May 31, 1966
A lonely weekend with M. away – except for my surreptitious call to her from the Steel Building at 9:30 p.m. after I had left Heidbrink, [Thich] Nhat Hanh, and A. Gould (we had a fine talk, made a tape for Dan Berrigan etc. More of this later).
M. was terribly lonely and upset, being away “where there are no associations with you” and feeling the undertones of my own tantrums (my urge to “escape” and “be free”). At times I felt she was ready to cry. But we had a good talk, I came back later, happy, to the hermitage and sat up until 11:30 writing her a letter. Concelebrated the next day, often close to tears thinking of her and of our love. Nhat Hanh lost his voice, and got no sleep (just worn out), so they canceled an engagement in Nashville and stayed until the evening of Pentecost Sunday. So in the afternoon we drove around, to Lincoln’s Knob Creek house, to Bardstown, and back and then I gave my talk Sunday evening.
Monday was a desolate sort of day, though very bright and beautiful. I was hoping M. would be back in Louisville and went to call her – did not realize I could have got her at her mother’s in Cincinnati but would have tried anyway, only I no longer had the number on me. This piece of foolishness spoiled the day for me. I went over to the tobacco farm with Bro. Alban and took off by myself up at the top of the long fields, sat and lay in the sun, watched the clouds sail by over the knobs – it was like the old days at Oakham when Whitmonday was always a holiday and I would get a bike and go to Uppingham. Came back walking along the road and got picked up by a car with a Confederate license plate, driven by Gerald Boone it turned out. Slept badly at night and woke with a somewhat frightening dream about M. which I interpreted as a warning against my own cruelty. Several times now, with my own sensitivity and withdrawal I have been unjust to her, and I hope by now I have learned!!
Today I begged God to forgive me and not to take away the gift of love He gave us. Then I went down and offered Mass for “us” again – but this time before it I was moved to offer God my life for her, as a complete acknowledgment of the wonderful gift she has been, and as a total expression of love, in response to the total generosity of her love! Perhaps that is part of the trouble. She is so total, so overwhelming, so admiring, so unable to see any wrong in me that I sometimes imagine she must be kidding! But no, she means every word of it and her sincerity moves me to tears. She is simply a beautifully warmly loving person who loves completely and totally and has found in me a hope of an adequate response to her immense capacity to love. I am scared by so much love, and withdraw when I think it can’t possibly be real, there must be a catch in it somewhere.
Every time I am the one who has turned out wrong. There is no catch. She is a perfectly, wonderfully honest and sincere person who says she is totally in love with me and is. And though I am totally in love with her a lot of the time, yet I have my moments of doubt and of them I am ashamed. Very ashamed when I see how perfectly and how simply she just lavishes her love on me. It is the most beautiful thing that has ever happened, and yet it breaks my heart – how can we go on like this without ending up in the most terrible disappointment? Nothing else is possible. Yet she is willing to take the risk, provided we can at least communicate and see each other somewhere once in a while.
I called her at dinner time (had a hard time getting the “safe” phone and made part of the call in the Gatehouse, which is terribly risky); we had a wonderful warm talk. She is happy again. So am I. And I think I never loved her as much as now.
In fact this afternoon (a beautiful and sunny day) I took off and went for a walk around the place where we had been together. Two spots where we sat alone on Derby Day and the place of our marvelous long Ascension picnic, that day of marvelous love! I was deeply moved in all those places and thanked Our Lady for the pure gratuitousness of this love and the expression we have been permitted to give to it in this way. It has been a terribly beautiful, unexpected, miraculous month that I cannot begin to understand. All I know is that I must love. She is the most beautiful thing that has ever happened to me and her love is a gift from heaven, it is so pure and clear and total. I want to do all I have said in my letters and really love her perfectly, completely – (within the limits of my vows) and do all I can to make her relatively happy. And any expression of my love seems to make her terribly happy. Her love is as precious to me as life itself.
I wrote another poem Sunday, in the evening, about Saturday night’s call.11 But I simply cannot copy all the poems here. They will probably never be published, though I am sending J. Laughlin copies to keep on file.
June 2, 1966
Since Tuesday, when M. came back, I have had some good phone calls, the best of which was today. We get deeper and deeper in love. She challenged me on a point about “detachment” (I suppose I must have said something about that as she was so terribly lonely on the phone Saturday). But of course to talk about detachment when you are in love is just nonsense. Yet it came as a mild shock. Of course I am not detached and neither is she. We are profoundly and firmly attached to each other. I am more aware of it all the time because my nature at times rebels against being “held” like this. So today on the phone I made a frank commitment on this point. I am attached and I know it and my life is profoundly changed – in a most serious way – by the fact. It is no joke at all. This love of ours – very joyous today, very sure of itself, triumphantly articulate – is still an immense reservoir of anguish, especially for me. But I don’t care. Now I can accept the anguish, the risk, the awful insecurity, even the guilt (though we are doing nothing radically wrong, i.e. not sinning). I hope I am not lying to myself anywhere. Certainly I am not just loving now for the joy of it. I am loving because of our commitment to each other, our bond to each other, what we mean to each other. We are far beyond the point where I used to get off the bus in all my old love affairs. I am in much deeper than I ever was before. (In the light of M.’s love I realize for the first time how deeply I was loved back in those days by girls whose names I have even forgotten.)
Anyway, I am seeing M. Saturday again in Louisville.
Finished [Idries] Shah on Sufism [The Sufis (New York, 1964)] the other day. Parts of its are good. Reading Laura [Anagarika Brahmacari] Govinda on [Foundations of] Tibetan Mysticism [New York, 1960]. Article in the Commonweal is probably coming out tomorrow. A Buddhist nun burned herself to death in Vietnam. The Abbot’s off to Chile tomorrow to see about taking over the Monastery of Las Condes.
The visit of J. Heidbrink, A. Gould and Thich Nhat Hanh last Saturday-Sunday was very impressive. Nhat Hanh is first of all a true monk; very quiet, gentle, modest, humble, and you can see his Zen has worked. Very good on Buddhist philosophy and a good poet. Like Camus, is a Buddhist existentialist. I read an article of his in Frères du monde a year or two ago and thought of writing to him about it. He left a couple of his books. We had several meals with Fr. Abbot who got very interested in Nhat (mostly I suppose because he looks like such a kid and is yet so smart) and tried out a lot of Christian arguments on him etc. When Nhat was ill Sunday morning I had a long talk with John Heidbrink.
Getting back to M.: this love cannot be a matter of playing around. I wrote in a way that it could. It’s altogether serious. It scares me at times. She has given up saying we should live together and fully accepts my vows, etc. But love demands contact and much communication and this remains a constant problem here. My phone calls are illegal and so too are some of our meetings. This does not make for peace, but it meets the demands of love and I think in conscience – and in love – I must meet them. The sincerity and depths of all this will probably be tested, and God knows I will need help!! There’s something in me that wants freedom at any price and can claim all sorts of religious justification. More or less clear sightedly, at least now, I am going in the opposite direction. I am taking a course that can be harmful to me as a monk, a contemplative and a writer. And I am doing it for love. Not out of passion and enthusiasm, but out of simple love for M. However, I think it is unde
rstood that when a show down with the vows comes, I have to stick by the vows. (I take back what I said about it being harmful to me as a writer. Have written some of my best poems about all this.)
It is the question of regularity – observance – discipline, etc.
These are to some extent shot on account of her. I keep a pretty good day in the hermitage, reading better now – meditating a little, not well. Thinking a lot about her. Tonight I will be up a little late doing that … and asking myself a lot of questions.
So many other priests are doing the same tonight – everywhere! It is a strange crisis in the whole Church.
June 3, 1966
The heart of the matter is this. M. is a person with an enormous need to give love. She felt herself providentially drawn to me in the hospital and began to give me love immediately the first day she cared for me. I knew before I left the hospital that she loved me. It was confirmed even in the first letter she wrote me. I responded very positively because I already loved her. Since then we have continued to discover more and more the true dimensions of our love. It is not simply a passion, a bodily need (though the physical reactions are profound!); it is a deep love of our heart. I feel I must fully surrender to it because it will change and heal my life in a way that I fear, but I think it is necessary – in a way that will force me first of all to receive an enormous amount of love (which to tell the truth I have often feared). To be loved by this infinitely, totally inexhaustively loving girl who wants to pour out all her affection on me. And to love her in return with a deep spontaneous strong love that will support and help her in life. (She says that my love has completely changed her life, brought her peace, a sense of direction, liberation from sin etc.) The realities of this love cannot be ignored. They demand, however, disconcerting sacrifices from us – including that of the ideal image of myself as solitary, detached, remote, “pure,” out of this world. In place of this – my reality and actuality seen in its limitations and utterly unsatisfying – humiliating – to me, balanced by the view her love takes which, while being impossibly exaggerated, is different from my view and must have some objective value (she is nobody’s fool!).
This love is a disconcerting, risky, hard-to-handle reality. But it is real. It does not fully interfere with or invalidate my solitude (gives it a strange new perspective all right!).
Danger of “platonic love” – concentration on the “essence of love” or on the “essence of woman” – whereas what love demands is to find the actuality of love and of woman in this concrete, existing woman who gives herself to me as she is; to love her womanliness and be conquered by it in order to give to her what she asks out of her deepest heart. But M. does not ask sex: she asks a love that fully respects her in her wholeness as person (this does not exclude sex by any means, but in our case circumstances do – what is important is the union of which sex is only a sign). I have to stop making sex a problem in this (torment, wanting it so badly and knowing it has to remain impossible, fear of going into it in some messy dishonest way!).
There is a real danger of my cracking up under the pressures and contradictions of love in my absurd situation. OK, I accept it. I will not evade the obligations of love just to protect a little ego held together with bits of string. But I won’t crack up. Quite the contrary, letting the strings be pulled apart and thrown away, refusing any longer to hold together this small and vulnerable “self” with its illusions of autonomy, I will find new depths and a new consciousness higher than my own and my anxieties will be healed in love and transcendence – in which there are no ideals – only the reality of what is greater than any “I” and incomprehensible to it. M.’s love, which looks superficially like an enslavement, is actually part of a great insurmountable way of liberation that goes far beyond our affection and its expression.
Returning to learn from Camus – to prefer happiness, or the taste for it, even though absurd, to a taste for Apocalypse: “à force de médiocrité on revient aux Apocalypses [by force of mediocrity one returns to the Apocalypses]!” Precisely – my “tragedies” turn out to be evidence of inner disposition to mediocrity disguised as a religious ideal.
June 4, 1966
Seriousness of love. Judgment and crisis where the ideal image is called into question. My great danger is that in such crisis I become so disturbed that I refuse love. This is I think the basic and very urgent problem. Whatever may be right or wrong about my love for M., this is what is being shown me: the true relationship is not between her and my ideal self, but between her and my real, actual self – and that I must be glad if the ideal self is from time to time discredited – by my own stupidity and selfishness, not by her – she is too sweet and too eager to see good in everything. But this too causes insensitivity – expectations to which I must measure up constantly (and which of course I can’t). All foolish. I must manfully face this judgment and find my center not in an ideal self which just is (fully realized), but in an actual self which does all it can to be honest and to love truly, though it still may fail.
June 5, 1966
Two important days.
Yesterday went in town and had a long time with M. at Cunningham’s – in a room together. It was perfect from beginning to end. She came out looking lovely and joyous in a light dress, long hair flying in the wind, face literally shining with love. From that moment (11:45) until I left her (about 4:10) it was simply perfect. We talked and loved and scarcely ate anything, but drank Chianti and read poems and loved and loved. The thing that was most clear was the simple perfection of our love, the total “givenness” of it and our complete surrender to its delights and perfection, its peace, its freedom, with no care and no afterthought. Nothing was ever so clear as the fact that we really, truly, completely love each other. She brought up some of her “problems” (uncertainty about which has been disturbing me) and they were much less than I thought. Mostly fears. Good to have it all straight now! Also it is terribly clear to me that she really depends on my love for her. It is terribly important that I continue faithfully to love her, and not be misled by doubts. It is not that she needs me to “need” her, but that she needs to give her love to me and to have me respond to her warmly and totally.
Today called her at 7 and had a long talk with her sweet sleepy voice, confirming everything and getting it all more clear, and deeper and deeper into her love and confidence. My own love grows. Beauty of the chaste freedom of yesterday’s love. Yet it has terribly deep repercussions. Haunted and comforted by her womanliness, her sweetness, her hair, cheeks, neck, lips, her lovely look of love and surrender. Her inexhaustible capacity to give love, to pour it out more and more, and all on me.
Slept badly, though. I know I can still be stirred by deep anxieties.
June 9, 1966. Corpus Christi
Concelebration early. I stood there among all the others, soberly aware of myself as a priest who has a woman. True, we have done nothing drastically wrong – though in the eyes of many our lovemaking is still wrong even though it stops short of complete sex. Before God I think we have been conscientious and have kept our love good. Yet is it reasonable for me to be writing her love poems – even a song?
True as our love may be, we have to be perfectly realistic about it. Today especially I was thinking we must be realistic in our expectations for the future. There just is no real future for our love as a real love affair. In heaven maybe we will be one. It is perhaps true that she loves me more than she ever loved anyone and that she wants to give herself totally to me for life. But we cannot do anything about it. I see clearly that we are both torn by contradictions. She cannot go on indefinitely without full sexual expression of our love, though she thinks she can (and fears she cannot. We discussed all this frankly). She knows she is attracted to others and to opportunities of passion in spite of love for me and I know I have no right to hold her and do not want to: in the sense that I think she ought to marry. [ … ] The only solution for us is to envisage a future of warm and lasting friendship, l
ove in that pure sense – and much less contact than we have now. I am not pushing for drastic change, but things will just change themselves gradually and it must be done so no one gets hurt. I do not see any alternatives but I am simply letting things go the way they obviously will go. Yet at the same time our love really deepens and it is terribly real and beautiful – and exciting. But I see my own way clear. She needs support, love, encouragement, sacrifice, and all these I will gladly give because I love her deeply – but no upheavals, and no wild attempts at solution. We are certainly getting no cooperation from anyone else in things, like transportation for her to come out to see me. In all this, I see that I have to really love her and not just love love or love her body. It is a training in realism and in love of the person she is (a person inexhaustibly beautiful and lovable to me).
At noon – angst about the telephone system. The direct phone to Louisville has been cut off in the Cellarer’s office and I worried that it might be on account of me. Did not understand Bro. Kilian’s reply to my questions, the night he was being evasive. Only after our afternoon of Zen emptiness did it occur to me that perhaps he was only telling the straight truth and that the Louisville calls could now be made on the other phones OK. I will see tonight when I try to call M. on the way to night adoration!
Every time I come out of one these struggles about love I realize I am being selfish, and unfair to M’s love. And refusing to be loved, since to me being loved means anxiety over loss, possible loss, and I have always been so negative and despairing that I have preferred to forego love rather than run the risk of loss. Now if there is one reason to go on it is this: to give love and not worry about loss. I really want to try to give her a little joy, peace, light, security. But the problem is the illusion that goes with it: the awful illusions that our love has a wild earthly future! Can’t have one? Only by miracle! Because some kind of loss is almost inevitable. Not the loss of love (I am sure we will always love each other in our hearts), but just the impossibility of contact. It is a grim prospect, but I know I must not despair, for her sake and for my own, and go ahead hopefully no matter what! I can see I am too ready to see trouble and give up! The old story. This is not authentic solitude! My hermit tendencies today have been suspicious. But the Zen afternoon was good, for walking in the dry dirt at the margins of St. Edmund’s mowed field I forgot the flies and thought “What do you lack?” In fact I lack nothing! Or rather what is “lack”?
Learning To Love Page 11