God and to have cut himself off so completely from the world, that the question of a romantic relationship that might threaten his monastic and priestly vocation could scarcely be imagined.

Yet,  at the age of fifty-one he became involved in an intense relationship with a student nurse after she helped bring him back to health in the hospital in Louisville where she worked. The relationship lasted some five months until Merton was ordered by his abbot to end it. In spite of the order Merton still saw her occasionally and corresponded with her from time to time after that until he was left with only fond memories of her and of their love. 

The romance is recorded in detail in volume six of Merton’s seven-volume private journals  that were allowed to be published only twenty-five years after his death on December 10, 1968 - two years after the relationship had ended.. His death occurred on the outskirts of Bangkok where he was attending a conference with Cistercian abbots; it was caused by his touching a faultily wired fan in his room, to which he had retired for a rest after lunch. 

The volume of his journals with the account of their romance is entitled Learning to Love: Exploring Solitude and Freedom, edited by Christine M. Bochen (New York: HarperCollins, 1997). The section of the book where their  relationship is most intense is called “Daring to Love”. The object of his love is identified throughout only by the first letter of her first name - M. The same volume has an appendix entitled “A Midsummer Diary for M.”, written in June of that year, in which Merton addresses her directly and analyses their relationship more objectively than he was able to in the journal itself. 

When Merton met M. in the hospital he had been living full-time in a hermitage on the grounds of the monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani, Kentucky for less than a year. He had entered the hospital on March 23, had an operation on his back on March 25, and returned to the monastery on April 9, Holy Saturday. In his first journal entry after his return (April 10) he writes of “a very friendly and devoted student nurse ...(whose) affection - undisguised and frank - was an enormous help in bringing me back to life fast (p. 38)”. He received a letter from M. on April 19 indicating that she wanted to see him - and indeed he wanted to see her. His letter in reply began a series of letters, telephone calls, and meetings in Louisville and at the monastery during which a deep love developed between them. 

Merton duly recorded the course of their love in his journal in some of the finest writing on the experience of love that I have ever read. For this honesty and artistry in expressing his passion we must be grateful, even while he experiences the pain of being torn between his vocation as a celibate monk and priest, and his love for M.

Many passages from the journal could be quoted that reflect the intensity of their love. Here is an early one: “There is no question that I am in deep. Tuesday M. met me at the doctor’s. Appeared in the hall, small, shy, almost defiant, with her long black hair, her grey eyes, her white trench coat...(We had) a wonderful lunch, so good to be with her, and more than ever I saw how much and how instantly and how delicately we responded to each other on every level” (April 27, p. 45). 

On May 7 (Derby Day in Louisville) he wrote: “After supper (at the airport) M. and I had a little time alone and went off by ourselves and found a quiet corner, sat on the grass out of sight and loved each other to ecstasy. It was beautiful, awesomely so, to love so much and to be loved, and to be able to say it all completely without fear and without observation (not that we sexually consummated it)” (p. 52). Their love, in fact, seems never to have been sexually consummated.

Two days later the possibility of marriage becomes a real one. Merton writes: “The question has obviously arisen: whether we should not just go off and live together - married” (p. 55). On the same day he also reflects: “It is now, to me, a really serious option: that if in the near future the way does open for a married clergy, I should take it” (p. 55).

But Merton could never take that fateful step, and the Church was not ready for a married clergy in those days immediately following the Second Vatican Council. Merton had reached the point that many of us married priests reached when we understood God had given us a vocation to both marriage and priesthood. Merton did not seriously consider that option, and didn’t even consider requesting a dispensation from his vow of celibacy so he could marry within the Church. 

When many of us reached this point, we moved forward to a new life of love and marriage; in contrast, Merton recommitted himself to his vows and to his monastery. In fact, he always saw himself as irrevocably committed to his vows, and to the life of solitude he was trying to live in his hermitage, however much that life was disrupted for a time by M. As a result, he was torn deeply, as he says on May 17: “There are moments when I simply die to go away with her and love her and surrender to our love and forget everything else, but it is obviously impossible. All through everything I come back to the one word impossible” (p. 63). 

The word “impossible” he uses again after an ecstatic picnic he and M. shared alone on the monastery grounds. Of that experience he writes: “And always in the end there is the enormous unthinkable problem of my vow and my dedication which really come first and make the whole thing absurdly impossible” (May 17, p. 67).

And so it remained for Thomas Merton. He could not envision himself being a married priest, even with a dispensation from his vows. Yet when his romance with M. is finally over, he still cherishes and loves her. Thus on Aug.4 he writes: “In our solitude we somehow remain in deep connection” (p. 107); on Aug. 6 he reflects: “I have often wished I would die in these last days - I constantly pray for us to be together finally in God. And am impatient for the time when we will be” (p. 110); and on Aug. 13 he says: “I miss her terribly, think back repeatedly of the few wonderful days we had together, the perfection of our love, our obligation to one another” (p. 113).

Although Merton and M. occasionally met and corresponded after that, it was with the understanding that their exclusive relationship was over. Merton became more at peace in his life in the hermitage, and  M. moved to Cincinnati, where she eventually married and settled into domestic life. She has never made any public comment on her relationship with Merton, even after volume six of his journals was published.

 As so often in these cases of a priest who falls in love with a woman and then decides to leave her for his priestly vocation, it is the woman whose needs and suffering are ignored. Merton did not really do this, as he often wrote of how he felt M.’s suffering as well as his own. But M. can easily be the forgotten one in this brief encounter, and Merton seems not sufficiently aware of his obligations to her, and whether God was calling them to fulfil their love in marriage. Perhaps in the climate of the Church ten or twenty years after the Second Vatican Council he would have left the monastery and married M.

But at the time and place where Thomas Merton was when he fell in love with M. he could not envision the possibility of marrying her, and by his actions at the time he showed that being a married priest was not for him. At least not in Gethsemani, Kentucky in 1966.

Should Thomas Merton have been a married priest? Only he could finally answer that question, with the perception he had of his obligations to God, to his vows, to M., and to himself. The later writings in his journals indicate that he was so committed to his vocation as a monk and a priest that he could not see himself living another life, even with M.

Still, it is interesting to speculate what might have become of Merton had he left the monastery to marry M. And that many of us did leave the clerical priesthood to marry when we were as much in love as Merton was with M.