How does all this fit the standards of “the cell”? How does “the cell” judge it? There seems to be no problem. Solitude has not become distasteful to me, or changed its meaning. It is true! I am not ready to go back to sleeping up here – medicinally and perhaps psychologically. That it is the only place where I feel at home and feel I can be myself. And I think, if the truth be told, what I am looking for is not to “be a hermit” but just to be myself, the person God made me to be – and also incidentally the person loved by M.
(She was looking at the pictures in Jubilee – which embarrass me – and said she was just doing this “because it was you.” And the hospital librarian came along and said what a miserable life I must be leading etc. etc.)
April 30, 1966
Heavy rain, breaking up in the warm afternoon.
Every day I have to resist the temptation to call her again. We are waiting for the Abbot to leave (Monday) so that we can get letters through more easily (I hope!). Insecurity is bad for me, and I begin to seethe with physical desire, then become restless, disturbed, distressed, and fearful for the future. Always a possibility of disaster! But a good deep effort at prayer (this afternoon for example) is a help. Work also is a help (yesterday – wrote an article Commonweal asked for, about “The World”).7 Reading too. Just walking around trying to collect my thoughts is not much help. They all tend to be about her and I become desperately lonely.
There is no other way but deep prayer, renunciation of all surreptitious desires for self-satisfaction and consolation, and a firm determination to love her only in God. I can see I have not really made this act of renunciation deep down, and have to keep renewing and deepening it. It means renouncing also the desire to continue calls and visits beyond a certain necessary point. All very complex and difficult. My solitude in the hermitage (at least part of each day) is one of the biggest helps after all. After an afternoon here I am at peace and relatively sane again though I was terrified to the point of physical pain and trembling earlier this p.m.
If in all this I can also truly and unselfishly love her (and not just my own love or my “being loved by” her), there will be much gained. But being away from her makes it so easy just to fall back into imagining and longing and remembering, and this is not love. All I can think of is to pray for her as earnestly and honestly as possible and leave the rest to God.
May 2, 1966
Continuous pounding rain all day yesterday (Sunday. F[east] of St. Joseph the Worker) and in addition the time changed and this afternoon was an hour longer. I got into a rain coat and went out for a walk, and the desolate yet beautifully green rain-soaked fields were a joy to be in. I went out toward the south skirting St. Joseph hill where the sweep of fields is very wide. Emptiness, nothing but rain, no cars, no people, just rain and larks rising out of the green barley or whatever it is. In the vast emptiness and desolation of it I was at peace – without thought and without much preoccupation. Not lonely for M. but in some strange way lonely with her, as if she had somehow peacefully become part of my loneliness and of my life that tries to be in God, tries to dwell at the point where life and grace well up out of the unknown.
The afternoon was comforting, for this is what I have been grasping for and it is the only thing that makes relative sense: i.e. her love in this way (only) can become a harmonious part of my vocation. And I believe that in this way it can also be very fruitful – but it also presupposes the Cross, always!
It is in this, strangely, that I seem to really love her, as if in this emptiness my love really reached out to her own heart, for I know she is lonely for and perhaps “with” me and that in her heart is the same struggle and that I must do what I can to sustain her and comfort her – my own struggle to find peace is not just for myself but for her, since I will share it with her as best I can – in a letter and when I see her and my prayer. This too makes sense. But the difficulty of communication is my worst suffering.
What is most frustrating about being so blocked in something that seems so human and real, is to confront the low level of communication within the community. Heard on the loudspeaker some remarks of Dom James in evening chapter about notes which had been handed to him concerning the new church plans. One had the sense that it was all a childlike game – the notes were well meant and often tried to make good points, but in every case he read each note in such a way as to make it sound idiotic, and in each case the community accepted this distortion. In this way the community – most of whose representative members wrote this – consented to its own degradation and humiliation. The final impression was that they were all childish idiots whose views were absurd and would never be seriously considered, and yet each one was happy that this note had actually “been read” to the community. What a burlesque of “family life” and of community! When this kind of indignity is systematically substituted for real communication, then there is something basically wrong. And there is nothing to be done about it (for instance how could one ever have explained such a thing to Dom Columban last week? To him it would be perfectly understandable that a monastic community should be treated as a collection of infants without judgment).
No wonder there is trouble everywhere, in seminaries, in religious houses etc.
May 4, 1966
Brilliant May days after the rain. Have walked out twice into the deep woods behind Dom F[rederic]’s lake. M. is supposed to be coming out for a picnic this Saturday. More letters, another phone call (this time legal). She has settled down to a sweet little girl happiness that completely disarms and ravishes me. I just don’t know what to do with my life, finding myself so much loved, and loving so much, when according to all standards it is all wrong, absurd, insane. Yet here it is. And I can’t help coming back again and again to the realization that somehow it is not crazy – it makes sense. Here is someone who, because I exist, has been made much happier and who has made me happier, and revealed to me something I never thought to see so intimately again – the beauty of a girl’s heart and of her gift of herself. But this is one of the great, deep realities, like the spring itself and this blue day and the green hills and the light of the sun – much more real and perfect than all these, because conscious, aware and free.
So though it can all be perplexing or even frightening (what will happen when inevitably we are separated?) I see one thing only: to go on hesitantly perhaps, but trustingly trying to answer the demands of this deep personal commitment to her in love, to really, deeply return her love, to make her happy, to give her joy and support and help, to make her life more beautiful.
Of course I would be more peaceful, secure and safe just minding my own business in the hermitage and trying to forget her – but thank God for this blessed disturbance, for this love that sometimes upsets me, which, at a certain cost to me, makes another person happier. And which opens up in her such a revelation of love and goodness.
If I seem a bit disoriented by it, that is good. More reason to trust in God and hope to come out where I could not have come without her help. I so much want her life to be happy and fulfilled, in God, humanly, every way – and that brings up other problems.
J[ames] Laughlin and Nicanor Parra are arriving here this evening.
May 7, 1966
The brilliant weather has continued all week and now it seems to be the most brilliant day of them all. M. should be leaving Louisville about now with Jack Ford and his wife (and M. is scared that they will be scandalized at us – which is quite possible. How are the two of us going to sit politely at a picnic lunch without giving away the obvious fact that we are in love?). M. and I will have trouble providing safe small talk that will not let all the cats out of all the bags, because Thursday with J. and Nicanor I ended up in Louisville taking her out to supper at the airport. First I was only going to call her from Bardstown. Then I thought we could go to Bernheim Forest and call from there. But there were no public phones there. So we went out to the big restaurant and motel on the turnpike beyond the toll gate and b
y the time I got there I decided that, since we were practically in Louisville, we might as well go all the way. So I called M. to expect us in twenty minutes and soon there we were outside Lourdes Hall, and she came out looking more lovely than ever. I had on only my Trappist overalls but anyhow we got into the Luau Room at the airport. Lots of rich people were arriving for the Derby (which is today) and the place was full of brass and money and there I sat having a marvelous time, looking like a convict, unable to turn my head to see all the swanky jets landing behind me, satisfied to look at M. I could hardly eat anything – not unusual as it has been that way since the operation.
After supper M. and I had a little while alone and went off by ourselves and found a quiet corner, sat on the grass out of sight and loved each other to ecstasy. It was beautiful, awesomely so, to love so much and to be loved, and to be able to say it all completely without fear and without observation (not that we sexually consummated it).8
Came home dazed, long after dark (highly illegal!) and wrote a poem before going to bed. I think Nicanor Parra was highly edified. He was saying something about how one must “follow the ecstasy” – by which he meant evidently right out of the monastery and over the hill. This of course I cannot do.
The poem is of course unpublishable. So it will be for M. only, and I’ll try to read it to her today in the woods without choking with emotion.
LOUISVILLE AIRPORT, MAY 5, 1966
Here on the foolish grass
where the rich in small jets
land with their own hopes
And their own kind
We with the gentle liturgy
of shy children have permitted God
To make again that first world
Here on the foolish grass
After the spring rain has dried
And all the loneliness
Is for a moment lost in that simple
liturgy of children permitting God
To make again that love which is His alone
His alone and terribly obscure and rare
Love walks gently as a deer
to where we sit on the green grass
In the marvel of this day’s going down
Celebrated only
By all the poets since the world began
This is God’s own love He makes in us
As all the foolish rich fly down
on to the paradise of grass
where the world first began
where God began
To make His love in man and woman
For the first time
Here on the sky’s shore
Where the eternal sun goes down
and all the millionaires in small jets
land with their own hopes
and their own kind.
We with the tender liturgy
And tears
of the newborn
celebrate the first creation
of solemn love
Now for the first time forever
Made by God in these
Four wet eyes and cool lips
And worshipping hands
when the one voiceless beginning
of a splendid fire
Rises out of the heart
And all the evening is one flame
which all the prophets
accurately foresaw
Would make life plain
And created the world
over again
There is only the one love
which is now our world
our foolish grass
Celebrated by all
The poets since the first beginning
of any song.
May 9, 1966
M. and the Fords and Fr. John [Loftus] came Saturday – arriving late (an hour of waiting and I made desperate acts of patience) – the woods were beautiful. It was a brilliant cool day, something like my ordination day, lovely May weather. A good picnic with a bottle of St. Emilion. Then M. and I went off for a couple of hours together (Gladys Ford gave us some funny looks when we came back and I think Fr. John was worried). But M. and I sat on the moss by the little creek in one of my favorite places, and talked and loved and opened our hearts to each other. It was the longest, greatest time we had had together, not as ecstatic as the evening at the airport, but sweet and deep. There are in us both deep capacities for love, especially in her. I have never seen so much simple, spontaneous, total love. And I realize that the deepest capacities for human love in me have never even been tapped, that I too can love with an awful completeness. Responding to her has opened up the depths of my life in ways I can’t begin to understand or analyze now. And of course there could be all kinds of “danger.” But what danger? Where does the danger really lie? I am struck by the fact that the social rules of thumb for handling such situations offer no real structure, no authentic answer, and one cannot begin to make sense of norms!
I can’t spell it all out here. But all kinds of questions have obviously arisen.
1) M. has decided that after graduation in August she will get a job in Louisville instead of going home to Cincinnati. She will get a car and will come out regularly to see me, like once a week, and we will go on with this as long as we can. Obviously this means meeting her without permission – phone calls without permission. The danger of a conscience correspondence9 that Dom James may decide to open and investigate etc. It is practical for our present need, but is no solution. And I am still determined to stick to my vows. Hence it is really no solution at all. How can we hope to go on for the rest of our lives like that? Especially how can I ask her to live such a life, instead of marrying and having a home. She refuses even to think of marrying anyone else etc. etc.
2) The question has obviously arisen: whether we should not just go off and live together “married.” But the problems are appalling. Excommunication, fuga cum muliere [flight with a woman], apostasy, and all the hounds after me perpetually from Dom James to the Roman Curia! Yet strangely enough now I can see where this could be for some people the only answer. There comes a time when all this legal machinery for fulmination simply does not convince. It claims to be the voice of God, it pretends to damn in His name and by His authority … Does it really? Is it a mark of faith to accept this in timid fear, so that one closes his mind in desperation to all other more intimate and more personal values? These are questions that can and should be seriously asked in this time after Vatican II! Obviously the question is not whether contumacy becomes a virtue. And one would always try to work it out with the Church, not against it. Yet with someone like Dom J. there are no possible solutions, no chances of reasonable communication. Especially where women are involved everything has been long settled in advance and there are no questions even to be raised.
3) It is, however, now, to me, a really serious option: that if in the near future the way does open for a married clergy, I should take it.
I don’t know if the above makes sense. At times I am so carried away by M. that I can’t think of anything but of finding some way to spend the rest of my life with her. I have no compunction about this, for I do not feel it is in any way an infidelity to God, since I think our love comes from Him. But practically, in the framework of social obligations I have, it is a pure impossibility and even thinking about it can perhaps become ruinous.
Her beautiful letters keep coming. Cries of love out of the late night when she sits up writing to me in the silence. Today, one she wrote Thursday, after we had met at the airport.
“ … I want to be with you, to never be without you …. I want to live with you darling! I want to share everything in your existence, I can’t bear separation. To love you, to walk hand in hand with you straight to God …” She breaks my heart. How can we possibly be together unless I leave this place and how can I possibly get out of here? I really would if it were possible. How can we go on just seeing each other occasionally for a few hours? How can she build her life on that? This is all crazy. Perhaps after all the only thing is to be
tough about it, and simply say that what is impossible is impossible, and not let our hopes get built up. But when we are together it seems so sane and obvious that we belong together.
She summed it all up, “To be ourselves.”
The crux of the matter is: this is not allowed.
Poem I wrote yesterday (Sunday) –
I ALWAYS OBEY MY NURSE
I always obey my nurse
I always care
For wound and fracture
Because I am always broken
I obey my nurse
And God did not make death
He did not make harm
But the little blind fire
That escapes from one wound into the other
Knitting the broken bones
And fixing scars so that they can be forgotten.
I will obey my nurse who keeps this fire
Deep in her wounded breast
For God did not make death.
He did not make pain
or the arrogant incision
under the official bandage
Because I am always broken I obey my nurse
who in her grey eyes and her mortal breast
Holds an immortal love the wise have fractured
Because we have both been broken we can tell
that God did not make death
I will obey the little spark
That flies from fracture to fracture
And the explosion
where God did not make death
But only vision
I always obey my nurse’s broken heart
Where all fires come from
And the abyss of flame
Knitting pain to pain
And the abyss of light
Learning To Love Page 8