← Lewis Festival Scholar Series
Lewis Festival Scholar Series
"Of Solitude and Spiritual Friendships: Thomas Merton" Sophfronia Scott Ep. 1 LFSS Season 7
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Welcome to the c.s. lewis festival scholar series. I'm your host, david krause. The annual C.S. lewis Festival takes place in September at the renowned Great Lakes center for the Arts along the beautiful shores of Lake Michigan. The festival is a collaboration of the arts, education and faith communities in Petoskey, Michigan. The Detroit Free Press wrote. The Lewis Festival is known across the country for dozens of innovative activities and is the leading wave of interfaith dialogue in Michigan. For more information, please Visit us@cs LewisFestival.org as part of this growing podcast series, we're taking a look at the 2024 CS Lewis Festival featuring a unique group of speakers and authors delving into the theme the Seeker and the Storytellers and who are the Seekers and storytellers featured C.S. lewis, Madeleine L' Engle and Thomas Merton. All three were 20th century seekers whose moral imagination and spiritual quests were transformed by reading great books. All three went on to become renowned authors, poets and storytellers of faith whose works are widely influential today. This podcast features award winning journalist Sophronia Scott, founding director of the Alma College MFA in Creative Writing and author of the Seeker and the Everyday Conversations with Thomas Merton. Sophronia also has many other nonfiction and fiction titles to her credit. She is, along with Sarah Arthur, co director of the Lingo Writing Retreat. Now enjoy Sophronia's Talk of Solitude and the Spiritual How a Non Traditional Monk's Life Shaped the Writing of Thomas Merton.
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Thank you Sarah. Thank you David, Liz and Alex. I'm happy to be here. So Sarah mentioned the book the Seeker and the Everyday Conversations with Thomas Merton. I did not plan to write this book. If you had asked me in January 2018, would you ever write a book about Thomas Merton? I would say no. Why? There are tons of books about Thomas Merton. Thomas Merton has written tons of books. There does not need to be another book about Thomas Merton. A friend asked me because she knew that I read a lot of Thomas Merton, specifically his journals. Thomas Merton has seven volumes of journals and I was reading them happily and I sometimes quote Thomas Merton in social media. And so she knew this and she wanted to put together a panel for the Festival of Faith and Writing, which happens in Grand Rapids every other year at Calvin University. And she asked me to be on the panel and I said yes. And this was my first time really speaking about Merton outside of classes that I would teach at my local church. And so we get there and we're on this big stage and big audience and I suddenly am thinking, wait, I'm looking at the people on the panel with me, and I'm starting to think, well, I'm kind of a fraud sitting up here, and I better let the audience know. And so when we started, I said, look, just so you know, I am not an academic. I am not a scholar. I just kind of have this monk who follows me around and gives me advice. And that's how I'm going to talk to you about Merton, just from my personal sense of engagement with him, because I think about my personal life, I think about what he was going through in his journals, and he feels like a friend to me. So I'm going to talk to you about Merton in that way. And apparently that hit home because a lot of people throughout the conference after that panel were talking to me about it and asking me more questions, and because they wanted a way into Merton and they find it intimidating. Even today, someone's asking me about books to read by Merton. And so finally, this woman came up to me and said, and you're writing your Merton book, aren't you? And suddenly I was like, yes, I am. Okay. Because now I could see what it was. Usually when I write nonfiction, I'm answering a question, and the question I'm hearing, how do I read Thomas Merton? I can help. And I'm not someone to tell you how to read Thomas Merton, but I can show you how I read Thomas Merton. I'm a modeler. I will model for you. Here's how I read Thomas Merton, and hopefully it will help you get into this. So the book comes out, and, you know, I'm doing various talks and in rooms like this, answering questions. And I was doing a class for Baldwin Wallace University for a religious studies class there. One of the students asked me toward the end of the class, well, what don't you get to talk about where this book is concerned? I said, you know, this book is organized through Merton's bio, and it tackles a chapter. Each chapter engages with something that we are all dealing with today. Ambition, materialism, friendship, love, prayer, death, all of these different things. She said, what don't you get to talk about? I said, no one asks me about love or friendship. I said, I'm going to start talking about that. And so I started doing talks. And so I was kind of really excited when someone asked me about this. We're talking about friendships, we're talking about relationships. We're talking about conversations that these three writers could have together. I said, this is my opportunity again to talk about friendships and relationships and Merton and love. And that's what I'm going to talk to you about today because I think it's important. But I also must apologize to the people who came up to me this morning asking if I was going to talk about Merton's Catholicism and asking me if I was going to talk about Merton's Asian journals. I told them they only gave me an hour. Those are other talks I do retreats that are a couple days long. I don't have the time. Sorry. I'm sorry. But we're going to do this part today. We will do this today. So, as Sarah mentioned last night in our talk, Merton was born in 1915. He lost his mother around age of seven. She died of cancer. He lost his father. Merton was about 16, 17 when his father died of a brain tumor. And he basically, even though he had a younger brother, there was a loneliness about his existence. So he. He entered the monastery in 1941. And I should also tell you about my coming to Merton, because I also learned that in talking about Thomas Merton, everyone has a Merton story, almost like a conversion story, Right. I thought that was weird. But it's also enlightening when you talk about how one comes to Merton. And for me, there is something about his personality that makes me feel like he is someone I could have known. And reading his journals, his journals actually begin long before he was a monk. He'd been journaling from his early 20s. And so if you read his journals, you get this sense of him from. From a young man, through the conversion, then into the monastery. And even though all of this is in Seventh Story Mountain, it's not there in the same way, because Merton's work was censored and that was not common for him. Anybody who wrote on behalf of the Catholic Church, your work went through a certain editing process. And when I read the Seven Story Mountain, I enjoyed it. But to me, I felt like something was missing, that there were things he was not saying. And I eventually learned in reading a biography of him about this censorship process. But that's when I also learned about his journals. And that's when I knew I was going to find the real Merton, because that's what I cared about. I wanted to know this person who said this quote, right? If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live or what I like to eat or how I comb my hair, but ask me what am I living for. Oh, someone says to me, but he has no hair, but ask me what am I living for in detail. Ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. And I don't know about you as much as I love my friends and my relationships. It's really hard to have this kind of conversation in today's world. And I was looking to have this conversation, but I didn't know about Merton until I was well into my 40s. You'll see this in the book. I basically. I was an MFA student myself, and it was actually the very first MFA lecture I was in, where one of the people, one of the lecturers, read a portion from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. And it just set me on fire. And I was reading this for Chuck this morning. I was like, okay, I read it for Chuck. I'll read it for you guys. The first chirps. And by the way, this is the section, if you know Conjectures. This is the part called the Night Spirit in the Dawn Air. And it begins with how the valley awakes. The first chirps of the waking birds mark the point Vierge of the dawn under a sky as yet without real light. A moment of awe and inexpressible innocence. When the Father, in perfect silence, opens their eyes, they begin to speak to him not with fluent song, but with an awakening question that is their dawn state, Their state at the point vierge, their condition. Asked if it is time for them to be, he answers, yes. Then they, one by one, wake up and become birds. They manifest themselves as birds beginning to sing. Presently, they will be fully themselves and will even fly. Meanwhile, the most wonderful moment of the day is that when creation in its innocence asks permission to be. Or once again, as it did on the first morning that ever was. And I heard that, and I think, yes, yes, that's exactly it. I want to be outside. I want to get that message telling me it's time for me to be. Who is this man who wrote this? What in the world? Right? But notice I didn't go out and buy the book. I didn't go out and look. I said, oh, they have this at my library. I'm going to go get this book from the library. I ordered it through interlibrary loan, and when it showed up, I raced to the library and got that book and started looking for that section. And I couldn't find was not in the book. I'm thinking, did I get the wrong book? But then me, I'm a book person. I started looking at the book. I could see that there were pages had been torn out. That section that I was looking for had been torn out. And I took that as A sign. I said, okay, there's something deeper going on here. Sophronia, you can't just take this book from the library and think you're gonna just look at this and throw it away. You're gonna have to go buy this book. You're gonna have to go get other books. And obviously, this person is meant to be something more in your life, and I took it that way. So, Merton, for me, Thomas Merton helps me access and love the impossible world. Right? This is this man who. Reading him as a young man in his 20s makes me sometimes feel like his mother. And I would read his journals from that time, and I'm feeling like I'm talking to him like my son. Really? Really, Thomas, I think you could have made a better decision there. Why are you being this way? There are times when he feels like my two older brothers, where he has this swagger, right. That I just love. I love my older brothers. And to me, Thomas Merton could be very bold in that way. Sarah mentioned I went to Harvard sometimes, and he went to Columbia when he eventually came to the United States. Sometimes he reminds me of my classmates, and I want to be in a debate arguing with him up until the time he died when he was 53. And when I wrote this book, I was 53 and thinking about us at the same age, and his thoughts about death, not knowing he was going to die, but those were. That was the way he was thinking. And I'll get to a little bit of that later. I mentioned before that he was, you know, a bit of a rake. He's kind of a good looking guy. Yeah, he was cutie. Yeah. But he was also, as I mentioned, alone a lot. And I think in certain ways, as I would say to a young man, he didn't know how to behave, and he didn't have a mother who would check his behavior. He didn't have a present male guardian who would say, okay, you need to be better about these things. So he went to Cambridge and he drank a lot, and he was a womanizer. And as I mentioned, he got a young woman pregnant, and he got sent down. He got kicked out of Cambridge, and his guardian sent him to the United States and he went to Columbia. But at Columbia, he developed friendships that he would have for the rest of his life. He met Robert Lacks, who is the young man on the right with Merton at the top. Top picture, he met Edwin Rice, who's in the bottom. And although he's not in this photo, he also met Bob Giroux, who became of Farrar Strauss And Giroux, who would publish his work eventually, and Madeleines, right? So these men, they would be. Even though they were college guys, I think these were the first serious relationships he would have about writing about life. Robert Lacks went on to become a noted poet in his right. And Merton was writing poetry, he was drawing illustrations. He was the editor of the Yearbook. But he also ended up in a class on religious studies, which is the thing that sparked him to think about his own spirituality and which led to that conversion that we talk about, that he writes about in Seven Story Mountain that led him to becoming Catholic. Now, he didn't go into the monastery right away. He graduated from Columbia. He was teaching at Saint Bonaventure's College in upstate New York. But he had this experience. He was actually trying to figure out if the monastery would be his calling. He did some volunteer work at a place called Friendship House in Harlem. And he was trying to figure out whether that would be his calling or whether he would be in the monastery. But he had an experience there with being in community that. I will read this to you. And this is from 7 story Mountain of his. What it meant to him to be with the volunteers in that program. And these people impressed him deeply. He said he felt that the group, quote, had banded themselves together to form a small secret colony of the kingdom of heaven in this earth of exile. And when he left, he felt a void. When he stopped volunteering there, he felt a void. He felt as though he'd been tossed back into the world unanchored, an orphan once again. He said he realized that this connection, this type of connection was important to him. He wrote, I needed this support, this nearness of those who really loved Christ so much that they seemed to see him. I needed to be with people whose every action told me something of the country that was my home. Just as expatriates in every alien land keep together, if only to remind themselves by their very faces and clothes and gait and accents and expressions of the land they come from, right? So he hit upon this sense that the spiritual journey requires companionship. And perhaps that was something that led him to consider that he really did need to be in a monastery. This is the I. A month after, actually a month after the Walking on Water conference, I was in. I was in Kentucky to visit the monastery, the Abbey of Gethsemane, where Merton became a monk in 1941 and where he spent the rest of his life. And this is. This is their earliest morning prayer. This is like 3:30 in the morning. And there is A cycle of prayer that the monks go through. And it's funny, when I first got there and they give you the little schedule, I thought, are they really going to be there at 3:30 in the morning? And so I put on my little slippers, I had sweatpants on. I was like, okay, I'm going to go. And sure enough, there they were. But when you think about it, you are in this community. And it was even bigger than when he was there. And by the way, this photograph, if you look at photographs from Merton's funeral, it's dark, there's actually an altar, and it goes much further back. And there's an amazing photo of his coffin in. In that section, in that dark section, and his brothers around his coffin after he died. And the monastery brothers. The monastery brothers, yeah. So. But I have this feeling Merton went to a couple of retreats at this monastery before he actually joined it. And I have this theory that, you know, you go on retreat and what do you do? You're in your room, right, and you're reading and you're writing and you're walking around and you're thinking, I have this suspicion that he thought he was going to live like that. He went to the monastery, he entered the monastery. And you have this schedule that you are on this timetable of prayer through a specific time that you have for yourself. But you're also expected. You're doing physical labor of clearing the fields. You're expected to help in the teaching of the novices that come in. He was the master of novices for a while. And once the Seven Story mountain came out, it became a lot noisier at this monastery because it actually got more men came to this monastery. A lot of money came into the monastery because of it. They were automating things. And so it wasn't the quiet refuge that I think he thought it would be. The other thing is that he thought he would leave writing behind when he entered the monastery. And he even burned some manuscripts, right? He gave away poetry manuscripts to friends. He thought that this was something he would leave behind because he thought it was an expression of ego, that this wasn't something that would be becoming to a monk. But his supervisors saw this talent and felt that it could be used for the faith. And they were the ones that encouraged him to write Seven Story Mountains. And this is a spiritual biography. It was published in 1948. He was only 33 years old to publish a biography that was so far reaching that put him on the map. He was only 33, so he was Writing even more, more than ever. And he, from then on out was kind of balancing that struggle of, well, you know, he's trying not to get egotistical about it. On the one hand he's like, okay, I'm a monk and this. On the other hand, he says, I wonder if they made it into a movie, would Gary Cooper play me? And he's like, but no, I shouldn't be thinking about that. I shouldn't be thinking about that, right? You see, this endeared me to me. It's like, oh, he's so funny. But if you're going to write, writing requires an ongoing conversation. He couldn't be writing all of this material. And he was prolific. You don't just write off the top of your head and from your own experience. Writing is a conversation with books, it's a conversation with other people. If you would see him reading, he always read with a pen in his hand or a pencil in his hand, marked up manuscripts, constantly speaking to the author, even if he's just talking and writing to the piece now, because I think because it was so noisy, he had this yearning to be in solitude. And the Trappists are not a hermitage based monastery. They are meant to be in community, a lot of times in silence. And so his superiors resisted his requests for years for him to have a hermitage, for him to be on his own. And he finally got this hermitage. It's hard to see, but it's this little, you know, this little piece out in the woods. But even when they built this, they didn't tell him, okay, we're going to build your hermitage. They built this building and said, well, we're going to use it for conferences, for retreats, when other people come. And then when he was allowed to stay there, he wasn't allowed to stay there overnight. He could just go there and pray. But he had to come back to the monastery. And it wasn't until early 60s that he was finally about to really, truly be there. But again, you can't write in isolation. So we're talking about someone who kept up a voluminous correspondence with people. He had letter writing to people like Joan Baez, Boris Pasternak, anybody that he felt that he read something that affected him, he would fire off a letter and send it. But when you think about it, this wasn't like firing off an email and sending an email. He had to find the person's address, right? He had to get the stamp, he had to get permission to mail a letter. Because of the monastery, you're not Allowed to be just out and talking to everybody. And at one point, his abbot said that he felt that Merton was too engaged with the world. He was too much. And it's like you're trying to put toothpaste back in a tube, right? You've let this man out into the world in a certain way. Even though he's in the monastery, he still has to be engaged with people. So Merton's friendships were varied. And I'm going to talk about these friendships in three different ways. So thinking about the respect that is required to have a certain kind of friendship, the second is having the openness and acceptance because a good friend will tell you about yourself. And so Merton had to be able to hear that. The third thing is how does the love and friendship that you've taken in express itself out in the world? And so how did the people inspire, influence Merton? And then how did that show up in his writing? So this is a photo, and I love this photo because I'm a car person, and I love that he's laughing and smiling. The person driving this car is one of the monastery brothers. His name is Father John of the Cross, and he was a young man who came to the monastery. And even though he was younger than Merton, Merton saw that there was a spiritual connection that he had with this young man, and he became Merton's spiritual director. And there's this wonderful part where he. He talks about how John of the Cross, he's one of the few men in this monastery who have anything to say in a sermon. What he preaches is really the gospel, right? And Merton appreciated this young man's sense of grace and his willingness to chide Merton. He said, father John of the Cross said, I would have less resentment in me if I were more concentrated on doing whatever it is God wills for me and not considering the defects of this institution. He said, I know the integrity of this man is very costly to him. He suffers very much in order to be true to his own heart, that is, to the heart which God has given him and which has in it a mysterious command that no one here is able to understand. And, in fact, Father John of the Cross eventually did leave the monastery. And I ache for Merton in that respect to have lost such a friend, right? And for Merton to recognize and again to respect where this young man was and not anybody else. And probably John had this from the other monks, saying, well, you need to do this. You need to be this way in order to fit in here, right? And Merton knew him well enough to know this man is bigger somehow, like, than some. This box that we seem to be trying to put him in. Right. And maybe it's meant for him to be out in the world spreading gospel in a different way. I don't know. But Merton respected that. The other thing that's interesting about Merton is that even though he's this monk, and a lot of times at a hermitage, there were people hanging out with Merton all the time. People would go hang out with Merton, they would come to the monastery. This is Wendell Berry and his wife come visit him. This is Thich Nhat Hanh. And they were tremendous friends. And of course, you know, he only. He recently just passed away, didn't he? Right. So you can, you know, you realize how young he was in this picture, Right. This is the jazz musician Dick Sisto. This is Seymour Freegood and Dan Walsh. And I couldn't find a photo with him and Joan Baez. Right. But they would. They would hang out. This is Robert Lacks, came to visit him. And I think that's Edwin Rice as well. And so I was thinking about, oh, this is the Dalai Lama, Right. So I was thinking about, well, what is it like to hang out with Thomas Merton? And I found this video. Let's see if we can get it to play. So this is Henri Nouwen, and let's see if we can get this to play. Oh, I think we don't have the sound. Is it. Is it? So what do I. So he bloomed, and I feel that his friendships were part of that. And he knew that every so often he would hit upon a relationship that expressed this growth. So this is Boris Pasternak, the author of Dr. Zhivago. And Merton read his work and was moved to write to Pasternak. He wrote to him in 1958. He actually sent him a copy of one of his own prose poems. And Merton said to him, with other writers, I can share ideas, but you seem to communicate something deeper. It is as if we met on a deeper level of life on which individuals are not separate beings, as if we were known to one another in God. And Pasternak responds, acknowledging that connection. He said that Merton's letter was wonderfully filled with kindred thoughts, as having been written half by myself. And so Merton, in his journal, of course, he's excited to get this letter. And he wrote to him in his journal. He said that the letter confirmed my intuition of the deep and fundamental understanding that exists between us. And this is the thing I have been growing to see is most important, everything. And that's in italics. Everything hangs on the possibility of such understanding, which forms our interior bond. That is the only basis of true peace and true community. External, juridical, doctrinal, et cetera. Bonds can never achieve this. And this bond exists between me and countless people like Pasternak everywhere in the world. And then he has his parentheses genuine. People like Pastor Knack are never countless. And my vocation is intimately bound up with this bond and this understanding, for the sake of which also I have to be solitary and not waste my spirit in pretenses that do not come anywhere near the reality or have anything to do with it. Right. That connection. Right. That you take it to me. Connections like that. You're on a journey and you're kind of having. Your headlights are kind of like half dim, and you know you're on this journey and you know you're kind of going in the right direction, but because you can't see it that well, you're kind of moving slowly. Okay, I'm driving slowly. But a friend like Pasternak, this type of friend, shines a spotlight on the road. Here it is. And suddenly it's like you can see that road and that person sees you. Now I can run. Now I can. It's like they've created the wormhole and you from here to here, like that. John o'. Donoghue. I don't know how many of you know the Celtic writer, spiritualist John o'. Donoghue. He calls that relationship anamkara. Right? Anamkara. In the early Celtic church, a person who acted as a teacher, companion, or spiritual guide was called an anam kara. It originally referred to someone to whom you confessed, revealing the hidden intimacies of your life. With the anamkara, you could share your innermost self, your mind and your heart. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. When you had an anamkara, your friendship cut across all convention, morality and category. You were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the friend of your soul. Right? So he's looking for relationships like that, relationships that opened him up to new experiences, to understanding spirituality. He became friends with the Zen master, DT Suzuki, and he actually Merton. This photo was taken in New York City. Merton got permission to leave the abbey to go visit Suzuki. When he learned that he was in the country and in New York City. Suzuki, I believe, was in his early 90s at this point. And this would, you know, Milton knew that this would probably be the last chance to see him alive. And so he was allowed to visit, but he was given rules Even he was like, you can't let anybody else know that you're going. You can't. You know, he just had to be very low key about this. And so he was allowed to go and visit Suzuki. But he wrote about this in terms of thinking about the type of conversations that they could have. And he showed this interest in Suzuki for the long term. But he was also thinking very carefully about their dialogue and what that would be like and how the relationship would progress. And he understood that such an interaction would turn on trusting God as well, because he wanted to have respect for Suzuki's own beliefs. He said, if I should demand that Suzuki should come over and meet me on this ground that is alien to us both, it would be a terrible infidelity to truth, to myself and to Christ. Thus, if I tried baldly and bluntly to convert Suzuki, that is, make him accept, and he uses these quotation marks, make him accept formulas regarding the faith that are accepted by the average American Catholic, I would, in fact, not convert him at all, but simply confuse and, in a cultural sense, degrade him. If I can meet him on common ground of spiritual truth, where we share a real and deep experience of God and where we know in humility, in our deepest selves, and if we can discuss and compare the formulas we use to describe this experience, then I certainly think Christ would be present and glorified in both of us, and this would lead to a conversion of us both, an elevation, a development, a serious growth in Christ. Right? And Suzuki just totally appreciated Merton's experience, his candor. It was a joyful meeting. It was a joyful meeting. You know, drinking tea sometimes, Merton having to yell in his ear because Suzuki was going deaf, right? And I love the image of them discussing, of sharing experiences of God. And I do think God was present and glorified in this meeting. When Suzuki left Merton, he said to him, the most important thing is love, right? John o' Donoghue writes, human presence is a creative and turbulent sacrament, a visible sign of invisible grace. Friendship is the sweet grace that liberates us to approach, recognize, and inhabit this adventure. I love Facebook, but the one issue I have with Facebook is that we take on and discard friends really easily. Friend unfriendly, right? Like, unlike. And I'm concerned that we are losing the depth of understanding of what it means to have a friend, to be a friend, right? And to live from that friendship, to know how people inspire us, right? To walk with that kind of companionship. Now, we're going to take this to a Different type of relationship. This is the sixth journal, the sixth volume of Merton's journal. It's called Learning to love. In 1966, early 1966, Merton is lamenting the death of a couple of friends. At that time, you know, you're white, male, in your early 50s, guys were dying of heart attacks. He had lost a couple of college friends. He had started the work that would put together his literary estate. One of the reasons why we have so much Merton accessible to us is because he did a bang up job of making sure his estate was organized long before he died. And he had very good friends. He put them in charge of that. And by the way, these journals, the reason why they are so explicit and so clearly Merton is because in his will, it was stipulated that these journals not be published until 25 years after his death. So this journal, and if you look on any used book site, this is the journal that is the most expensive and can be hard to get. And it's because of what happened in that year of 1966. When I lecture, I do a longer lecture about just this portion of Merton's life. I call it Thomas Merton and the Transformative Power of Love. In these early months of 1966, Thomas Merton had a back issue that caused his hands to be numb. He could barely hold a pencil. He was in pain much of the time. He was mourning the loss of a friend. And he was devastated to learn that he needed back surgery and not an easy thing in the 1960s. So when he went to the hospital in, I think it was like March, April, he basically packed up that hermitage as though he was not coming back, right? So just this devastation and this sadness. Fast forward, he has the surgery. The next thing you know, I think the dates are in May. He is writing about this nurse who had, who had taken care of him in the hospital. And she had written to him. And at first he thought, okay, you know, this is going to be a friendship and it's going to be okay, and we're just going to keep it at that. But he fell in love with this woman and he writes, all I know is that I love her so much I can hardly think of anything but her. Also, I know that in itself, this love is a thing of enormous value. Never has anyone given herself to me so completely, so openly, so frankly, and never have I responded so completely. Yet it is an absolute conflict with every social canon feeling predetermination. And everyone, the pious and the feisty, will use it for one thing only, to crush and discredit us. He. What I liked about this relationship, as brief as it was. Is that it made him rethink everything about himself. From when he was a young man. He started thinking about how he treated women so badly. And why that could have been. He even says he realizes now that coming into the monastery. That in terms of his own sexuality. That he had given something up before he truly understood it. Even though this relationship was not consummated. He recognized that there was this aspect of him that had gone uninvestigated. But he says that. That this relationship. Clearly this love. Is not a contradiction of my solitude. But a mysterious part of. Fits strangely and without conflict. Into my inner life of meditation and prayer. But it fits also into my own way of emptiness and unknowing. And indeed, my moments of inner silence. Are my main source of strength, light and love. Along with my Mass. Because he was doing his own masses in the hermitage. Which is most ardent these days. And in which I feel most closely connected with her in Christ. So what I found amazing is that in all of those pages of the journal. He does not mention pain. He must still be in pain, right? He's come from surgery. He's probably still rehabilitating. He mentions nothing of it. He is giddy, he is excited. He is writing constantly. And even though he says he must be careful, he's a guy. He's sneaking into the office at the monastery to call her. So, you know, something's going to happen. He's going to get caught. But what I like to. About this relationship is that I think he knew that at some point. That he wasn't going to leave the monastery. As much as he loved her. But he wanted her to know that this relationship was real and that it was important. And so he wrote the story of it. He wrote this. He took the sections of his journal that were all about her. And he created a document called A midsummer diary for Mr. Because that was when the relationship took place between May into July. Like, just. Just, like, few, like eight weeks, right? And he found a way to have a friend take him to her. So he could give this to her. And no matter what, people like, people will, you know. Yeah, write terrible. People have written terrible things about this relationship. But I will tell you, as. As a woman and as a writer, I. I know what it means when you write something down. And you put words in people's hands. And to me, that's a sign that he was serious about this. And devastated when they were caught. Right. And that he. That he was caught Making these phone calls. And he couldn't even receive mail from her because, you know, they look at all the mail. And so he could no longer receive mail. He could no longer have this connection to her. Here's a poem that he wrote in October. You know, as conflicted as he was, he was still thinking about her. And I love this poem. It's absolutely beautiful. If you and I could meet up there in that cool cloud like two sunbeams or birds going straight to South America or distracted spirits flying together innocent in midair or if we could be together like two barges and in a string or tight wandering rafts heading downriver to St. Louis or New Orleans if we could come together like two parts of one love song Two chords going hand in hand A perfect arrangement and be two parts of the same secret oh, if we could recover and tell again our midsummer secret if you and I could even start again as strangers here in this forsaken field where crickets rise up around my feet like spray out of a green ocean. But I am alone, Alone, walking up and down Leaning on the silly wind and talking out loud like a madman. If only you and I were possible. Never mind. Tonight the moon is full and you over buildings, I over trees. We will watch it rise together. So to me, that is a person who knew love. He was reading Camus after this as well. And he said, well, first of all, this is the piece he was reading of Camus. When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no other vocation than to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. And he and Merton said, it is one of the most beautiful passages in all Camus. And so well, expresses my own deepest belief, right? Because he feels that he has been changed because he saw that light in her. And his feeling of wanting to take that light out into the world. And I feel that love is this outward reaching force, right? And Merton wanted to offer this gift. And, you know, I mentioned last night that he was writing about, you know, dating, right? And how we treat each other as though we're in a marketplace. And he wrote about that, saying that love is regarded as a deal, right? In order to make a deal, you have to appear in the market with a worthwhile product. We unconsciously think of ourselves as objects for sale on the market. We size each other up and make deals with a view to our own profit. We do not give ourselves in love. We make a deal that will enhance our own product. And therefore no deal is final. Our eye is already on the next deal. And this next deal need not necessarily be with the same customer. Life is more interesting when you make a lot of deals with a lot of new customers. So in my mind, he was. He wanted to share. He wanted other people to understand love. Here he is. He could have been seen as foolish. He was writing these essays about love. What would a monk in a monastery know about love? And yet he felt he had learned something important and he wanted to give that to the world. And so he wrote essays like this, right, because he wanted people, even young people, fix this dating thing, because there is something deeper there to be had. Thank you.
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Thank you, Sophronia, for your deeply personal journey into the life of Thomas Merton. This entire podcast has been made possible by the C.S. lewis Festival in Petoskey, Michigan, and its generous sponsors. To learn more, please Visit us@cs LewisFestival.org I'd like to thank the festival as well as podcast producer Zach Smith of Hands Media.