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Connecting with a legacy, Claudette McDonald
of Des Moines, Ia. touches Thomas Merton's
gravestone during a 1989 pilgrimage to the
Trappist monastery in Kentucky.
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During a visit in the mid-1990s to the Abbey of Our Lady of
He was referring to Thomas Merton, the 20th century monk at Gethsemani who ranks as one of history’s great figures on religion, writing and social criticism.
Merton, a convert to Catholicism who lived at Gethsemani from 1941 until his untimely death in 1968, sometimes retreated to a backwoods hermitage at the abbey to turn out books, essays and poems that powerfully influenced spiritual, religious and pacifist thinking worldwide.
Our host’s downbeat assessment of the Merton name as an annoyance that narrows the understanding of the monastery left the half-dozen of us a little slack jawed.
Though I knew a few Louisville activists who had visited Thomas Merton and had talked of the real-world limits which shaped his and other monks’ lives at Gethsemani, Merton still had been guru-like to radical activists of the secular and religious realms.
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| Thomas Merton, 1915-1968 |
Or perhaps not. Our host told us straightforwardly that day in the ‘90s that the Gethsemani monks’ lives were about communion with God through both group ceremony and workaday toils, not exuding the sheen of any one former brother’s legendary insights.
As a secular, non-Catholic person, my conception of Thomas Merton was shaped by reading some of his works and by hearing talks and doing interviews with a few of his closest friends, including Sister Mary Luke Tobin, a feminist, ecumenist and member of the Loretto nuns; and Ron Seitz, a Louisville poet, essayist and creative writing professor whose haiku written upon Merton’s death is the most moving piece of writing I have ever seen.
While I worked as a writer and photographer for Louisville’s archdiocesan newspaper The Record, it was my good fortune in 1989 to cover the first meeting of the International Thomas Merton Society.
This two-day coverage of sessions at
Bellarmine University in Louisville and a group trip to Gethesemani was among a
handful of stories I did involving Merton and the contemplative radical lives
of monks at the monastery and nearby orders of nuns while reporting for The
Record, then editing FORsooth, a peace and justice newspaper.
In 2008, I covered the 50th anniversary of the life changing epiphany which had come to Thomas Merton on an ordinary busy day in downtown Louisville.
In
the spring of 1958, the already worldwide acclaimed monk was surrounded by
average Louisvillians waiting for the crosswalk signal to change as a moment
ensued which for all but one person present was just another non-descript and
forgettable instant in lives of expedience.
“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district,” Merton wrote in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness…. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
In 2008, I covered the 50th anniversary of the life changing epiphany which had come to Thomas Merton on an ordinary busy day in downtown Louisville.
“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district,” Merton wrote in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness…. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
The dedication of a plaque at 4th
and Walnut (the latter street was renamed Muhammad Ali Boulevard in the ‘70s)
in March 2008 drew about 75 people from the Louisville area and as far away as
Christchurch, New Zealand.
Also present were Louisville political hopefuls
whose speeches and photo ops made the event run long.
The blend of Merton friendly constituencies – traditional Catholics, intellectuals, political activists and tourism minded business people – was golden for candidates.
The blend of Merton friendly constituencies – traditional Catholics, intellectuals, political activists and tourism minded business people – was golden for candidates.
City leaders were
chortling with delight over the worldwide visitor promotion potential from the
identifying of this street corner as the place where such a profound shift in
religious and political thinking was born. That night they unveiled 4th
and Muhammad Ali’s honorary name of Thomas Merton Square.
Spiritual Travels website writer Lori
Erickson recently gave the intersection a green light: “I
don’t know of anything else quite like it. Where else in America can you find a
tourist plaque marking a mystical experience?
"Its existence points to Merton’s
influence and importance, but also to a central teaching of his: there is no
division between the sacred and the secular. All places are holy, including a
busy street corner in the middle of a city.”
The sacred and the secular crisscross where two busy thoroughfares do as well. So do the left and the right often, wherever Thomas Merton’s legacy dwells.
Two polar opposites in Catholic activism I interviewed were Father Jim Flynn, a bold anti-oligarchy and pro-sanctuary activist who had repeatedly risked his mortal life resisting U.S. Central America policy and marching with Martin Luther King against segregation in Louisville; and Ron Ray, a lawyer, former Pentagon official and Vietnam combat veteran during his years as a colonel in the Marines.
The sacred and the secular crisscross where two busy thoroughfares do as well. So do the left and the right often, wherever Thomas Merton’s legacy dwells.
Two polar opposites in Catholic activism I interviewed were Father Jim Flynn, a bold anti-oligarchy and pro-sanctuary activist who had repeatedly risked his mortal life resisting U.S. Central America policy and marching with Martin Luther King against segregation in Louisville; and Ron Ray, a lawyer, former Pentagon official and Vietnam combat veteran during his years as a colonel in the Marines.
Ray had overseen fundraising for a Vietnam memorial in
Kentucky’s capital city of Frankfort, and he had seemed like the most pleasant and
soothing personality until he later wrote several articles in which he maliciously
attacked gay people.
Both Father Flynn and Colonel Ray, in unrelated interviews a few years apart, told me they sometimes sought inspiration by reading and praying by the grave of Thomas Merton on the abbey grounds. (Whether they ever met there or elsewhere I don’t know.)
The Merton gravesite is a powerful spot. At the 1989 pilgrimage of Merton Society members, I saw a nun draping a rosary over the grave then praying, and another visitor picking pieces of grass from the gravesite and placing them into a sealed plastic bottle.
Both Father Flynn and Colonel Ray, in unrelated interviews a few years apart, told me they sometimes sought inspiration by reading and praying by the grave of Thomas Merton on the abbey grounds. (Whether they ever met there or elsewhere I don’t know.)
The Merton gravesite is a powerful spot. At the 1989 pilgrimage of Merton Society members, I saw a nun draping a rosary over the grave then praying, and another visitor picking pieces of grass from the gravesite and placing them into a sealed plastic bottle.
Another standing nearby asked me to
photograph her broken camera lens, which she explained had fallen on the floor
of the Gethsemani chapel during that morning’s service, and had cracked more or
less in the shape of the letter A, or the Greek letter Alpha, which she said while
exuberantly smiling was a symbol for happiness.
If the mishap had happened anywhere
else, it would have been just a crack, and in something so expensive as a lens,
hardly denotive of happiness.
But in the place where Thomas Merton walked, positive feelings come naturally.
^Click ABOVE to hear Thomas Merton's final talk, in Thailand, hours before his death on Dec. 10, 1968.
Back at the campus which served as the gathering place for that initial Merton Society meeting in 1989, a new president, Joseph J. McGowan, would shortly lead Bellarmine after leaving a position at Fordham University in New York City. McGowan and his wife Rita McGowan won friends instantly with their likability and emphasis on student life at Bellarmine, which opened in 1950 as locally focused Bellarmine College.
^Click ABOVE to hear Thomas Merton's final talk, in Thailand, hours before his death on Dec. 10, 1968.
Back at the campus which served as the gathering place for that initial Merton Society meeting in 1989, a new president, Joseph J. McGowan, would shortly lead Bellarmine after leaving a position at Fordham University in New York City. McGowan and his wife Rita McGowan won friends instantly with their likability and emphasis on student life at Bellarmine, which opened in 1950 as locally focused Bellarmine College.
As the McGowans arrived
in 1990, the campus would shortly be basking in very high rankings in Money,
Forbes, and U.S. News magazine stories on the nation’s best values in higher
education.
Under Joseph McGowan, dorms were built to accommodate the influx of students drawn by these magazine rankings, but also per his policies, adjuncts were replacing retiring professors, and STEM was overshadowing liberal arts.
Under Joseph McGowan, dorms were built to accommodate the influx of students drawn by these magazine rankings, but also per his policies, adjuncts were replacing retiring professors, and STEM was overshadowing liberal arts.
In
other words, the personable and intellectual McGowan nonetheless was emulating college trends of the 1990s and 2000s making growth,
financial assets and public image paramount.
And that meant a decision by
Merton in the mid-1960s to donate his papers to inaugurate the Thomas Merton
Center at what was then a rather quiet and provincial Bellarmine College now spelled “recruiting gold” to a BU not content in the 21st Century with
anything but exponential growth (McGowan said he hoped Bellarmine would become
the Vanderbilt of the region).
“Besides being one of the most significant interdisciplinary Catholic thinkers of the 20th Century, Merton was both a neighbor and a close friend to Bellarmine, entrusting the bulk of his literary estate to our stewardship,” McGowan wrote in promotion material in 2015 for a Bellarmine-organized centennial celebration of Thomas Merton’s birth.
Though who am I to question a monk and writer’s
choice, I believe Spalding University, then called Spalding College, would have
been more fitting as a Merton repository.
“Besides being one of the most significant interdisciplinary Catholic thinkers of the 20th Century, Merton was both a neighbor and a close friend to Bellarmine, entrusting the bulk of his literary estate to our stewardship,” McGowan wrote in promotion material in 2015 for a Bellarmine-organized centennial celebration of Thomas Merton’s birth.
Spalding, near the historic Old
Louisville section of the inner city, was founded in 1814 by Mother Catherine
Spalding, the beatified founder of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth.
Their
headquarters is about 10 miles from Gethsemani, and the pro-feminist peace and justice activist Merton blends with the woman-founded, social work oriented
Spalding.
Bellarmine was proposed as all-male, and its student body was for the school’s first year. It was named for Roberto Bellarmino (whose name was later anglicized), the Catholic Church’s overseer of the censoring and home incarceration of Galileo for his correct findings about the planets and the sun.
It certainly seems a contradiction that a science-oriented college would be named for him in the mid-20th century -- the persecution by Bellarmino was a setback to Galileo, and science.
In 2019, however, Spalding University is getting a slice of the Thomas Merton legacy.
Bellarmine was proposed as all-male, and its student body was for the school’s first year. It was named for Roberto Bellarmino (whose name was later anglicized), the Catholic Church’s overseer of the censoring and home incarceration of Galileo for his correct findings about the planets and the sun.
It certainly seems a contradiction that a science-oriented college would be named for him in the mid-20th century -- the persecution by Bellarmino was a setback to Galileo, and science.
In 2019, however, Spalding University is getting a slice of the Thomas Merton legacy.
A Contemplative Garden dedicated to Merton’s
life and work is opening on the Spalding campus this year, complete with a 27-foot-tall stupa – a monument modeled in the Eastern
tradition – which will contain Thomas Merton artifacts, including visual images from a
meeting in India between Merton and Tibetan spiritual leader in exile His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama shortly before Merton’s death in Thailand from an accidental
electrocution during a break at a multi-faith conference.
“The garden is designed to express the unity experienced by the Dalai Lama and Merton through their historic meeting as well as how both men oriented their life’s activities around the contemplative tradition,” a Spalding website said.
As upbeat as this garden’s construction is, its venue is a reminder that a now closed Merton-Dalai Lama peace garden in downtown a block west of the Thomas Merton Square failed to achieve the hoped-for aesthetics.
That open-air facility drew more litter than visitors.
An imposing picture of Merton and the Dalai Lama was impressive, but just as telling was a sign pleading with skateboarders not to defile this place of sacredness, a needed request during a time when Tony Hawk had more followers under 40 than a great monk.
It seems that in the United States scheme of things, the crass can’t be excluded from the ideal.
It’s a combination as inevitable as travel agencies cashing in on trips to the Holy Land, or the Kroger supermarket chain making the yearly garland of roses for the Kentucky Derby winner, or the computers on which you read rallying cries for freedom for Tibetans being made in the nation that is their brutal oppressor.
Nonetheless, anyone who cares about ideals will find strength in Merton’s writings. He was pro-racial equality, pro-feminist and a pathfinder for multiculturalism, as demonstrated by that meeting with the Dalai Lama.
“The garden is designed to express the unity experienced by the Dalai Lama and Merton through their historic meeting as well as how both men oriented their life’s activities around the contemplative tradition,” a Spalding website said.
As upbeat as this garden’s construction is, its venue is a reminder that a now closed Merton-Dalai Lama peace garden in downtown a block west of the Thomas Merton Square failed to achieve the hoped-for aesthetics.
That open-air facility drew more litter than visitors.
An imposing picture of Merton and the Dalai Lama was impressive, but just as telling was a sign pleading with skateboarders not to defile this place of sacredness, a needed request during a time when Tony Hawk had more followers under 40 than a great monk.
It seems that in the United States scheme of things, the crass can’t be excluded from the ideal.
It’s a combination as inevitable as travel agencies cashing in on trips to the Holy Land, or the Kroger supermarket chain making the yearly garland of roses for the Kentucky Derby winner, or the computers on which you read rallying cries for freedom for Tibetans being made in the nation that is their brutal oppressor.
Nonetheless, anyone who cares about ideals will find strength in Merton’s writings. He was pro-racial equality, pro-feminist and a pathfinder for multiculturalism, as demonstrated by that meeting with the Dalai Lama.
"Keep Your heart awake." From some Merton talks in the 1960s.
Merton
also was passionately against the nuclear arms race.
He wrote the poem “Original Child Bomb” against the use of the A-bomb at
Hiroshima while he lived amid the highly pro-war and culturally normative
populace of Nelson County, where World War II is The Good War, no questions
asked.
Nelson had the highest percentage of Vietnam veterans of Kentucky’s 120
counties, and unreconstructed pro-war attitudes abound there, yet the anti-war
Merton is revered among locals. Farmers and other neighbors often chat with
“the monks” over the fence during the day’s labors, just as rural people do
everywhere.
In Louisville, everyone seems to have a Merton encounter story, frequently
true, if embellished, and often second-hand.
It was Merton’s only straying from his vows of celibacy during
his 27 years as a monk, and the involvement was deeply meaningful to him, if
impetuous.
Former Irish Times correspondent John Cooney, using as a source Gethsemani monk and Merton colleague Fr John Eudes Bamberger, wrote in 2015 that the 51-year-old Thomas Merton “fell in love with 19-year-old Margie Smith,” adding: “It was a situation which was obviously provoking an acute inner crisis in Merton who was perceived to be in a mid-life fling with a young woman.
Not permanently. McCarthy and other sources said Margie Smith shortly married her Chicago fiancée, returned to Ohio, continued her career in nursing, raised three children, and still keeps in touch with some Merton friends in Louisville. She has never publicly identified herself or spoken on the record (though one Merton biographer said he has talked by phone with her).
The Irish Times' John Cooney said Merton's last telephone call to Margie was to wish her bon voyage as she departed for her honeymoon with her Chicago fiancée in 1967. This would indicate the monk was letting go of that mad longing, figuring he and Margie would be resuming normal lives, both with many years to go.
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Brian Arbenz, a Louisville writer, researcher and activist, recommends these videos for more insights into the Trappist monk:
One acquaintance of mine in the 1980s
related their father’s memory of chatting with Merton at a chance meeting in
Louisville in the 1960s during which he told the monk – just as so many
immediately would – that he was uplifted by Merton’s 1948 book “The Seven
Storey Mountain."
That seminal book awoke social justice and individuality as causes
within Catholicism and wider Christianity. It was described
by Adrian Hastings, in his History of
English Christianity, 1920-1985, as “the most exciting and influential
religious autobiography of its generation, perhaps of this century.”
A co-worker of mine said they understood that the significant other was a nurse seen, or rumored to be seen enjoying a picnic with Merton in the city’s lovely and winding Cherokee Park in the mid-1960s.
But the Seven Storey Mountain author disagreed, according to my acquaintance, who related that Merton responded to their father’s praise for the
book by saying that it was “verbose” and urging him to read his more recent
works on social justice.
That anecdote is unverified, but another account of Merton’s
behavior while spending time in Louisville which was passed on to me secondhand has turned out to be proven correct: that the sworn
celibate monk Thomas Merton had a girlfriend.A co-worker of mine said they understood that the significant other was a nurse seen, or rumored to be seen enjoying a picnic with Merton in the city’s lovely and winding Cherokee Park in the mid-1960s.
Even if this citing were
confirmed, two people picnicking would seem flimsy evidence of an affair, but from
reports in Catholic and secular sources across the political spectrum –
including numerous biographies of Merton written since 2010 -- here is what is known:
Thomas Merton in fact became romantically involved with a student nurse who cared for him after the monk had back surgery in 1966 at St. Joseph Infirmary hospital in Louisville.
Thomas Merton in fact became romantically involved with a student nurse who cared for him after the monk had back surgery in 1966 at St. Joseph Infirmary hospital in Louisville.
Published reports have identified her as Margie Smith, and said she was a Catholic from Ohio who was 19 in 1966 and was engaged at the time to a future doctor
living in Chicago.
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| Louisville's St. Joseph Infirmary, the place where romance was planted. |
Former Irish Times correspondent John Cooney, using as a source Gethsemani monk and Merton colleague Fr John Eudes Bamberger, wrote in 2015 that the 51-year-old Thomas Merton “fell in love with 19-year-old Margie Smith,” adding: “It was a situation which was obviously provoking an acute inner crisis in Merton who was perceived to be in a mid-life fling with a young woman.
"On Saturday, June 11th, 1966 Merton, by now back at Gethsemani, arranged
to ‘borrow’ the Louisville office of his psychologist, Dr James Wygal, to meet
Margie, where they drank a bottle of champagne and became intimate.”
Wygal had more or less a contract with Gethsemani to provide counseling to its monks and he knew Merton personally.
The great progressive peace activist and Washington columnist Colman McCarthy, so close to Merton that he still calls him “my friend, Tom,” wrote in 2018 that his friend and the nurse “fell in love, hard.”
Wygal had more or less a contract with Gethsemani to provide counseling to its monks and he knew Merton personally.
The great progressive peace activist and Washington columnist Colman McCarthy, so close to Merton that he still calls him “my friend, Tom,” wrote in 2018 that his friend and the nurse “fell in love, hard.”
Citing Merton’s journals, McCarthy describes Margie Smith
as having “flowing black hair and gray eyes,” and said Thomas Merton wrote soon
after his release from St. Joseph hospital that it was "clearer than ever
that we are terribly in love, the kind of love that can virtually tear you
apart."
McCarthy added that despite Merton confessing the affair to a sympathetic but firm Abbot James Fox and agreeing to break it off and end all contact with Smith, "For months into the spring and summer, after repeated secret phone calls, furtive lunches and dinners, sipping champagne in Louisville, Merton's journal entries and letters would lyrically run deep with his happiness:
McCarthy added that despite Merton confessing the affair to a sympathetic but firm Abbot James Fox and agreeing to break it off and end all contact with Smith, "For months into the spring and summer, after repeated secret phone calls, furtive lunches and dinners, sipping champagne in Louisville, Merton's journal entries and letters would lyrically run deep with his happiness:
"‘We are moving slowly
toward a complete physical ripening of love, a leisurely preparation of our
whole being, like the maturing of apples in the sun.’
...."‘There is something
deep, deep down in us, darling, that tells us to let go completely. Not just
the letting go when the dress drops to the floor and bodies press together with
nothing in between, but the far more thrilling surrender when our very being surrenders
itself to the nakedness of love and to a union where there is no veil of
illusion between us. Darling, I long for it madly. Do you see? Do you need me
as well?’ ”
Not permanently. McCarthy and other sources said Margie Smith shortly married her Chicago fiancée, returned to Ohio, continued her career in nursing, raised three children, and still keeps in touch with some Merton friends in Louisville. She has never publicly identified herself or spoken on the record (though one Merton biographer said he has talked by phone with her).
The Irish Times' John Cooney said Merton's last telephone call to Margie was to wish her bon voyage as she departed for her honeymoon with her Chicago fiancée in 1967. This would indicate the monk was letting go of that mad longing, figuring he and Margie would be resuming normal lives, both with many years to go.
___________________________________________
Brian Arbenz, a Louisville writer, researcher and activist, recommends these videos for more insights into the Trappist monk:
"Merton just keeps on teaching."
A peacemaker who stood up for justice
