Haven’t done anything on my main guru Thomas Merton in awhile. hence, with it being Sunday and me trying to post something semi-religious, let’s celebrate tomorrow’s anniversary of Brother Tom getting laid.
Yep, that’s what I said “getting laid” because on 11 June 1966 Merton and his nurse friend Margaret Smith met in his shrink’s office and consummated their love affair. Margaret was a 25 year old nurse who had helped Merton recover from back surgery and they became close friends. So close that the monastic, celibate, Trappist monk yielded to all of Maragret’s many charms. Here is the story reprinted from a Note in Merton’s Wikipedia entry (click here and scroll down:)
In Learning to Love, Merton’s diary entries discuss his various meetings with Smith, and in several cases he expressly denies sexual consummation, e.g. p. 52. However, on Saturday, June 11, 1966, Merton arranged to ‘borrow’ the Louisville office of his psychologist, Dr. James Wygal, to get together with Smith, see p. 81. The diary entry for that day notes that they had a bottle of champagne. A parenthetical with dots at that point in the narrative indicates that further details regarding this meeting were not published in Learning to Love. In the June 14 entry, Merton notes that he had found out the night before that a brother at the abbey had overheard one of his phone conversations with Smith and had reported it to Dom James, Abbot of Gethsemani. Merton wondered in his diary which phone conversation had been monitored, saying that a conversation he had on Sunday morning, i.e., the morning following the meeting with Smith at Wygal’s office, would be “the worst!!”, see p. 82. The June 14 diary entry also describes Merton’s discussions with Abbot James in this regard, and Merton’s intent to follow the Abbot’s instruction to end his romantic relationship with M. Roughly a month later, in his entry for July 12, 1966, Merton says regarding Smith, “Yet there is no question I love her deeply … I keep remembering her body, her nakedness, the day at Wygal’s, and it haunts me … I could have been enslaved to the need for her body after all. It is a good thing I called it off [i.e., a proposed visit by Smith to Gethsemani to speak with Merton there following their break-up, which Merton called off].” See p. 94. Learning to Love reveals that Merton remained in contact with Marge after his July 12, 1966 entry (p.94) and after he recommitted himself to his vows (p. 110). He saw her again on July 16, 1966, and wrote: “She says she thinks of me all the time (as I do of her) and her only fear is that being apart and not having news of each other, we may gradually cease to believe that we are loved, that the other’s love for us goes on and is real. As I kissed her she kept saying, ‘I am happy, I am at peace now.’ And so was I” (p. 97). Despite good intentions, he continued to contact her by phone when he left the monastery grounds. For example, he wrote on January 18, 1967 that “last week” he and two friends “drank some beer under the loblollies at the lake–should not have gone to Bardstown and Willett’s in the evening. Conscience stricken for this the next day. Called M. from filling station outside Bardstown. Both glad” (p. 186).
For more discussion on Merton’s affair with Margaret (click here.)
Clapton’s Layla is still the best song ever about being in love with someone and dealing with not being able to “act” upon it for whatever reason(s:)