Sunday, March 6, 1966
He lowers the binoculars. The deer have wandered off in the direction of Monk’s Creek. As the full moon rises, flooding the woods with shadows, the wind feels colder. Time to go inside.
Right now, down in the abbey, the monks are praying before bed. But he will stay up, sitting in the glow of the fire, and then he will turn on his desk lamp and jot some thoughts in his journal. He will write about the deer. The incident seems significant somehow, not just because they seldom linger so long in the clearing, but because some kind of connection was made. They were as aware of him as he was of them, but it was more. They looked into his eyes and he looked into theirs. It was unearthly. Like knowing and being known.
Inside, he tosses a log on the fire, stokes it, and there it is—the pain. A disc in his neck has disintegrated, leaving the vertebrae to grind against each other like broken cinderblocks. It’s unbearable at times. The numbness in his hands often keeps him from writing. He was in Louisville this past Wednesday for X-rays, and the doctor said surgery was the only option. A spinal fusion. It’s scheduled for the twenty-fourth, just two and a half weeks from now, though he’s supposed to register at St. Joseph’s Infirmary the day before.
Things seem so fragile. Since moving to the hermitage, one problem has followed another. The dermatitis sometimes gets so bad he has to wear dermal gloves to protect his chafed, bleeding hands. The bursitis flares up regularly, especially when he chops wood. One of his eyes has been giving him problems ever since it got poked with a tree branch. And there’s that odd lump—a tumor?—on his stomach. He’ll get all of this checked at the hospital. Last November, a bout of dysentery deferred his dream of visiting the Solentiname community in Nicaragua to work with Ernesto Cardenal—one of his own former novices, now a celebrated poet and revolutionary. He can’t risk dysentery again. And the abbot probably won’t let him go anyway.
No wonder he’s been thinking about death recently, not in a morbid way, but simply the raw actualness of it. The inevitability. How do you prepare for it, “set your house in order,” as people say?1 He has no idea.
It’s not about legacy either. Poet Thérèse Lentfoehr, that dear Salvatorian sister, has taken care of that.2 She’s been writing him about where to archive her collection of his manuscripts. She even has an unpublished novel he wrote before entering the monastery.
He stands and walks to the kitchen to pour a glass of water from one of the jugs he hauls from the abbey each day. It tastes wonderful. “As the deer pants for the water brooks . . . ,” he thinks.
The deer. How peaceful it all felt, and how hopeful. There was something intimate in those eyes, a reciprocity. He used to coach the novices about the theoria physike—“the contemplation of God in and through nature, in and through things He has created.”3 It was like Meister Eckhart’s famous pronouncement, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”4 And that, in turn, reminds him to pack some Eckhart to read in the hospital.
He wants to remember to mention the deer in his letter to Jacques Maritain tomorrow—a letter he’s been meaning to write for days. Jacques is brilliant about our perceptions, our “intuition of being” and its relation to the senses, but he lives in his head much of the time. Jacques would love this place, so different from the Little Brothers of Jesus in Toulouse, where Jacques has lived since Raïssa’s death. The hermitage would reconnect Jacques to Nature, its visceral reality. Yes, remember to mention the deer. And chopping wood. And the cold.
All this—the deer, the pain, the unwritten letters—has roused in him something that he finds hard to admit, something so hulking and obvious that it’s the easiest thing in the world to miss.
The other side of solitude is loneliness.
•••
That Merton felt isolated is certain. He had complained that the brothers were ignoring him or had forgotten him completely. For their part, they were keeping their distance because they assumed that’s what someone with a hermit’s vocation would want.
He wrote Jacques Maritain the next day. Maritain, a major Catholic philosopher, had been a mentor to Merton ever since Merton first heard him lecture at Columbia. Maritain’s last visit to the States had been five years ago, a year after his wife Raïssa’s death. Now, at eighty-three, the great French thinker was contemplating a sort of farewell tour in the fall, to visit old friends while his health was good. Gethsemani would be on the itinerary.
In his letter, Merton complained about the controversies sparked by Vatican II and confessed it all made him “feel a thousand years old,”5 though his illnesses and pending surgery as much as the new English liturgy made him feel that way. And he mentioned the deer: “Through field glasses I could look right into their huge brown eyes and it seemed I could touch their big black noses with my own.”6
In hindsight, the experience with the deer was pivotal, a moment around which many emotions revolved. The deer embodied Merton’s longings for connection. Nowhere else in his journals before then does he mention looking so deeply into eyes that look back into his own, nor does he write elsewhere so much about the physical act of touching. The deer are as much about relationship as about Nature. The previous September, from that same vantage point, he had watched a doe and two stags cross the same clearing, and then too he “longed to touch them.” He wrote, “The deer reveals to me something essential in myself!”7
As someone who prayed the Psalms, Merton would have often been reminded of Psalm 41: “As the hind pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants after thee, O God.”8 The deer that traipsed across the abbey grounds on the night of March 6 were no doubt looking for “water brooks.” The farm ponds on the other side of County Road 247 from the hermitage were frozen. February and March had been exceptionally cold, and a layer of snow still covered the ground. The deer were heading in the direction of Monk’s Creek, where the water was still flowing, just a few hundred yards east of the hermitage.
Merton’s own “panting after God” is something he hints at when writing that he was “entranced by [the deers’] perfection.”9 Ten years earlier, in a small chapbook called Praying the Psalms, he had composed a meditation about that very passage from Psalm 41. He wrote, “the sufferings of the soul that thirsts for God are blended with mystical joy.”10 The cover of that first edition of Praying the Psalms, not coincidentally, showed a stylized drawing of a leaping deer.
The seventh-century mystic Isaac of Nineveh, whom Merton considered his favorite writer to read in the hermitage,11 wrote about the importance of eyes, and of seeing Nature, in the contemplation of God: “What the eyes of the body are for physical objects, faith is for the hidden eyes of the soul. Just as we have two bodily eyes, so we have two spiritual eyes, and each has its own way of seeing. With one we see the glory of God hidden in creatures: with the other we contemplate the glory of God’s holy nature when he deigns to give us access to the mysteries.”12 A passage from Canticles, the Song of Solomon, even describes a human lover as a deer: “My beloved is like a roe, or a young hart. Behold he standeth behind our wall, looking through the windows, looking through the lattices.”13
Five days later, Merton was still thinking about the deer. On Friday, March 11, he wrote to Argentine poet Miguel Grinberg, “The woods here are where I belong. The deer were out the other night and I was looking at them (in the evening light) with field glasses, looking right into their big brown eyes. They could see me just as clearly as I could see them and they did not run away.”14
That mutual locking of those eyes was a moment that explains much about what was on the verge of happening to Thomas Merton, about his desire for God on one hand and for human love on the other—and the interconnection between the two, a form of intimacy, a way of knowing and being known. Those two loves are inextricably bound together in much of Merton’s writing and much of traditional Christian theology, especially in mystics like Saint John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila.
All winter, he had been reading the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the master poets on the subject of the spiritual aspects of love. Four days earlier, on March 2, while in Louisville for his medical exam, Merton had found a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet at the University of Louisville Library. He was astonished by what he read. The letters, he felt, “complete and deepen some of the things said about love”15 in Rilke’s poems. He was referring specifically to the seventh letter, in which Rilke outlines his personal philosophy of love. The letter’s recipient was Franz Kappus, a young poet friend of Rilke’s.
At the time, Rilke and his young wife, sculptor Clara Westhoff, were living in Paris, though Rilke was visiting Rome when he wrote this particular letter. Kappus, envious of Rilke’s marriage, had mentioned experiencing a certain amount of loneliness, a lack of female companionship, so Rilke explained the connection between love and solitude. Imagine how these lines of Rilke’s would have resonated with Merton:
It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more to do it.
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. . . . But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is—solitude, intensified and deepened loneliness for him who loves.16
As he read Rilke, Merton incorporated these ideas into the Zen-infused meditation he was writing as a preface for the Japanese edition of Thoughts in Solitude. A little more than two weeks later, three days before going to the hospital, Merton again thought about Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and wrote, “There seems to be something to his ideas on love.”17 A month later, in his journal, Merton would again echo Rilke’s words about love and solitude, though by then, the object of Merton’s love would have a human face and a name.
•••
The medical term for Merton’s condition is spondylosis, a wearing out of the cartilage between two vertebrae. While Merton’s complaints were of acute back pain, the degeneration was actually in his neck—a cervical spondylosis—with chronic numbness radiating to his arms and hands. He was uncomfortable sleeping in certain positions. The treatment was a procedure called an anterior cervical fusion, in which a small piece of flat bone is cut from the hipbone and inserted into the neck as a wedge-like replacement for the collapsed disc. The pieces are screwed together until the bone fragment and the surrounding vertebrae grow together. A spinal fusion. Merton later referred to it as his “invented back bone.”18
On Wednesday, March 23, Merton rose, as usual, four hours before dawn and took up his journal. His mood was reflective: “I know I have to die sometime and may this not all be the beginning of it? I don’t know, but if it is I accept it in full freedom and gladness. My life stands offered with that of Christ my brother.”19
He then wrote short appreciations of some of his fellow monks, such as Father Chrysogonus, the choirmaster, and he took care to praise Dom James as “an extraordinary man, many sided, baffling, often irritating, . . . but who honestly and in his own way really seeks to be an instrument of God.” Although his assessments were heartfelt, he was hedging his bets against the possibility of not returning from the hospital. He wanted the journal’s final entry to be conciliatory, no doubt to compensate for his many fulminations directed at the abbot and others. He leaned heavily on terms of approbation in describing those in the community—they were “excellent . . . good . . . excellent . . . fine . . . good . . . extraordinary . . . excellent . . . good . . . extraordinary . . .”—as if he were anxious to make amends.
In the final paragraph, he expressed his gratitude for the hermitage itself. Should he die at the hospital, his greatest regret would be the “loss of the years of solitude that might still be possible.”20
Then he shut the journal, gathered a few things, including his volume of Eckhart’s Sermons,21 and walked to the abbey for morning Mass. Afterward, the abbot’s brother, Bernard, another monk at Gethsemani, chauffeured Merton one hour north to Louisville in a heavy downpour. “Man is the saddest animal,” Merton wrote in a poem a few months later, perhaps remembering this drive to the hospital. “He drives a big red car called anxiety.”22
They drove to St. Joseph’s Infirmary in Louisville, run by the Sisters of Charity. It was a 324-bed Catholic hospital, the largest in the area.23 There, the doctors pronounced Merton’s eye healthy and determined the growth on his stomach was benign.
Although the operation was planned for Thursday, March 24, it didn’t take place until the following day, Friday, which happened to be the Feast of the Annunciation; in Catholic tradition, that is the celebration of the angel Gabriel’s message to Mary that she would bear a child. The timing appealed to Merton because not only was it a holy day, but he annually performed a private ritual of his own every March 25: “In the old days I regularly renewed my resolution to become a Carthusian.”24 The surgery began midmorning, and when he came out of the anesthesia at eleven that night, he thought it was the following day and that he had missed Saturday Mass.
He spent the next few days recovering, coping not only with his pain but with the sterile hospital environment and the routine prodding and pestering. He secretly wished the ever-efficient staff wouldn’t disturb him quite so much. Knowing that he preferred anonymity and privacy, the nurses tried not to bother their famous patient more than necessary—a deliberate routine of mildly depersonalized attention. Amid the insensate chatter of medical machinery, his pain, and the alienation that comes with hospitals, Merton thought, “I wonder who the hell I am.”25
He immersed himself in Eckhart’s Sermons, making notes and copying passages from the book, hoping to eventually write something about the famous German scholastic and mystic. He later referred to Eckhart as his “life-raft” while at the hospital.26
•••
As he lay there “bleeding in a numbered bed,”27 as he described it, one day followed another—until on Wednesday, five days after the operation, something out-of-the-ordinary happened. Absorbed in his Eckhart, trying to distract himself from his discomfort, he was interrupted by a young woman in hospital garb, someone he hadn’t seen before. Unlike the other nurses, this one chatted openly and volubly. She explained she was a student nurse and would be taking care of him for the week, checking his bandages, dispensing medication, and giving him sponge baths. Her name was Margie Smith, and she was honored, she said, to be his caregiver. She knew who he was.
Though initially put off by her talkativeness, he found her fresh and attractive, and to his surprise, he eagerly anticipated her next visit. When she returned later that day, they talked freely. She was Catholic and had spent time in a convent. In the next twenty-four hours, their discussions broadened to include their views on Vatican II, the liturgy, their favorite gags from Peanuts cartoons and Mad magazine, their family backgrounds, and Merton’s life at Gethsemani.
Out of curiosity she asked why anyone would want to live as a solitary. In an effort to explain, he loaned her the typescript of his new preface for the Japanese edition of Thoughts in Solitude, the one that expands upon Rilke. In it, Merton wrote somewhat mystically: “The paradox of solitude is that its true ground is universal love—and true solitude is the undivided unity of love for which there is no number. . . . He who is alone and is conscious of what his solitude means, finds himself simply in the ground of life. He is ‘in Love.’”28 In this play-on-words, he is saying those who are solitaries are not only grounded in “Love”—that is, in God—but also find themselves “in love” with all people.29 It was a reiteration of the solitude-and-solidarity epiphany he’d had in Louisville eight years earlier.
The conversations energized Merton. By Friday, he had recovered enough strength to attempt a short walk. With Margie gripping his arm, he took his first shaky steps down the hallway and outside to the hospital grounds. It was painful, but her encouragement inspired him. They walked to the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, just a short distance behind the hospital and the most impressive feature on the grounds. It was a large concave shrine, about fifteen feet high, made of mortared rocks and stone, with a statue of the Virgin Mary inside and a beautifully manicured, walled garden leading up to it. Margie would have pointed out the nurses’ dormitory, Lourdes Hall, where she lived, just beyond the grotto.
The next day, when Margie called in sick, Merton grieved. Her absence and an uptick in his pain aroused his despair. Still, he was determined to say Mass in the hospital chapel the following day, Palm Sunday, which he did, but it proved to be an ordeal. Perhaps Margie might attend, he thought. She didn’t. Upon returning to his room, he was convinced this young nurse was somehow essential to his healing.
That afternoon, he was permitted to take a walk by himself outside. Treading carefully because of discomfort, he selected the path that led past the Grotto to Lourdes Hall. Not unlike a love-struck teenage boy bicycling past a girl’s house, Merton hoped he might run into Margie by chance or that she might look out her window and see him. She admitted later she had indeed seen him but had decided not to disturb his time alone.
He was overjoyed when she returned to work on Monday. That day and the next, they shared more confidences, to the point that her supervisor had to remind her not to neglect her other patients.
On Wednesday, a week after their first meeting, Margie dropped by his room before she left for a few days’ vacation. Since this might be the last time they’d see each other, they were unusually subdued. She knew she wouldn’t return before he was released. She was flying to Chicago, she explained, to see her fiancé, who was about to be shipped off to Vietnam.