In 1966, a Trappist monk from Kentucky’s Abbey of Gethsemani had an affair with a nursing student. Her name was Margie, and you already know his. Thomas Merton never intended for this to always remain a secret. The details of the affair (which is what Merton repeatedly called it), and the poems that accompanied it (not his best work), were all planned for publication twenty-five years after his death. Merton burned all the letters from Margie, who—truer to the Trappist tradition of silence than Merton himself—never uttered a word about their relationship. Ah, but what a book deal it would have been.
Merton was in serious physical pain at the time owing to cervical spondylosis, but, as he put it, the longing for Margie’s companionship “ended up tearing me up more than the [corrective] operation itself.” Initially he resisted: “To seek happiness in human love now would be as absurd as a fish getting out on the beach to walk,” he wrote. But then he succumbed to the longing to see her again. And again. His friends became accomplices as he subverted monastery rules to arrange the next rendezvous. He was Ferris Bueller in a cassock.
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