Made of pardoned sins
For God did not make death
I always obey the spark that smacks like lightning
In the giant night
I obey without question
The outlaw reasons, cries in the abyss
From this world’s body that the wise have fractured
For God did not make death
He did not make prisons
The stalking canonical raven
The dirt in the incision
I will obey my nurse
I always take care
of my fractured religion
And God did not make death.
A voice says in me – love: do trust love! Do not fear it, do not avoid it, do not take mere half-measures with it, but love, believe in it, without any special program, without rebelling against the whole structure of the church, without ignoring or neglecting (or idolizing) concrete obligations which you may have, but love within the actual framework where you are and see what comes of it. This must mean a great freedom of spirit in regard to a lot of things and even a certain flexibility with regard to some monastic rules. (But my own suspicion says: where can it ever get you?) Never mind, you will never let go of your image of yourself in order to love another. You will have sacrificed your own profession in trying to make another happy. (But can it make her happy, in the long run?) Do not worry about the results: only do what you do: love.
Pray to learn how!!
May 10, 1966
Frost this morning. Bright sun now. Birds singing loudly. Wrens hopping about on the wood on the porch.
Whatever else I do, reading and meditation remain important, to keep in perfect touch with reality, to avoid the divisions created by yearning and speculation. One thing is evident – no use building my life on mere possibilities, whether an ideal self as a perfectly solitary hermit or a fulfilled and human self living with M. somewhere on an island. I am myself. I do not make myself, or bring myself into conformity with some nonsensical ideal. One of the good sane things about this love is seeing myself as loved by M. True, she idealizes me impossibly, yet at the same time unavoidably I am known to her as I am, and many of the things she loves in me are things I find humiliating and impossible. But she loves them because they are concretely mine, and I love her in the same way. This surely is a very good thing!!
May 12, 1966
There is no question that this love is a hard thing to bear – and to live with, precisely because it is so much better than the ordinary routines of my life before it. And yet inevitably it is a difficult good to cope with, just because there is so much that is excellent, and fine, and desirable, and wonderful in it. Hence the only thing to do is to take all of it with a good heart and joy and not fear the pain that must come with it.
Her last three letters have been to me almost unbearably beautiful. Her love and her heart are a revelation of a most perfectly tuned and fashioned personality, a lovely womanly nature, and an almost unbounded affection, all of which she has given to me. I can only regard this as a kind of miracle in my life – that is the first thing necessary if I am to understand it at all. Her reactions to our moments together simplify and perpetuate the joy and deepen my own memory and experience of them – and this love keeps growing, both in her heart and in mine. She seems to have a limitless capacity to love more and more. And yet I with my ingrained pessimism keep thinking of the time when we must stop – for it cannot go on like this. I have only a limited time to see her – when I stop going to the doctor’s I will not be able to meet her – at least legally – in Louisville, and if she comes out here it will be without permission and we may well get caught and stopped, with a lot of hullabaloo. Well, we can go on until they stop us, at least that! We are certainly not doing anything wrong, and loving each other most purely and innocently. And this, too, is very beautiful – for when we kiss each other our lips say everything – without any effort or any of the smokey wisdom of passion. And so it goes – I ask myself how I will live without her, and forget what a wonderful thing it is that we have had so much (last Thursday and Saturday!) – such incomparable meetings as I never dared imagine or expect. There will be more – and then I know that when she says she will always love me, and never stop loving me, whatever happens, she really means it. And I do too. This is merely something to live for and to rejoice in, even though we may have to be lonely and separate for long periods at a time. And God who has given us so much will, if we trust Him, continue to deepen and to fulfill our love.
Clearly this love is not a contradiction of my solitude but a mysterious part of it. It fits strangely and without conflict into my inner life of meditation and prayer – as it does much more obviously in her, since for her all articulate and affective love is most spontaneous. 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 which is most ardent these days and in which I feel most closely united with her in Christ.
May 13, 1966
Last night as I was about to go to bed I got the urge to call M. and so wandered in the dark over to the Steel Building, found the cellarer’s office open and went in and called – it was the third call this week! She was delighted, was in fact in the middle of writing me a letter on my “emptiness and nothingness” stuff which I really should not have written her, she does not need it. Her whole inner life is centered on love and on the other as person and is very realistic – I distressed her a little with this other approach but she understood it I think anyway. We talked of seeing each other Saturday, of her coming out next Thursday, etc. She is having exams for which she has not studied enough. She was out walking by the grotto etc. Before I was through Bro. Clement, who had been working late, came in and looked angry, but seeing it was only I he was mollified. Normally he would be furious at finding someone using his phone at that – or any other – hour. I hope he stays on my side!!
This morning I wrote another (love) poem for her, an aubade, just at the time she would be waking up (7 a.m.). That’s three in a week.
AUBADE ON A CLOUDY MORNING
Today no sun shines
Yet it is another morning
When in a distant room
Which I have never entered
No one sees your eyes first open
Only the dim light
which is now perhaps at this moment changed
Into the light you look at
And the day that is known to you
Knows the moment of your return
From the rivers of night
From that nowhere
That ocean of sightless quiet
Inviolate unknowing where your heart
Slept for me
For me restored itself to life and to the love
By which alone I stay alive
For whose essential and direct messages
I am waiting now pacing up and down
In this messy, lonely place
Waiting once again to live
And at war with my own heart
Because I cannot be there
To see your eyes reveal you
Opening not only to the light of my day
But to my own eyes and waiting heart
So that I might declare
As the one who knows best
That you are truly present again
That your identity
Has really been restored to the world
And your presence
The very necessary presence
And even the person of love
Has been thank God granted us again
For another day in which I can
Again breathe, work a little
Write something
(If I write for you
I can write something)
Try to exist
(If I am yours
I can exist)
Even though I am at war with my own heart
Because I am nev
er by your side
When those eyes first open
To recognize the new day
But if this is at least a day
That is known to you
And now seen by your eyes
Though without a sun
Its dim light is enough
I am satisfied with it
I look for no other.
May 16, 1966
Saturday I went to see Dr. Mitchell. It turned out I had bursitis in the left elbow and for this he gave me a (painful) shot, which was especially painful after I got home in the evening. Meanwhile I had lunch alone with M. at Cunningham’s and we had a very good time, though getting too much in love and talking too freely about what we would like to do – vague unrealistic possibilities, and too much along the lines of the above Aubade, which does not rest lightly on my conscience!! Not exactly fitting for a monk! But it was a lovely quiet grey afternoon and I enjoyed it – a pleasure I was really not entitled to at all. When I got home I woke up in the night and began to worry, and from then on it has been anxiety and unrest. In the middle of Sunday afternoon, out in the woods, I saw clearly that it can’t go on like this. I simply have no business being [in] love and playing around with a girl, however innocently. It is true I do sincerely love her and I know she loves me too, and we do owe each other something – but all in all it is simply a game, a fascinating, pleasurable exciting game that she plays perfectly and I have enjoyed it almost to ecstasy (Saturday again). What a beautiful thing it is! But after all I am supposed to be a monk with a vow of chastity and though I have kept my vow – I wonder If I can keep it indefinitely and still play this gorgeous game!
[Merton scratched out the first four lines of this paragraph, rendering them indecipherable.] It is certainly as deep or deeper than anything I can remember and we have had beautiful moments together – but I can see it has to end sooner or later, and probably soon. I called her today again, and I am afraid she sensed the difference and was hurt (and this has added to my self-reproach). I can’t get my mind on anything else this afternoon though I intend to do some writing, if I can.
But the main thing is this. It may be painful to end it, but it will be better. Not to solemnly declare everything finished, but we cannot possibly plan to go on seeing each other regularly. Perhaps we can exchange a letter or two once in a while, and I would miss her badly if I never saw her at all, but we can’t plan anything sanely and it would only lead to a great deal of trouble. So we just have to face it. Thursday will probably decide it all. But what a sweet person she is and how bad I feel about having to let this end. I hope really we can keep in contact and go on really loving each other in our hearts as we have promised, because in a way it will be simply impossible for me to stop loving her. It is out of the question. I think I will love her as long as I live.
May 17, 1966
The trouble is that with M. and me it is not a game. What I wrote yesterday was in large part a shameful evasion, since somehow on Sunday I had suddenly convinced myself I had to find a way out – and there is no easy way out of love. The suffering is great but there is no getting around it. It is true the very nature of things will make it necessary for us to see each other less. And that in itself is no real solution. In real anguish I called her twice yesterday, and of course this disturbed her a little. She was also terribly lonely and depressed at the beginning of last week I learn. Today I called her again and it was a fine call, happy and sane and got things back to normal – i.e. not so much anguish and depression.
Humanly speaking the situation is impossible. We are terribly in love, and it goes very deep, perhaps more even with her than with me, for her capacity to love seems inexhaustible. It is not a game. That was a wicked thing for me to say, especially after Saturday. If anyone ought to know it, I ought. She loves me totally and beautifully and I am so in love with her it is almost impossible to do anything but think of her. It is an obsession and that is bad. But it is love. I have never loved anyone so much, never wanted to give myself so much to anyone, and it is totally impossible. We both want our love to go on in spite of all the obstacles, at least in our hearts (and there is no way around that!!), but the pain of separation is awful in just three or four days and what will it be for weeks at a time? We will get used to it I suppose! And even that sounds callous and mean. But there is no human solution. We have talked over everything, even apostasy, which is of course impossible. But we considered every theoretical possibility. There just is nothing. There is no real hope of a married clergy and the last priest to be able to get a dispensation would be I. If we continue as we are we might possibly manage to see each other surreptitiously once in a while with a lot of trouble – but how long can I keep up those phone calls from the Cellarer’s office? He did not look too happy about it today.
We are planning to spend the day together Thursday (Ascension).
We are determined that our love must stay spiritual and chaste – I think there is no other way!! But the longing for her is frightful – and of course so is the conflict that goes with it. I know how much she wants me too, and I also know that a crude botched-up affair in the woods would be worse than nothing. There are moments when I simply die to go away with her and live with her and surrender to our love and forget everything else, but it is obviously impossible. All through everything I come back to the one word impossible.
Above all what affects me most is M. herself. She is the sweetest person I have ever known. Her love is the tenderest, simplest, sincerest thing that has ever come into my life. It is utterly beautiful and I take back nothing I have ever said to her in any letter or poem or anything else. She has a lovely heart, entirely full of love and sweetness, and she has given it completely to me – and I have accepted her gift and given myself in return. Now we face the frightful ordeal of being in love without being able to be together and talk to each other, see each other, kiss each other … But we are not the only ones in the world!
This morning we were awake thinking of each other at 1:30 (she likes this and so do I), but after I went back to sleep I woke again at 3:30 in a splendid and terrible crisis of love.
I had been dreaming of some beautiful day and a voice said “of course it is beautiful, it is Derby Day and Derby Day is always beautiful” (that was the 7th – the day she came out with the Fords). Then I woke up with a sense of eternal reality and validity of our love and became flooded with really ecstatic love and tears in which I could see her heart, so to speak, in all its preciousness before God, all its beauty and lovableness, the enormously valuable gift of her love to me! I wept for half an hour, shaken with sobs, still not completely awake, absorbed in the deep reality of this vision and this hope. God knows I have little else left that I live for! We are doggedly hoping for one thing – that we will be united at last forever in heaven! But the way there will be terrible, with the anguish and longing we feel for each other.
May 20, 1966
On Wednesday (the 18th) I woke again in the same way but this time with M. as mysteriously present in my heart and saying “Dear, it is a beautiful day!” and again I was flooded and swept with this sense of a “day” that eternally belongs to us. This is not and cannot be on any calendar, the day of our love which is forever full of light and joy; the “day” that shines on us when we are together in the solemn, unending, leisurely rite and play of our love that just goes on and on (I see how truly this is a kind of contemplation and understand the place of sexual love in Hinduism). Though in fact the 18th was an awful day of continual rain, I kept hearing M. say “Dear, it is a beautiful day” and within me it was a beautiful day. I felt like it could not possibly rain Thursday – Ascension Day – when she was to come out. In fact it did not. It was a beautiful day!
Poem written Wednesday:
CERTAIN PROVERBS ARISE OUR OF DREAMS
Certain proverbs arise out of dreams that are not known to the analyst, when a sleeper wakes with the cry that he has seen everything. But before this cry is silent he has alrea
dy forgotten all that he saw.
What he saw was too good to remember. It showed that only the impossible can be trusted. To most men happiness is impossible. They would rather put their confidence in a small prize.
Certain dreams reveal a day which is not in the calendar. On this day no harm can come to lovers. They can do each other no wrong. Only those who have dreamed it can live without harming those they love. The cruel do not come upon this day which is incredible. If they discovered it they might be forgiven. They could never bear it.
Nevertheless even cruel lovers dream what is contrary to their cruelty.
We have always known we were winners but we did not know what we had won, and when you told me I did not believe it.
There is something better than winning all; it is the enormous need for another. There is one dream more solemn than judgment day, in which the dreamer knows that without his Beloved he is lost, so lost that no trace of him will ever be found even in hell. My need for you is my judgment.
Who would have guessed this? No harm ever comes to one who loses himself entirely in the love of another. A few sleepers recognize this proverb.
In my sleep I know that without you I am lost and in your sleep you know that without me you can no longer exist. In blackest misfortune this comfort comes to the very sorrowful whose pillow is wet with tears.
My sin was this: I wanted to understand my own problem. In punishment for which I was instantly given a problem to understand. All understanding then became impossible until in my sleep I turned again to you.
Who can trust? Only one who has dreamed. There is no assurance in daylight that has not been prepared by the dark. In the night when nothing can be seen I turn to my Beloved and her voice is my security.
When there is no time for my problem but only for you, I turn to you and see I have no problem. The winner is he who needs no problem. To him there can come no harm. He will never be cruel. The cruel lover needs a problem to excuse his cruelty.
Learning To Love Page 9