The Tablet

Thomas Merton in love

by Gregory K. Hillis

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The account by the monk and spiritual writer Thomas Merton of a clandestine relationship he had with a young nurse, Margie Smith, in 1966 shows both selfishness and honesty

In his historic address to a joint meeting of Congress during his visit to the United States in 2015, Pope Francis singled out the American Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, as someone worthy of study and emulation, describing him as “a man of prayer, a thinker who challenged the certitudes of his time and opened new horizons for souls and for the Church”. This papal endorsement came despite the fact that Merton was and remains a controversial figure. He is held in suspicion by some Catholics for his opposition to war, his scepticism about capitalism, and his commitment to ecumenical and interreligious dialogue – particularly for his engagement with Eastern religious thought.

His detractors also point to the relationship he had in the summer of 1966 with Margie Smith, a trainee nurse. Debate about this relationship flares up occasionally, as it did last year in the wake of a review in Harper’s magazine by Garry Wills of a book on Merton by Mary Gordon, in which he pointed to Merton’s clandestine relationship as evidence that he was little more than a disgruntled and shallow pseudo-ascetic. Unfortunately, we don’t have Margie’s account of their relationship. We only know one side of the story – at most. Merton emerges from his own account of the affair as selfish and self-absorbed. But it also shows him grappling with his own evident shortcomings with honesty and humility.
On 25 March 1966, Merton had an operation on his back at St Joseph’s hospital in Louisville. A little less than a year earlier, Merton had been given permission to live permanently as a hermit with the blessing of his abbot and his community. While Merton relished the hermit life, it took a physical toll, and his back was soon giving him enough trouble that an operation proved inevitable. It was successful, though the recovery was slow. Assisting him in his recovery was a young student nurse named Margie Smith who, by Merton’s account, showed an “undisguised and frank” affection for him.

Merton soon returned to the monastery and went back to living at the hermitage. A month later, a letter from Margie appeared. While we don’t know what was in the letter, Merton was clearly flattered and had to admit to himself that the affection she expressed for him was mutual. He naively wrote in his private journal that somehow his love for her could be incorporated in some way into his life as a hermit, that perhaps it could be channelled into a general love for the world. It’s hard to say what Merton meant, though, at this point, I don’t think he envisioned the two of them having a relationship. What is clear is that he had very little clue about what to do about their feelings for each other.

Two days later, things became more serious. Margie wrote to tell him that she would like to see him. Reluctantly, Merton admitted that he wanted to see her too. “I tell myself it is because I want to help her,” he wrote, telling himself that he couldn’t become emotionally attached. However, he already knew he was kidding himself. Two days after her letter, they communicated for the first time by phone, and Merton realised that he had crossed a line that he shouldn’t have crossed. He knew that a relationship between them could have no future, and Merton wrote in his journal that he should end it before things became more complicated. He didn’t.

His journal entry for 27 April 1966 begins with a harsh realisation: “There is no question that I am in deep.” Margie met him in the doctor’s office when he was in Louisville for an appointment, and the two of them sat alone in a restaurant for 30 minutes afterwards. It was during this lunch that they realised how much they loved one another. “I am not as smart or as stable as I imagined,” he lamented.

Their relationship proved to be revelatory in ways he did not feel he could ignore or set aside. Merton felt transformed both by the love he experienced from her as well as by the love he had no idea he was capable of expressing: “I realise that the deepest capacities for human love in me have never even been tapped, that I too can love with an awful completeness. Responding to her has opened up the depths of my life in ways I can’t begin to understand or analyse now.” 

As the relationship began to take on more physical expressions, Merton wrote about the way in which their love was helping him to come to terms with his sexuality. While his sexual encounters before his conversion to Catholicism were marked by an unhappiness that was the consequence of his own desire for sexual conquest, such was not the case with Margie. He wrote that his “sexuality has been made real and decent again”.

However, the tension between his monastic solitude and his love for Margie soon became glaringly obvious to him. While his May 1966 journal entries are almost embarrassingly euphoric, his journal entries throughout the first two weeks of June contain agonised thoughts about the tension between this love that he felt he could not but accept and feel, and his calling as a monk and hermit.

The end soon came. On 13 June, Merton’s abbot, Dom James Fox, returned home from a trip. When Merton went to the cellarer’s office to phone Margie, he was told by the cellarer that another monk had listened in on one of his illicit phone calls and reported the relationship to the abbot. Far from experiencing anger about this outcome, Merton expressed relief: “I have to face the fact that I have been wrong and foolish in all this. Much as I loved Margie, I should never have let myself be carried away to become so utterly imprudent.” The two continued to meet occasionally over the following weeks, and while Margie, according to Merton, proposed that he leave the monastery so that they could spend the rest of their lives together, Merton knew the end had come. After July, they didn’t meet again.

Merton was not a man in search of love, but, by his own telling, someone who experienced with Margie the love of and for a woman for the first time. Caught in the throes of this love, Merton acted recklessly, and his journal entries from this time read more like the reflections of a heartstruck teenager than an esteemed writer in his fifties. It’s not surprising that many have read these accounts as showing Merton to be egotistical and immature. “Here deep did not call to deep, but shallow to shallow,” as Wills cruelly put it.

But in the months and years after the relationship ended, Merton’s assessments of what had happened in the summer of 1966 were more complex and insightful. Almost a year after the end of their relationship, Merton wrote about what might have occurred had it gone further. Reflecting on his feelings after a day spent with Margie, Merton made it clear that he was far more conflicted at the time than he perhaps let on in his journal entries from the year before: “That Sunday I was literally shaken and disturbed – knowing clearly that I was all wrong, that I was going against everything that made sense in my life, going against all that was true and authentic in my vocation, going against the grace and love of God.” And as he looked back on the end of their relationship, Merton expressed relief: “After that, only the grace of God saved us from a really terrible mess.”

A few weeks later, Merton expressed regret about the relationship: “I experience in myself a deep need of conversion and penance – a deep repentance, a real sense of having erred, gone wrong, got lost – and needing to get back on the right path. Needing to pray for forgiveness. Sense of revolt at my own foolishness and triviality. Shame and amazement at the way I have trifled with life and grace – how could I be so utterly stupid!” More than a year later, apparently filled with shame, he burned Margie’s letters to him.

Merton established the Merton Legacy Trust in 1967 to oversee his literary estate and to take responsibility for the publication of his works after his death. He of course had no idea that he would die only a year later. The trust stipulated that Merton’s private journals could be published after 25 years had elapsed since his death, but Merton put no other restrictions on their publication. He was uninterested in having them purged of anything unsavoury. 

In a 1963 interview, Merton lamented the way in which his bestselling autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, had resulted in others having an image of him that lacked reality: “I rebel against it and maintain my basic human right not to be turned into a Catholic myth for children in parochial schools.” Merton did not want the same thing to happen with the publication of his journals. If he was going to be known, he was going to be known.

It’s the forthrightness of his journals that continue to attract readers like myself. To read Merton’s private journals is to be given unique access to the kind of inner thoughts, compulsions, and emotions that all of us experience but often don’t know how to communicate to ourselves or to others. Merton allowed himself to be an open book, and made it clear that he wasn’t going to hide his relationship with Margie. 

“I have no intention of keeping the Margie business entirely out of sight,” he wrote in his journal. “I have always wanted to be completely open, both about my mistakes and about my effort to make sense out of my life. The affair with Margie is an important part of it – and shows my limitations as well as a side of me that is – well, it needs to be known too, for it is part of me. My need for love, my loneliness, my inner division, the struggle in which solitude is at once a problem and a ‘solution’. And perhaps not a perfect solution either.” 

Merton remains stubbornly at the centre of the drama in a way that makes the reader want to give him a shake. But for all the writerly narcissism on display, these words also reveal his unwillingness to be known apart from his foibles, or to hide the complexity of who he was as a human being striving to do God’s will. Merton had had enough of the pious legends that too often mark the ways we talk about our saints.

Perhaps this is why many people find in Merton the kind of saint with whom they can relate. Each time I go to the Abbey of Gethsemani, I make a visit to Merton’s grave. And each time I’m struck by the tokens pilgrims leave to venerate him. Surrounding the simple Trappist cross marking his grave are rosaries, prayers, guitar picks, sobriety tokens, art, and carvings. I have a sense that this kind of veneration would make very little sense to those who need their saints to be uncomplicated and tidy. But there are many who understand Merton to be the kind of saint who speaks profoundly to them precisely because he was human, and a human who, despite his faults, strove throughout his life to be transformed by God.

Margie Smith married a doctor and raised a family. Rather wonderfully, she never once spoke publicly of her relationship with Merton.

Gregory K. Hillis is an associate professor of theology at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky.