"According to one tradition, before meeting his patron,Hajji Zayan al-Attar, Hāfez had been working in a bakery, delivering bread to a wealthy quarter of the town. There he first saw Shakh-e Nabat, a woman of great beauty, to whom some of his poems are addressed. Ravished by her beauty, but knowing that his love for her would not be requitted, he allegedly held his first mystic vigil in his desire to realize this union. During this he encountered a being of surpassing beauty who identified himself as an angel, and his further attempts at union became mystic; a pursuit of spiritual union with the divine. A Western parallel is that of Dante and Beatrice"
We tend to think of holy men as saints, detached from the world, but far from it. It inflames our humanity to be able to experience the divine more, to express our own divine spark and to realize God as we see it in an other that we love. One, I do believe one cannot love God as deeply as when one loves an other soul--maybe that is the expression of God in physicality, and brings us more in union with the divine. But then isn`t the other also a part of or God? So then why wonder and be amazed--one experiences, feels and expresses that which one is within-reading about it dosn`t really cut it, or being cut off from it.
As for Merton`s story is so moving I thought I would quote much from it here--
<<<Yet, at the age of fifty-one he became involved in an intense
relationship with a student nurse after she helped bring him back to health
in the hospital in Louisville where she worked. The relationship lasted
some five months until Merton was ordered by his abbot to end it. In spite
of the order Merton still saw her occasionally and corresponded with her
from time to time after that until he was left with only fond memories
of her and of their love.
The romance is recorded in detail in volume six of Merton’s seven-volume
private journals that were allowed to be published only twenty-five
years after his death on December 10, 1968 - two years after the relationship
had ended.. His death occurred on the outskirts of Bangkok where he was
attending a conference with Cistercian abbots; it was caused by his touching
a faultily wired fan in his room, to which he had retired for a rest after
lunch.The volume of his journals with the account of their romance is entitled Learning to Love: Exploring Solitude and Freedom, edited by Christine M. Bochen (New York: HarperCollins, 1997). The section of the book where their relationship is most intense is called “Daring to Love”. The object of his love is identified throughout only by the first letter of her first name - M. The same volume has an appendix entitled “A Midsummer Diary for M.”, written in June of that year, in which Merton addresses her directly and analyses their relationship more objectively than he was able to in the journal itself.
When Merton met M. in the hospital he had been living full-time in a hermitage on the grounds of the monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani, Kentucky for less than a year. He had entered the hospital on March 23, had an operation on his back on March 25, and returned to the monastery on April 9, Holy Saturday. In his first journal entry after his return (April 10) he writes of “a very friendly and devoted student nurse ...(whose) affection - undisguised and frank - was an enormous help in bringing me back to life fast (p. 38)”.
He received a letter from M. on April 19 indicating that she wanted to see him - and indeed he wanted to see her. His letter in reply began a series of letters, telephone calls, and meetings in Louisville and at the monastery during which a deep love developed between them.
Merton duly recorded the course of their love in his journal in some of the finest writing on the experience of love that I have ever read. For this honesty and artistry in expressing his passion we must be grateful, even while he experiences the pain of being torn between his vocation as a celibate monk and priest, and his love for M<<<
Many passages from the journal could be quoted that reflect the intensity of their love. Here is an early one: <<<There is no question that I am in deep. Tuesday M. met me at the doctor’s. Appeared in the hall, small, shy, almost defiant, with her long black hair, her grey eyes, her white trench coat...(We had) a wonderful lunch, so good to be with her, and more than ever I saw how much and how instantly and how delicately we responded to each other on every level” (April 27, p. 45).
On May 7 (Derby Day in Louisville) he wrote: “After supper (at the airport) M. and I had a little time 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)” (p. 52). Their love, in fact, seems never to have been sexually consummated.<<<
Two days later the possibility of marriage becomes a real one. Merton writes: <<<The question has obviously arisen: whether we should not just go off and live together - married” (p. 55). On the same day he also reflects: “It is 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” (p. 55).<<<
But Merton could never take that fateful step, and the Church was not ready for a married clergy in those days immediately following the Second Vatican Council. Merton had reached the point that many of us married priests reached when we understood God had given us a vocation to both marriage and priesthood. Merton did not seriously consider that option, and didn’t even consider requesting a dispensation from his vow of celibacy so he could marry within the Church.
When many of us reached this point, we moved forward to a new life of love and marriage; in contrast, Merton recommitted himself to his vows and to his monastery. In fact, he always saw himself as irrevocably committed to his vows, and to the life of solitude he was trying to live in his hermitage, however much that life was disrupted for a time by M. As a result, he was torn deeply, as he says on :<<<There are moments when I simply die to go away with her and love 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” (p. 63).<<<
The word “impossible” he uses again after an ecstatic picnic he and M. shared alone on the monastery grounds. Of that experience he writes: <<<<“And always in the end there is the enormous unthinkable problem of my vow and my dedication which really come first and make the whole thing absurdly impossible”<<<
And so it remained for Thomas Merton. He could not envision himself being a married priest, even with a dispensation from his vows. Yet when his romance with M. is finally over, he still cherishes and loves her. Thus on he writes: <<<“In our solitude we somehow remain in deep connection” <<<; on he reflects:<<< “I have often wished I would die in these last days - I constantly pray for us to be together finally in God. And am impatient for the time when we will be”; he says: “I miss her terribly, think back repeatedly of the few wonderful days we had together, the perfection of our love, our obligation to one another”<<<
Although Merton and M. occasionally met and corresponded after that, it was with the understanding that their exclusive relationship was over. Merton became more at peace in his life in the hermitage, and M. moved to Cincinnati, where she eventually married and settled into domestic life. She has never made any public comment on her relationship with Merton, even after volume six of his journals was published.
As so often in these cases of a priest who falls in love with a woman and then decides to leave her for his priestly vocation, it is the woman whose needs and suffering are ignored. Merton did not really do this, as he often wrote of how he felt M.’s suffering as well as his own. But M. can easily be the forgotten one in this brief encounter, and Merton seems not sufficiently aware of his obligations to her, and whether God was calling them to fulfil their love in marriage. Perhaps in the climate of the Church ten or twenty years after the Second Vatican Council he would have left the monastery and married M.
But at the time and place where Thomas Merton was when he fell in love with M. he could not envision the possibility of marrying her, and by his actions at the time he showed that being a married priest was not for him. At least not in Gethsemani, Kentucky in 1966.
Should Thomas Merton have been a married priest? Only he could finally answer that question, with the perception he had of his obligations to God, to his vows, to M., and to himself. The later writings in his journals indicate that he was so committed to his vocation as a monk and a priest that he could not see himself living another life, even with M.
Still, it is interesting to speculate what might have become of Merton had he left the monastery to marry M. And that many of us did leave the clerical priesthood to marry when we were as much in love as Merton was with M.
Durante Degli Alighieri, better known as Dante, (c. June 1, 1265 – September
13/14, 1321) was an Italian Florentine poet. His greatest work, La
divina commedia (The Divine Comedy), is considered the greatest literary
statement produced in Europe in the medieval period, and the basis of
the modern Italian language.
Dante was nearly nine years old when he first set eyes on Beatrice Portinari, in a gathering at her father's palazzo in Florence. She was a few months younger than Dante and dressed in a crimson dress. She captivated him completely. As he later wrote, "From that time forward love fully ruled my soul." For the next nine years he remained absolutely besotted with her but only from a distance and it was only in 1283, when he was 18, that she spoke to him as they passed each other in the street.
In 13th century Florence arranged marriages were the norm, especially amongst the uppers classes, to which both Dante and Beatrice belonged. So, at the age of 21 Dante was married off to Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since the age of 12 and Beatrice married a year later too, only to die three years after that, at the tender age of 24. Dante was devastated. He remained devoted to Beatrice for the rest of his life and she was his principal inspiration for much of his well known work, such as La Vita Nuova, and La Divina Commedia.
When Dante first saw Beatrice, he tells us she was dressed in soft crimson and wore a girdle about her waist. He fell in love with her at first sight and thought of her as angelic with divine and noble qualities. He frequented places where he could catch a glimpse of her, but she never spoke to him until nine years later. Then one afternoon he saw her dressed in white, walking down a street in Florence. Accompanied by two older women, Beatrice turned and greeted him. Her greeting filled him with such joy that he retreated to his room to think about her. Falling asleep, he had a dream that became the subject of the first sonnet in his La Vita Nuova, one of the world's greatest romantic poems. Two chapters from La Vita Nuova are quoted below:
When exactly nine years had passed since this gracious being appeared to me, as I have described, it happened that on the last day of this intervening period this marvel appeared before me again, dressed in purest white, walking between two other women of distinguished bearing, both older than herself. As they walked down the street she turned her eyes toward me where I stood in fear and trembling, and with her ineffable courtesy, which is now rewarded in eternal life, she greeted me; and such was the virtue of her greeting that I seemed to experience the height of bliss. It was exactly the ninth hour of day when she gave me her sweet greeting. As this was the first time she had ever spoken to me, I was filled with such joy that, my senses reeling, I had to withdraw from the sight of others. So I returned to the loneliness of my room and began to think about this gracious person.
Whenever and wherever she appeared, in the hope of receiving her miraculous salutation I felt I had not an enemy in the world. Indeed, I glowed with a flame of charity which moved me to forgive all who had ever injured me; and if at that moment someone had asked me a question, about anything, my only reply would have been: ‘Love’, with a countenance clothed with humility. When she was on the point of bestowing her greeting, a spirit of love, destroying all the other spirits of the senses, drove away the frail spirits of vision and said: ‘Go and pay homage to your lady’; and Love himself remained in their place. Anyone wanting to behold Love could have done so then by watching the quivering of my eyes. And when this most gracious being actually bestowed the saving power of her salutation, I do not say that Love as an intermediary could dim for me such unendurable bliss but, almost by excess of sweetness, his influence was such that my body, which was then utterly given over to his governance, often moved like a heavy, inanimate object. So it is plain that in her greeting resided all my joy, which often exceeded and overflowed my capacity.
.........and surely this must be love...no?
Dante was nearly nine years old when he first set eyes on Beatrice Portinari, in a gathering at her father's palazzo in Florence. She was a few months younger than Dante and dressed in a crimson dress. She captivated him completely. As he later wrote, "From that time forward love fully ruled my soul." For the next nine years he remained absolutely besotted with her but only from a distance and it was only in 1283, when he was 18, that she spoke to him as they passed each other in the street.
In 13th century Florence arranged marriages were the norm, especially amongst the uppers classes, to which both Dante and Beatrice belonged. So, at the age of 21 Dante was married off to Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since the age of 12 and Beatrice married a year later too, only to die three years after that, at the tender age of 24. Dante was devastated. He remained devoted to Beatrice for the rest of his life and she was his principal inspiration for much of his well known work, such as La Vita Nuova, and La Divina Commedia.
When Dante first saw Beatrice, he tells us she was dressed in soft crimson and wore a girdle about her waist. He fell in love with her at first sight and thought of her as angelic with divine and noble qualities. He frequented places where he could catch a glimpse of her, but she never spoke to him until nine years later. Then one afternoon he saw her dressed in white, walking down a street in Florence. Accompanied by two older women, Beatrice turned and greeted him. Her greeting filled him with such joy that he retreated to his room to think about her. Falling asleep, he had a dream that became the subject of the first sonnet in his La Vita Nuova, one of the world's greatest romantic poems. Two chapters from La Vita Nuova are quoted below:
When exactly nine years had passed since this gracious being appeared to me, as I have described, it happened that on the last day of this intervening period this marvel appeared before me again, dressed in purest white, walking between two other women of distinguished bearing, both older than herself. As they walked down the street she turned her eyes toward me where I stood in fear and trembling, and with her ineffable courtesy, which is now rewarded in eternal life, she greeted me; and such was the virtue of her greeting that I seemed to experience the height of bliss. It was exactly the ninth hour of day when she gave me her sweet greeting. As this was the first time she had ever spoken to me, I was filled with such joy that, my senses reeling, I had to withdraw from the sight of others. So I returned to the loneliness of my room and began to think about this gracious person.
Whenever and wherever she appeared, in the hope of receiving her miraculous salutation I felt I had not an enemy in the world. Indeed, I glowed with a flame of charity which moved me to forgive all who had ever injured me; and if at that moment someone had asked me a question, about anything, my only reply would have been: ‘Love’, with a countenance clothed with humility. When she was on the point of bestowing her greeting, a spirit of love, destroying all the other spirits of the senses, drove away the frail spirits of vision and said: ‘Go and pay homage to your lady’; and Love himself remained in their place. Anyone wanting to behold Love could have done so then by watching the quivering of my eyes. And when this most gracious being actually bestowed the saving power of her salutation, I do not say that Love as an intermediary could dim for me such unendurable bliss but, almost by excess of sweetness, his influence was such that my body, which was then utterly given over to his governance, often moved like a heavy, inanimate object. So it is plain that in her greeting resided all my joy, which often exceeded and overflowed my capacity.
.........and surely this must be love...no?
