Originally published at crisis magazine
What are we to make of Thomas Merton’s affair? The nurse? No, not the affair with “M,” but his affair with “A”—alcohol. Merton was restless and fearful the summer evening in 1966 when he wrote, “Where will I be when the dark falls and the dragons come and there is no more beer?”
The careful reader of the nearly 3,000 pages of his journals covering three decades will find Merton often discontented, a sense that he’d rather be somewhere other than where he was or someone other than who he was. To wit, in February 1964, on the twenty-second anniversary of his reception of the Cistercian habit, Merton offers an evaluation of his life citing “twenty-two years of relative confusion, often coming close to doubt and infidelity, agonized aspirations for ‘something better.’”
At times, these sentiments are accompanied by lamentations of his drinking.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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They are most evident in Volumes Six and Seven of his journals, 1966-1968, but also surface in The Seven Storey Mountain, where Merton describes his prep school and collegiate years. Crossing the Atlantic at age seventeen, he and some “Bryn Mawr girls” had
