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.

My aim is not to play the role of crime scene investigator for the sex police, but it is hard to tell from the journals whether this affair was fully consummated. Merton did expressly say in June of 1966, “It stops short of complete sex.” But after another episode he wrote, “It is God’s own love He makes in us.” And “I cling to the round hull / Of your hips.” After another clandestine meeting he records, “We ate herring and ham (not very much eating!) and drank our wine and read poems and talked of ourselves and mostly made love and love and love for five hours.” He continues,

Whatever we make of such passages, for a monk vowed to chastity, this is a DEFCON 1 scenario. “Cool me,” wrote the one-time champion of asceticism to Margie in the collection titled Eighteen Poems, “for I am destroyed by too much perfection.” He was fifty-one at the time; Margie was twenty-five.

John Howard Griffin’s 1983 book Follow the Ecstasy offers a detailed account of the affair. The title refers to the counsel offered by Merton’s friend, the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, as he accompanied Merton back to the hospital after arranging a meeting with Margie. Griffin reasonably diagnoses the affair as self-deception, even if it enabled Merton to conclude that “his religious commitment was not the subtle disguise of an emotional cripple.” Still, Griffin’s refusal to fully endorse the incident pushed more progressive Merton admirers to complain of too much horrified naysaying. Indeed, insistence that Merton’s affair was a fundamental good is now so predominant, at least among Merton biographers, that it helps justify disdain for Merton especially among more traditional Catholics.

Three examples of this new consensus will suffice. Roger Lipsey’s carefully researched book Make Peace Before the Sun Goes Down goes so far as to apologize for Merton’s own account of the affair: “[Merton] could argue himself into belittling what had occurred, into thinking how foolish he had been.” Lipsey then compares the incident to Dante and Beatrice or Petrarch and Laura. Suzanne Zuercher, like Lipsey, also corrects Merton to make her case in her short book on the liaison. After quoting his words “In my heart I knew it would really have been better if I had followed my original intention and been content with a couple of letters and nothing more,” Zuercher interrupts: “And yet, think of what Merton would have missed had he followed his instincts then!” That the burden of proof is now on those who would critique Merton’s dalliance is made abundantly clear by Mary Gordon’s question in her book On Thomas Merton: “Have you ever done anything stupid because you were passionately in love? If the answer is no, congratulations. Or maybe not.”

These are not necessarily dishonest readings of the affair, nor can these authors be entirely blamed for coming to their conclusions, for they each cite Merton himself. “It was good that I (we) went through the storm,” Merton wrote in May 1967. “It was the only way to learn a truth that was otherwise inaccessible.” But the context of that passage is crucial, a context I wish here to illuminate. Indeed, if we are as honest about the situation as Merton eventually was with himself, and if we take into account his journals in their entirety (only briefly quoted by most biographers), I don’t think there is much room for benign interpretation at all. The fact that so many interpreters miss this may be attributable to a refusal to see the place of Merton’s Marian piety in bringing this affair to an end.

Smoke and Mirrors

From the start Merton knew it was wrong. In May 1966, as his conversations with Margie escalated, he became infatuated, but he takes a head-clearing walk in the woods at the Abbey of Gethsemani and writes, “I saw clearly that it can’t go on like this.” But as love’s intoxication intensifies, we get the self-justifying passages that embolden modern biographers:

If that’s the whole of it, perhaps we should all hasten to have such affairs ourselves. In fact, we might be at risk if we don’t. Merton continues,

The affair with Margie, Merton concludes, releases him from intolerably high standards so he can “find [his] center . . . in an actual self which does all it can to be honest and to love truly, though it still may fail.” In such passages, Merton gives us a master class in self-justification. One can be forgiven here for agreeing with Garry Wills’s zinger: “Here deep did not call to deep, but shallow to shallow.”

But then, in the very same month, Merton’s doubts begin.

By October of the same year, the mists further evaporate. Merton’s self-assessment develops. His idealized view of M. collapses. “She is [like Merton!] a mixed-up person with many conflicting trends and also a kind of triumphant selfishness.” He goes on,

Moving to the anniversary of their first meeting, Merton still insists, “We love and understand each other and still in some sense need each other, though obviously it is all over.” But then the see-sawing stops, because he finally locates the roots of the affair. And this is where things get especially interesting:

And so this desire to be loved, fleetingly slaked in an affair with a young, idealistic nurse—Merton concluded—accounted for some of his copious literary output. All along, this was about so much more than sex. It was not only that Margie was young and beautiful; it was that she knew and admired his writing. Merton, in other words, was wrestling not only with lust but also with vainglory, a much more difficult temptation to overcome. As Merton’s psychologist famously put it, “You want a hermitage in Times Square with a large sign over it saying ‘Hermit.’” Who doesn’t want to be adored?

Looking back on the affair after a year, Merton writes,

God then offers his monk peace. Merton explains what happened on one “hesychastic afternoon” as he walked shirtless, “the warm sun on my back,” on the same grounds on which he once agonized about his emerging relationship with Margie. His sanity is there restored:

In short, reading the passage (selectively cited by Merton’s biographers) in context shows that there is very little room to interpret the affair as Merton’s graduation from puritanical notions of morality. Merton admits he had been deceived. He breaches modern decorum by insisting there is something “deeper than any consolation of eros”:

Merton knew well, of course, the Christian teaching that sex within monogamous marriage is a good. But it was not the good chosen by Merton when he professed monastic vows, vows that—when choosing to become a hermit after his affair with Margie—he solemnly renewed. “I don’t really want married life anyway,” Merton wrote in the midst of it all. “I want the life I have vowed.”

Others were not so fortunate. We need not wonder what literary output from the same period might have looked like were a monk to abandon his vows for marriage, for this is precisely what happened with Merton’s contemporary and friend, the “Beat Friar,” a one-time Dominican lay brother and poet named William Everson (1912–1994). I can’t say that Everson’s attempt to rewrite the Song of Solomon, on offer in his 1973 book Man-Fate: The Swan Song of Brother Antoninus, has aged entirely well. While Solomon stayed his hand, Everson’s description of sex with his one-time counselee and now wife suffers from considerable oversharing.

In retrospect, Everson’s swapping out his monastic habit for trendy buckskins at a 1969 poetry event in San Francisco and proclaiming himself “poet-shaman” looks more like conformity than courage. His claim to have become “all Indian at last” after a quick visit to Wounded Knee evokes not awe but snickers. What haunts me most about Man-Fate is not the salaciousness but the following lines:

This is not to entirely rule out a legitimate calling from monasticism to marriage, or vice versa. But Everson’s career reveals that vows are not broken without great cost—a cost that Merton was fortunately spared. In Antipoem I, repudiating his stupidity, Merton writes,

On Monks and Mary

While Merton’s enabling friends were of little help during the episode with Margie, his less compromising brothers, John Eudes Bamberger and Abbot Dom James Fox, were indispensable guides, showing him what love looked like by drawing lines. Their advice to not “follow the ecstasy” is what true friendship looks like when temptation threatens to shipwreck a life. But just as important was another woman besides Margie: the Virgin Mary. This aspect of the affair is rarely commented on, perhaps because it might make Merton, the hip monk who chilled with Joan Baez and impressed the Dalai Lama, look too staid. But the blinders first came off during his preparation for his vow to become a hermit, vows deliberately professed on September 8, 1966, the Nativity of the Virgin Mary. As he wrote in an intention for a Mass the same year of his affair:

It is a prayer that Mary, in the mysterious role that Christ entrusted to her, appears to have answered.

Moreover, further clarifications about Margie came as he meditated on Marian apparitions received in the Spanish mountain town of Garabandal. Here is the passage in full:

Merton would, of course, not be the only modern mystic who experienced Mary’s healing dimensions. In his unusual book Yoga and the Jesus Prayer, Thomas Matus counters the suspicion that he is somehow unfulfilled as a celibate monk by writing, “I have entrusted my sex life as a celibate monastic to the Mother of Jesus, and she has never failed me.” Similarly, William Johnston culminates his reflection on Christian mysticism in The Wounded Stag by citing his fellow Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins’s famous line, “Be thou then, O thou dear / Mother, my atmosphere.” Mary became Johnston’s atmosphere as well, enabling him to hold to vows of celibacy while cultivating chaste friendships with women. Merton, Matus, and Johnston, in other words, all found fulfillment in their chosen celibate vocations, and they each credited the Virgin with helping them get there. Those who consider such testimonies untoward or creepy might consider the extent to which they remain captive to Freud’s assumption that spirituality is always a dim reflection of what really matters, which is sex.

Icons played a large role in cultivating the Marian atmosphere of Merton’s life, icons that embellished the spartan cinder blocks of his hermitage. Of the above left-hand one he wrote in January 1960 that it was “not astonishingly beautiful but simple and holy and joyous. It radiates a kind of joy and strength that one would not look for—or see if one looked only superficially.” Of the right-hand icon he wrote in gratitude to the friend who gave it to him in 1965, “How magnificent it is in its simplicity. I never tire of gazing at it. It will change my whole attitude.”

He took such icons on the road as well. After taking his vow as a hermit, in part because too many people were visiting him at his hermitage, he accepted the invitation to visit Asia. Part of the aim of the journey was to find a more isolated hermitage site for use by Abbey of Gethsemani monks. But Merton never returned. Jim Forest reports that among Merton’s possessions at his death by electrocution in Bangkok was a small hand-painted icon of Mary that was given to him by his friend Marco Pallis. The icon, from Mount Athos, was a gift of awesome significance to him. “[This] icon of the Holy Mother came as a messenger at a precise moment when a message was needed, and her presence before me has been an incalculable aid in resolving a difficult problem.” On it (as I describe elsewhere) he wrote words from the Philokalia in Greek:

This is the chaste intimacy represented so well by the Virgin, which the world, and indeed a good part of the church, finds quite impossible to understand.

That God brought good from Merton’s affair is not to be doubted; but that it was therefore excusable, or even beneficial, is—according to Merton himself—very much to be doubted indeed. I can agree with those who think Merton is attractive because he is not an unearthly ascetic but a real human. “This . . . is a house. . . . What I wear is pants,” Merton once wrote in The Hudson Review to those who expected him to wear a habit in his hermitage. But the everyman monk who wore pants like the rest of us, by his own admission, should have kept them on.

Merton’s words in The Sign of Jonas, “Our Lady is my guide in the interior life,” were true to the end. His appalling affair (to borrow Sarah Coakley’s appropriate adjective) with Margie briefly eclipsed this deeper relationship, which was promptly resumed. Merton learned from Mary that contemplation was the only lasting cure to his longing for recognition. “Hers is the most hidden of sanctities,” the Trappist once wrote. “Mary’s chief glory is in her nothingness.” She was “so completely identified with truth like the clean windowpane which vanishes entirely into the light which it transmits.” There are signs that Merton had attained a similar peace at the end of his life.

He had written in The Seven Storey Mountain that “there was this shadow, this double, this writer, who had followed me into the cloister.” But at Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka he wrote he had “pierced through the surface and got beyond the shadow and the disguise.” The last Mass he celebrated, on December 8, two days before his death, marked the feast of Mary’s conception. Merton’s anticipation of this occasion was his last journal entry.

Against the baseless rumours that he had become Buddhist, the very same day he wrote to a friend, “I have not found what I came here to find. I have not found any place of hermitage that is any better than the hermitage I have, or had, at Gethsemani, which is after all places, a great place.” Griffin wisely concludes that “had Merton returned from the East alive, he would have become more and more silent. . . . He would have gone on writing . . . but he would have published less and less.” Merton once prayed to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, “Teach me to go to the country beyond words and beyond names.” And she answered.

We read Merton still not because of his lamentable failure with Margie. We read him because he came to realize it was one.

He had found a greater nurse.

Special thanks to Paul M. Pearson, director and archivist at the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University, for his gracious assistance with research for this piece and permission to reproduce Merton’s icons.