The Absurd Man

Sunday, May 22, 1966

The thinnest of crescent moons settles through the trees to the west, and ahead, the faint glow of Bardstown rims the horizon. As he walks the path to the hermitage—his first overnight there since the operation six weeks ago—he breathes deeply, relishing the quiet. The birds fall silent. The air feels clearer, less oppressive.

He reaches the porch and looks back. As he leans against a post, fireflies flicker in every direction, and he spots the constellation Scorpius rising above the trees to the south, showing what one imagines to be the scorpion’s pincers. No lights in the abbey, so the southern sky is dark and crystalline and full of stars.¹

Two and a half months ago he stood on this porch and watched the deer cross the clearing in the snow. Ten weeks, and so much has changed. Now he is feeling more like himself, back home at the hermitage. He thinks, “I am a solitary and that’s that.”²

•••

The previous Thursday, three days before his return to the hermitage, he and Margie attempted to reprise their memorable Derby Day picnic. The plan was for her to come to the abbey with a basket of food, but, a basket not being handy, she used paper bags, which started to disintegrate as the ice in one of them melted. So a long hike to their secluded spot by the creek below Vineyard Knob was out of the question. They found refuge instead in the shade of some nearby bushes, feasted on ham and herring and wine, and, as on Derby Day, the sexual temptation was intense.

The next day Merton wrote in his journal that he “refused to be disturbed by it.” He told himself that their attraction “purified” him, made him “real and decent again,” though by Saturday, he regretted the whole thing, describing it as “a great wave of . . . love [that] subsided slowly and left a rather stark expanse of mud-flats!!” The whole situation “was absurdly impossible.”3 By the next day he was thoroughly confused and looking forward to settling back into the hermitage.

He called Margie that Sunday morning, May 22, and again that night, just before hiking up to the cabin. The second conversation was hurried because she was expecting another call, which Merton suspected might be from her fiancé; and after hanging up, Merton also feared that she may have misinterpreted his apprehensions as a veiled rejection. He was anxious. He stepped out of the abbey door, inhaled the cool air, and trudged up to the hermitage. Whatever happened, that was where he belonged.

The place had its advantages. He could be more alone with his thoughts there, though he soon found prayer and meditation difficult. He was freer to focus on resolving the situation with Margie and would have more time to write her letters and poems with less risk of discovery. He occasionally had friends post his letters to her from outside the abbey. The Menendez file continued to grow.

The main disadvantage was the cabin’s lack of a telephone. In the next three weeks, the abbey’s phone system would become a major character in the drama, not unlike the farcical chink in the wall in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, through which the lovers Pyramus and Thisbe whisper. During those weeks, Merton surreptitiously called Margie, on average, more than once every two days. The risks were considerable. Apart from a few “safe lines,” which were private phones in administrative offices, the abbey had a primary phone line, which was more accessible. The disadvantage was its multiple extensions—a call on one receiver could be overheard on the others. Merton used both kinds of phones.

Face-to-face meetings involved the most risk, but Merton was undeterred. He and Margie planned another rendezvous for the next week, Saturday, May 28, but at the last minute, she was unable to find transportation, so she went home to Cincinnati instead. Merton was relieved, not so much because they might be observed but because he feared temptation would finally overcome them, and in his journal that evening he continued to vacillate between self-justification and regret, at one point confessing, “I should never have got in love in the first place.”4

•••

But something else happened on that Saturday, the day of the canceled tryst. The outside world abruptly forced itself upon Merton in the form of an encounter that would have widespread, even global, implications. Minister and peace activist John Heidbrink, who four years earlier had helped organize the Catholic Peace Fellowship (CPF), was scheduled to visit Gethsemani with someone he wanted Merton to meet, the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Although familiar with Nhat Hanh’s writing, Merton had never met him.

The two monks mirrored each other. Like Merton, Nhat Hanh was a prolific writer on issues of faith and nonviolence, having edited Buddhist publications and having founded a peace organization in Saigon. In the early 1960s, Nhat Hanh had studied at Princeton, taught at Columbia, and was now teaching a symposium on Buddhism at Cornell. Just as Merton looked with curiosity toward Eastern spirituality, Nhat Hanh looked with hopeful expectation to the West. Though critical of Christianity, he was interested in Western thought and philosophy, which led Merton to assess him as being “like Camus, . . . a Buddhist existentialist.”⁵ Both men were poets and teachers, and both had lost brothers to war.⁶ Even Dom James liked him because, wrote Merton, “he looks like such a kid and is yet so smart.”⁷ Nhat Hanh was thirty-nine at the time.

Nhat Hanh was currently in the midst of an important but quixotic project—to convince the US government to forgo its destructive policies in Vietnam. His letters to public figures were in some cases as influential as Merton’s Cold War letters. A year earlier, Nhat Hanh had written to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to urge the Civil Rights leader to declare publicly his opposition to the war, which King did two years later when he delivered his “Beyond Vietnam” sermon.8 Nhat Hanh was now at Gethsemani to connect with another influential American, and Merton welcomed the distraction.

The visitors arrived Saturday evening, May 28. Exhausted from his travels and hoarse from a throat infection, Nhat Hanh had to cancel his address to the monks scheduled for the next day, Pentecost Sunday. Instead, he and Merton had a lengthy, presumably soto voce conversation while they were driven around the countryside, visiting Bardstown and Abraham Lincoln’s childhood home. Later that day, Merton spoke to the assembled monks, acting as Nhat Hanh’s intermediary, explaining what he understood about Buddhism and Nhat Hanh’s views. Years later Nhat Hanh wrote warmly of Merton’s understanding of Eastern religion, especially his ability, rare among Christians, to get beyond Western dualisms.

Although Nhat Hanh intensely disliked the French Catholics who had done so much to suppress Buddhism and support the corrupt South Vietnamese government during France’s war with the north between 1946 and 1954, Merton was among those who eventually persuaded Nhat Hanh that much could be achieved by Buddhists and progressive Catholics working together. The conversations at Gethsemani that weekend were fascinating and revelatory, and many writers have declared the meeting to be a decisive convergence of the antiwar movements of the East and the West. For Merton, it was also another milestone in his own journey toward bridging the gulf between Western and Eastern monasticism. A far-reaching dialogue had begun.

So moved by the Zen monk was Merton that in the weeks that followed he wrote one of his most famous essays, “Nhat Hanh Is My Brother,”⁹ and he also wrote to the Nobel committee in Oslo to recommend Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize.¹⁰

But absent from most discussions about that momentous encounter was one painful, unspoken subtext.

•••

On that same Pentecost Sunday—significantly, the day on which Christians commemorate the fire of the Holy Spirit descending on the disciples—nine thousand miles distant from the Abbey of Gethsemani, something happened that powerfully affected both monks in different ways. Merton noted it only briefly in his journal, but for a writer as hypergraphic as he was, his very brevity was telling. While listing some books he was currently reading, he inserted this apparent non sequitur: “A Buddhist nun burned herself to death in Vietnam.”11 This simple, tragic phrase contained a world of meaning.

The incident occurred in Saigon, outside one of the city’s three main Buddhist pagodas, and the nineteen-year-old woman who set herself on fire did so as a statement of protest against the South Vietnamese regime. That day a Buddhist monk also burned himself to death in Da Lat, a mountain town two hundred miles northeast of Saigon, and two days later, a seventeen-year-old Buddhist nun would do the same in Hue City.¹²

These and at least two other similar incidents that week were inspired by the death of Thich Quang Duc, an older Buddhist monk who, three years earlier, had burned himself to death at a busy crossroads in downtown Saigon. The photograph of his last moments, widely distributed by the Associated Press, remains one of the most haunting images of that decade.¹³ It shows Quang Duc sitting peacefully in a lotus position as the flames, blown laterally by a buffeting wind, engulf his head and body. Shocked and helpless onlookers stand in the background. Quang Duc had been a friend of Nhat Hanh, and Merton was shaken by the photo, once commenting, “Symbolism of the Viet Nam conflict, the burning Buddhists!”¹⁴

The American and South Vietnamese governments were outraged by such acts, not so much by the suffering involved as by the sympathy they garnered for the antiwar cause. On Monday, May 30, the day after the nun’s death, President Johnson declared in his Memorial Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery: “This quite unnecessary loss of life only obscures the progress that is being made toward a constitutional government. It only clouds the sacrifices of thousands of lives that have already been made for the cause of independence and political hope in South Vietnam.”15

For reasons quite different than Johnson’s, Merton too regarded these deaths as an unnecessary loss; he opposed self-immolation as a tool of protest. Six months earlier, on November 9, 1965, a peace activist named Roger LaPorte, the day before his twenty-second birthday, soaked his clothing with gasoline and set fire to himself in front of the United Nations building in New York. He died later in the hospital. A week earlier, a thirty-one-year-old Quaker named Norman Morrison had set himself on fire outside the Pentagon offices of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara as part of an antiwar protest. Like the Buddhists, LaPorte and Morrison had been inspired by Thich Quang Duc.

While Merton endorsed nonviolent protest, he was appalled by self-immolation, which he considered an implicitly violent and coercive act. He was a founding member of the CPF, but in November 1965, after learning that LaPorte had died in connection with a demonstration by the group, Merton resigned his membership, explaining that such tactics possessed “an air of absurdity and moral void.”¹⁶

Merton’s defection prompted dismay among those in the group. Some were angry. Some wondered if Merton was rejecting the peace movement altogether and reneging on his support. Especially disturbed was Heidbrink, who, Merton feared, felt it was like “a knife in the back.”¹⁷ Though the rift was largely repaired in the months that followed, these events provided an important subtext for his meeting with Heidbrink and Nhat Hanh.

In bringing Nhat Hanh to Gethsemani, Heidbrink was confronting Merton with an alternate view, for Nhat Hanh’s take on those deaths was quite different. In his famous letter to Dr. King the previous year, Nhat Hanh referenced such burnings as an argument for the moral rightness of the antiwar cause. Religious men and women would never consider such measures, he argued, if the situation were not so dire, and he denied that such actions were protests or suicides. They were a form of self-expression. “To burn oneself by fire,” Nhat Hanh wrote to King, “is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance.” From a Buddhist perspective, death is the next step in the cycle of life. “In the Buddhist belief, life is not confined to a period of 60 or 80 or 100 years; life is eternal.”18 For Merton, and in Christian belief, by contrast, self-murder is an unacceptable rejection of a divine gift. Merton, though he agreed with Nhat Hanh on much else, would have had a hard time viewing it any other way.

Three days after leaving Gethsemani, Nhat Hanh issued a statement to lawmakers in Washington, D.C.: “The demonstrations, the self-immolations, and the protests . . . are dramatic reflections of the frustrations which the Vietnamese people feel at being so effectively excluded from participation in the determination of their country’s future.”¹⁹

As far as we know, that difficult topic was not broached at Gethsemani that Pentecost weekend, or at least none of the participants reported it. The only reference is Merton’s, written within forty-eight hours of Heidbrink and Nhat Hanh’s departure: “A Buddhist nun burned herself to death in Vietnam.”

•••

Merton didn’t mention Nhat Hanh in his journal again until several months later. As enlivened as Merton was by the visit, he put an end stop to the events of that weekend with these simple words in his journal: “Getting back to M.”²⁰ After that he returned to writing about their increasingly untenable situation.

But why did he mention the Buddhist nun at all? Was it bewilderment or sorrow? Or was there something paternal and pastoral in his empathy for her and for all young women faced with impossible choices? Did he connect the young nun with Margie in some unconscious way? Margie had once briefly considered becoming a Catholic nun, and only a week earlier, Merton had written a Menendez poem for her in which he said, “I will no longer burn your wounded body. We do not need to weary ourselves grasping anything, even love: still less the bloody jewel of desire.”²¹ In Merton’s mind, her complicated relationship with him was, in a sense, a burning.

The idea of sacrifice—even the word itself—recurred regularly in his discussions with her and in his journal entries. Several times he had warned her that their relationship would ultimately involve sacrifice, and as recently as the day of Nhat Hanh’s visit, Merton had written a letter in which he told Margie, “The only answer is sacrifice.”22

Merton, shaken and aware of his responsibility, sifted through his conflicted feelings like an obsessive inner archaeologist. He so overintellectualized his emotional minutiae that in one phone call Margie chastised him for it. But he knew, on the most basic level, he would eventually hurt her. Though each of them would make sacrifices, hers would be the greater.

Two years later, in a sad irony, there would be a burning: Merton would burn all of Margie’s letters before leaving for Asia.

•••

On the Tuesday after Pentecost, Margie returned from Cincinnati, and she and Merton had a long phone conversation. They devised a plan to meet in Louisville the following Saturday, when Merton would be in town for another bursitis shot. By Friday, anxious with anticipation, he wrote, “There is a real danger in my cracking up under the pressures and contradictions of love in my absurd situation.” His use of the word absurd triggered another association: in that same entry he resolved to reread Camus, because from Camus he could learn “to prefer happiness, or the taste for it, even though absurd.”²³

On Saturday, in Louisville, he headed to Cunningham’s, where all his anxieties evaporated when he saw Margie walking toward him in a light summer dress, with “her long hair flying in the wind.”²⁴ The day went beautifully. They spent most of the afternoon in a semi-private room in the restaurant, talking, drinking wine, reading Menendez poems, and being completely absorbed in each other. Merton was an hour late for his ride back to Gethsemani, and that night they spoke again on the phone.

As often happened, Merton’s misgivings disappeared in her presence, but back at the abbey, the anxieties reemerged. By Thursday of that week, while he was concelebrating Mass on Corpus Christi Day, the incongruity of his situation struck him: “I stood there among all the others, soberly aware of myself as a priest who has a woman,”25 becoming what Albert Camus called an “absurd man.”

•••

Like an allegorical figure, the notion of the Absurd stalked through Merton’s journals during these weeks. He was a monk in love with a woman with whom he could not pursue a relationship—unless he was willing to break the vows he knew he would never break—so that he could marry her in a ceremony that the church he belonged to would never recognize.

Along with Søren Kierkegaard, Camus was a formulator of the philosophy of absurdism, which posits that humans are instinctually drawn to find significance in circumstances even—or especially—when no inherent significance exists. The Absurd is an untraversable desert that stands between our need for meaning and our inability to discover it. Camus’s solution is to create our own meaning—the absurd man must start trekking across that desert even in the face of hopelessness. Merton took comfort in the idea that he should choose “to prefer happiness . . . even though absurd.”

Merton began rereading The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus’s influential collection of essays. Its central metaphor is the Greek tale of Sisyphus, the ill-fated Titan who was condemned to push a boulder up a hill only to have it break free from his grasp and roll back to the bottom—over and over again for eternity. The myth resonated with Merton, if only because this was not the first time he had suffered the agonies of an impossible love. At age sixteen, aboard an ocean liner bound for the US, he became infatuated with a woman who was, coincidentally, twice his age—just as he was now twice Margie’s age. The event, which he described in The Seven Storey Mountain, was at once prophetic and ironic:

I would rather spend two years in a hospital than go through that anguish again! That devouring, emotional, passionate love of adolescence that sinks its claws into you and consumes you day and night and eats into the vitals of your soul! . . . No one can go through it twice. This kind of a love affair can really happen only once in a man’s life. After that he is calloused. He is no longer capable of so many torments. . . . He is no longer capable of such complete and absurd surprises.26

The word absurd predominated then as now. With Margie, Merton was rolling the boulder back up the hill. One can only imagine how he must have paused over this arresting line in Sisyphus: “The more one loves, the stronger the absurd grows.”²⁷

•••

Shortly after the Corpus Christi Mass, Merton walked to one of the monastery offices to call Margie, only to discover that the direct line to Louisville had been disconnected. He briefly wondered if he might be under suspicion. Putting that thought aside, he called her on the main phone system instead. A new plan was underway. Since he had to return to Louisville the next Saturday, June 11, he arranged with Jim Wygal to meet Margie privately in Wygal’s office, with poems and champagne in hand. The meeting took place, and, as before, the temptations were strong.

That evening, after returning to Gethsemani, he called her on one of the abbey’s main lines, and in that conversation, they again enumerated the unlikely outcomes of their love—his leaving the abbey, their living together, their getting married. . . . The next morning, after sleeping poorly, he wrote in his journal, “Something has to be done. We can’t go on like this.”²⁸ Only one outcome was inevitable—discovery. It was at this point that the telephone took center stage.

As soon as Abbot Dom James returned from a trip abroad on June 13, one of the brothers asked to speak with him. The monk said that while in the gatehouse recently, he saw a light blinking on the phone console. Thinking that one of the extensions might be off the hook, the monk picked up the receiver. He heard voices. One was Merton’s; the other, that of a woman. The two were on intimate terms.

Merton got wind of the discovery that evening from another one of the brothers—ironically, while Merton was in the abbey, poking around for a phone on which to call Margie. He didn’t know which conversation had been overheard: the one on Thursday, during which he and Margie had arranged their meeting, or the one afterward, when they had discussed marriage. Perhaps on an unconscious level, Merton precipitated the discovery through his own lack of caution, as the only practicable way out of the situation. He called Margie quickly to let her know what had happened. “She was desolate, and so was I,” he wrote.29

The next morning, June 14, rather than waiting to be summoned, Merton went to the abbot to make a preemptive confession—though providing as few specifics as possible. The abbot was unexpectedly understanding. While sympathizing with Merton’s “powerful emotions,”³⁰ he demanded that all communication with the young woman cease. The abbot blamed the hermitage, suggesting that Merton had been too lonely and should return to the abbey. Merton bargained him out of it by agreeing to do extra training for the novices.

Over the following days, Merton responded variously with resignation, anger, shame, consuming heartache, but above all, relief. While he grieved for Margie, he knew he couldn’t forgo his calling as a solitary. It was one of the first things that she had asked him in the hospital—how could anyone live as a hermit? The hermitage was home; he knew it back then, and he knew it on the night, just three weeks ago, when he stood on the porch watching Scorpius rise over the trees.

On the day of his confession to the abbot, he wrote in his journal, “I am better and freer in solitude, total and accepted, including loneliness and sorrow for M. . . . I am going to write maybe a new book now, in a new way, in a new language too”³¹—a declaration reminiscent of Søren Kierkegaard, who felt compelled to break his engagement to Regine Olsen. While Kierkegaard knew the separation would make him miserable, and make Olsen miserable as well, he also sensed that to accomplish his best writing, to achieve his goals, he would have to avoid such complacent middle-class joys as marriage. The next day, Merton quoted Kierkegaard in his journal: “The self is the relationship to oneself.”32 A reaffirmation of solitude.³³

At the time, Merton was also reading Camus’s novel The Stranger, in the final chapter of which the book’s antihero, Mersault, is awaiting execution for murder. When a visiting priest asks Mersault why he never addresses him as père, “father,” Mersault responds, “I told him he was not my father; he was with the others.”³⁴

Two days after his talk with the abbot, Merton copied that ominous line in his journal—“He was not my father; he was with the others”—for it expressed his own disaffection. At that moment, nearly everyone—the monks, the church, Dom James—belonged to “the others.”³⁵ That was the same distancing phrase he had used on Corpus Christi Day, standing at the altar, a priest with a woman, celebrating Mass alone among “the others.”

But as strongly as Merton identified with Camus, he was about to embrace another artist equally able to articulate the absurdity and estrangement he felt. On the day of his confession, feeling vulnerable and exposed, Merton gloomily paced the fields around the abbey. That evening he drank brandy from a marmalade jar and confided to his journal: “Invisible. ‘Like a rolling stone.’”³⁶

His reference to a line from Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”—“You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal”—provided a remarkably cogent summary of Merton’s situation.³⁷ Like countless other fans, he had discovered how intensely personal Dylan’s universalities could be, though some secrets did remain, with Merton choosing not to tell the abbot about a number of things, like the Menendez file and the extent of his contacts with Margie.

In that same entry, he wrote, “Lately borrowed from Fr. Chrysogonus records of Joan Baez (especially ‘Silver Dagger’!!) and Bob Dylan, which I like a lot (‘Tombstone Blues’ and ‘There is something happening here and you don’t know what it i-i-s, Do you, Mister Jones?’).” Although Merton slightly misquoted the refrain from Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” he caught the acerbity in the descending melody as Dylan sings, “. . . i-i-s.”

As Merton commented: “Very pointed and articulate.”³⁸