**Author:** [[3. Resources/Authors/Thomas Merton (edited by Christine M. Bochen)|Thomas Merton (edited by Christine M. Bochen)]] # Book Overview ![[Learning to Love Visual.excalidraw]] ## About the Author Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky and one of the most influential spiritual writers of the twentieth century. His autobiography *The Seven Storey Mountain* (1948) became a bestseller and brought contemplative monasticism into mainstream American consciousness. Over the next two decades, Merton produced more than sixty books on subjects ranging from contemplative prayer and Zen Buddhism to social justice, nuclear weapons, and racial inequality. He maintained an enormous correspondence with writers, activists, and religious figures across traditions. He died by accidental electrocution in Bangkok in December 1968, while attending an interfaith monastic conference. Christine M. Bochen, the volume's editor, is a professor of religious studies who has edited several collections of Merton's work, including *The Courage for Truth* and *Thomas Merton: Essential Writings*. ## Central Thesis Love and solitude aren't opposites -- they're the shared ground of human maturity and freedom. This is the central discovery of *Learning to Love*, the sixth of Merton's seven posthumous journals. The journal covers January 1966 through October 1967, a period during which Merton, then a 51-year-old hermit monk, fell in love with a student nurse he met during a hospital stay. The relationship forced him into a confrontation between romantic love and his monastic vocation that he couldn't resolve through abstraction or theology. He had to live through it. What emerges isn't a simple story of temptation and return. It's a record of someone discovering that a solitude that excludes the capacity for love is just isolation, and that love which can't survive solitude is dependency. The journal's deepest argument is that genuine freedom -- what Merton calls "a life free from care" -- requires holding both love and solitude without letting either cancel the other out. ## Why This Book Matters This is the most personally revealing volume in the Merton journals. Where the other volumes show Merton engaging with ideas, social movements, and spiritual practice, this one shows him in crisis -- confused, contradictory, sometimes dishonest with himself, and working through the most basic human questions about love, commitment, and identity. It matters because it demolishes the sanitized image of Merton as a serene contemplative above ordinary human struggle. It also matters because the questions Merton faces -- how do you honor a commitment when your heart pulls you somewhere else? how do you love someone without possessing them? what does freedom actually look like inside a structured life? -- aren't monastic questions. They're human ones. The journal's honesty about these questions, including Merton's failures of honesty, makes it more useful than most spiritual writing on love and vocation. --- # Chapter Summaries ## Introduction (Christine M. Bochen) Bochen provides essential context for reading the journal. She outlines Merton's situation in early 1966: he's living as a hermit at the Abbey of Gethsemani, a role he fought for over years, and he's settled into a rhythm of solitude, manual work, prayer, and reading. She traces the arc of the journal through its four parts and explains the editorial decisions -- particularly around the relationship with M., which Merton wanted published but which required careful handling. Bochen frames the journal as Merton's confrontation with the question of whether a person can be both solitary and loving, and she argues that the journal's resolution is that genuine solitude requires the capacity for love, not its absence. ## Part I: "Being in One Place" (January-March 1966) Merton is living in his hermitage and finding his footing as a full-time solitary. The entries track his daily rhythm: rising before dawn, reading (Rilke, Camus, John of the Cross), walking the property, writing, praying. He's working on *Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander* and various essays. The season is winter turning to spring, and the natural world fills the entries -- cold rain, deer in the field, birds returning. He reflects on what solitude means now that he's actually living it rather than arguing for it. There are complaints about the abbey's institutional politics, health concerns (a persistent back problem that will lead to surgery), and moments of deep peace. The section establishes the baseline: a man who has what he wanted and is learning what it costs. ## Part II: "Daring to Love" (April-September 1966) This is the heart of the journal. Merton enters a Louisville hospital for back surgery in March 1966 and meets M., a student nurse. A connection forms quickly, and by April they're exchanging letters and phone calls. The relationship intensifies through the spring: Merton is exhilarated, guilty, confused, and more emotionally alive than he's been in years. He writes poems to and about M. (collected in *Eighteen Poems*). He sneaks phone calls from the abbey, arranges clandestine meetings, and oscillates between ecstasy and self-recrimination. The entries are raw -- he knows the relationship threatens his vocation, knows he's being dishonest with his superiors, and can't stop. By summer, Abbot James Fox discovers the relationship. Merton faces a choice and recommits to his monastic vow, though not without grief. The section ends with Merton accepting that the love was real and that his vocation is also real, and that he has to hold both truths without resolving them neatly. ## Part III: "Living Love in Solitude" (September-December 1966) After the break with M., Merton returns to his hermitage and begins the work of integration. The entries are quieter, more reflective. He's reading Rilke's letters intensively -- Rilke's ideas about solitude within love and love within solitude become a framework for processing what happened. He doesn't reject the relationship or pretend it didn't matter. Instead, he works to understand what it taught him about himself, about love, and about what his solitude actually is. The section tracks a slow movement from grief and disorientation toward a more honest understanding of his own capacity for love and his commitment to the solitary life. He begins to articulate the idea that his solitude isn't a rejection of love but a particular way of living it. ## Part IV: "A Life Free from Care" (January-October 1967) The final section returns to the rhythm of Part I but with a different quality. Merton is back in his routine, but the experience with M. has changed how he inhabits it. He's less defensive about solitude, less anxious about justifying it. The entries deal with his regular concerns -- reading, writing, nature, health, the Vietnam War, interfaith dialogue -- but there's a groundedness that wasn't present before. He develops the phrase "a life free from care" (drawn from the Desert Fathers) as a description of what he's pursuing: not a life without feeling, but a life not driven by anxiety, possessiveness, or the need to control outcomes. The section shows Merton moving toward the mature solitude that will characterize his final year before his death in December 1968. ## Appendix A: "A Midsummer Diary for M." A sustained piece of writing addressed to M. during the height of the relationship, blending personal reflection, love writing, and meditation on solitude and connection. It's more polished than the journal entries -- Merton was clearly writing with an awareness of audience, even if the audience was one person. The diary serves as a companion text to the journal entries from the same period, showing how Merton processed the relationship through deliberate prose as well as daily record-keeping. ## Appendix B: "Some Personal Notes" Brief notes and reflections from the period, including material that didn't fit the main journal's chronological structure. These provide additional context for Merton's state of mind during the key months of the relationship and its aftermath. --- # Key Themes and Highlights ## Solitude as Vocation, Not Escape Merton's understanding of solitude shifts throughout the journal. In Part I, solitude is something he's achieved -- a hard-won arrangement with the monastery. By Part III, solitude has become something he has to choose again, this time knowing what it costs. The experience with M. strips away any illusion that his hermit life is an escape from human connection. He has to own it as a positive choice, made in full awareness of what he's giving up. This transforms solitude from a withdrawal into a discipline. ## Love as Revelation The relationship with M. doesn't just test Merton's vocation -- it reveals dimensions of himself he didn't know existed. At 51, after decades in a monastery, he discovers he's capable of falling in love with an intensity that shocks him. The journal treats this as a genuine revelation, not a temptation to be overcome. Merton refuses to dismiss the love as merely a distraction or a failure. He insists that it taught him something true about himself and about the nature of love itself, even though he ultimately returns to his vow. ## The Tension Between Honesty and Commitment The journal is uncomfortably honest about Merton's dishonesty. He lies to his abbot, sneaks phone calls, arranges secret meetings. He knows he's being duplicitous and records his self-awareness without letting it stop him. This creates a portrait of a spiritual writer who is, in the moment, failing at the honesty he preaches. The journal's value is partly in this failure -- it shows that self-knowledge and right action don't always coincide, and that spiritual maturity isn't a fixed achievement but an ongoing struggle. ## Freedom from Care The concept of "a life free from care," drawn from the Desert Fathers, becomes Merton's mature articulation of what he's pursuing. It doesn't mean a life without love, pain, or engagement. It means a life not governed by anxiety, possessiveness, or the compulsion to control. After the crisis with M., Merton arrives at a version of freedom that includes the capacity for love without the need to possess. This is the journal's most substantive spiritual contribution. ## Nature and Contemplation Throughout the journal, the natural world around the hermitage serves as both setting and teacher. Merton's entries about dawn, rain, deer, hawks, and the changing seasons aren't decorative. They're integral to how he practices contemplation. The natural world is where he finds stillness, and his attention to it -- precise, unhurried, genuinely observant -- is the most consistent expression of his contemplative practice. --- # Analytical Reading ## Main Arguments 1. Solitude and love aren't opposites. Genuine solitude requires the capacity for love, and genuine love requires the capacity for solitude. 2. A monastic vocation doesn't eliminate human desire and emotional need -- it requires confronting them honestly rather than suppressing them. 3. Freedom isn't the absence of constraint but the absence of compulsive attachment -- "a life free from care." 4. Self-knowledge comes through crisis and contradiction, not through controlled spiritual practice alone. 5. Commitment and love can coexist in tension without either being false. 6. The natural world is a legitimate and necessary ground for contemplative practice. 7. Honesty with oneself is a process, not an achievement -- Merton is both profoundly self-aware and profoundly self-deceiving at different points. ## Methodology This is a personal journal, not a work of theology or argument. The "methodology" is daily self-observation over twenty-two months. Merton writes as events happen, without the retrospective smoothing that memoirs or spiritual autobiographies typically apply. The editor, Christine Bochen, provides contextual notes and an introduction that frames the journal's significance, but the text itself is primary source material. Its authority comes from immediacy and candor, not from systematic analysis. ## Strengths The journal's primary strength is its honesty. Merton doesn't edit himself into consistency or present a polished spiritual narrative. The entries contradict each other, reverse themselves, and record moments of confusion alongside moments of clarity. This makes the journal more trustworthy than most spiritual autobiography. The writing itself is excellent -- Merton was a skilled prose stylist, and even his quick daily entries have precision and rhythm. The editorial framing by Bochen is helpful without being intrusive, providing context where needed and stepping back where the text speaks for itself. The four-part structure gives the journal a natural arc that makes it readable as narrative, not just as a chronological record. ## Limitations The journal is one person's perspective on a two-person relationship. M. doesn't speak here, and Merton's account of her feelings and motivations is necessarily his interpretation. The power imbalance -- a famous 51-year-old monk and a young student nurse -- is present in the text but never adequately examined by Merton himself. Readers looking for theological argument or systematic spiritual teaching won't find it; the journal is experiential, not analytical. The later sections (Parts III and IV) are less dramatically compelling than Part II, which may frustrate readers drawn in by the love story. Merton's literary and cultural references (Rilke, Camus, Muir, Ionesco) assume a reader with broad humanistic education. Some entries are repetitive, particularly during the period of oscillation in Part II, though this repetition is itself revealing of Merton's state of mind. --- # Personal Reflection ## Key Takeaways The most valuable thing in this journal is the demonstration that spiritual maturity isn't a permanent state. Merton, one of the most respected contemplative writers of his century, falls apart in the most ordinary human way -- he falls in love and can't handle it gracefully. The journal doesn't treat this as a failure narrative. It treats it as the raw material of genuine growth. The idea that you can only know what your commitments mean when they're tested, and that the testing itself is the path rather than an interruption of it, is the journal's deepest teaching. The concept of "a life free from care" is the most portable idea. It reframes freedom not as doing whatever you want but as being released from compulsive anxiety and possessiveness. That's a definition of freedom that works inside or outside a monastery. ## Questions Raised - Where's M.'s account? The relationship is presented entirely through Merton's lens. How would the story read from her perspective? - Does Merton's ultimate recommitment to his vow represent genuine integration or a retreat to the familiar? - How much does institutional pressure (the abbot's discovery, the threat to his publishing career) drive the resolution versus genuine spiritual discernment? - Can the framework of "solitude and love as complementary" work outside a monastic context, or does it require the structure of a vow to hold it together? - What's the relationship between Merton's literary processing (the poems, the diary for M.) and his actual emotional processing? Does writing help him understand or help him avoid? ## Connections to Other Works - [[The Seven Storey Mountain]] by Thomas Merton -- Merton's autobiography, written twenty years earlier, presents his entry into monastic life. *Learning to Love* shows the maturity and complication that the autobiography's conversion narrative couldn't anticipate. - [[New Seeds of Contemplation]] by Thomas Merton -- Merton's most systematic statement of contemplative theology. The journal shows the gap between the composed spiritual teaching and the messy reality of living it. - [[Letters to a Young Poet]] by Rainer Maria Rilke -- Rilke's ideas about solitude and love as complementary disciplines directly influence Merton's thinking in Part III, particularly the concept that loving means "two solitudes protecting and greeting each other." - [[The Diary of a Country Priest]] by Georges Bernanos -- Another intimate record of a religious vocation lived under pressure, with similar tensions between institutional obligation and personal truth. - [[Confessions]] by Augustine -- The original Western spiritual autobiography of a man caught between desire and commitment. Merton is in the same tradition, though with less certainty about resolution. - [[A Secular Age]] by Charles Taylor -- Taylor's analysis of how modern selfhood complicates religious commitment provides context for understanding why Merton's struggle resonates beyond its monastic setting. --- # Reading Notes - The Introduction by Bochen is unusually good for a journal edition -- substantive enough to frame the reading without directing interpretation. - Part I's entries about the hermitage routine are some of the best writing on what daily solitude actually feels like in practice, as opposed to what it means in theory. - The shift from Part I to Part II is jarring. Merton goes from contemplative calm to emotional chaos in a matter of weeks. The journal doesn't smooth this transition, which makes it more honest. - Merton's poems to M. (referenced throughout but collected separately in *Eighteen Poems*) are apparently some of his best poetry. The journal entries hint at this but the poems themselves aren't included. - The phone call entries are painful to read. Merton, a man who writes brilliantly about detachment, can't stop calling a woman from the monastery phone. The gap between his teaching and his behavior is the journal's most uncomfortable and instructive feature. - Rilke's *Letters on Love and Other Difficulties* functions almost as a secondary text in Part III. Merton reads Rilke as giving him permission to understand the relationship as growth rather than failure. - The nature writing throughout is genuinely beautiful. Merton's eye for the Kentucky landscape -- dawn light, hawk flights, rain patterns -- isn't decorative. It's integral to how he experiences contemplation. - "A life free from care" as a concept has a specific lineage in desert monasticism, but Merton's application of it feels fresh: freedom not from feeling but from the compulsion to control feeling. - The abbot (James Fox) comes across as both an institutional authority figure and, in his own way, someone who cared about Merton's wellbeing. The relationship between them is more complex than the journal's frustration with him suggests. - The "Midsummer Diary for M." in the appendix is Merton at his most vulnerable and his most self-consciously literary at the same time. He's writing for an audience of one, but he's also writing for posterity, and he knows it. - The journal makes clear that Merton's solitude was never isolation. He was reading voraciously, corresponding with dozens of people, receiving visitors, and engaging with current events (Vietnam, the civil rights movement). His hermitage was permeable.