Beneath the Mask of Holiness: Thomas Merton and the Forbidden Love Affair that Set Him Free

One need not regard Merton as a saint to find fault with this unfortunate book. Those who appreciate Merton's human complexity--his contradictions, his finely tuned sense of the absurd, his willingness to meet his own shadow--will barely recognize the person depicted here.The author purports to write "a complete portrayal of the true Merton....an unbiased account." But his biases practically leap off the page. He expresses admiration for Merton's writings, calling him "a gifted wordsmith" with "an outstanding body of work." But he doesn't seem to like the man himself. He refers to Merton as "the celebrity monk," "a poster boy for the Catholic Church," known for his "holier-than-thou writings." In his pre-monastic days, he was "a sinner of the first degree," who experienced the "depth of depravity."Merton was often incredibly hard on himself, but Shaw gives him some competition, proclaiming him "spoiled, morally weak, ethically handicapped, narcissistic, deceptive, secretive, independent to a fault, and by all accounts, irresponsible."Readers of The Seven Storey Mountain are said to have been "hoodwinked and misled," because of a "conspiracy" and "cover-up" perpetrated by Merton and his "enablers"--"a concerted effort to disguise a tormented sinner as some sort of plastic saint rehabilitated through monastic practices." Merton is seen as "the abused spouse in a marriage to Gethsemani and the Catholic Church," who remained "confused and tormented" throughout his monastic life, until he fell in love with Margie, "a sensual student nurse half his age." Their relationship, called a "wondrous, magical story" in one place, is referred to elsewhere as a "sordid affair."Shaw's treatment of the Catholic Church and Merton's religious superiors is thoroughly negative and one-sided. While Merton may at times have felt like a prisoner, he was in fact free to walk away at any time, as countless others have done. He chose to stay, remaining a Catholic priest and a monk of Gethsemani for the rest of his life. As for Merton's complicated relationship with his abbot, Dom James showed his trust and respect for the monk by choosing him as his personal confessor. Weekly, for fifteen years, the abbot literally got down on his knees and confessed his sins to Merton. As Dom James said years later, "I knew he was the best."In terms of style, the book is a curious mixture of term paper and pulp novel. Errors in syntax and word choice abound, and logical connections are often elusive. Some sentences are almost impossible to parse: "For pages on end, the character while writing in the summer of 1941 months before he entered Gethsemani, Merton addressed his uncle in adoring terms." And Merton would surely be amused to see his first confession referred to as "confessionary tribunals"!More significantly, there are factual errors, along with many instances where the author has misread or mischaracterized passages from Merton's own journals. Despite hundreds of footnotes, the book is not even an accurate of the available details of the love affair itself.The reality is that Merton actually saw Margie on very few occasions, all of them duly noted in his journals. So it is puzzling that Shaw cannot seem to keep track of when and where they met, and who else was present. His account certainly suggests that there were more private "interludes" than the evidence supports. Even after rereading portions of Beneath the Mask alongside a copy of Merton's journal, I continue to be baffled by some bits of Shaw's chronology. Such details might seem trivial, were it not for the fact that the author uses specific dates and passages from the journals to support his own conclusions about the nature of the relationship.Finally, Merton's all-too-human weaknesses have hardly been a secret all these years. When I first heard about him back in the sixties, his youthful transgressions were pretty much understood to have included heavy drinking and an active sex life. (In those years, he was far more likely to be regarded as a dangerous radical than a plastic saint--especially by many Catholics.) Information that he had likely fathered a child has been out there since Edward Rice's book was published in 1970, and is acknowledged in the introductory notes to the 1998 edition of The Seven Storey Mountain.Merton's love affair with Margie was written about in detail a quarter of a century ago by his official biographers: his close friend John Howard Griffin (Follow the Ecstasy, 1983), and Michael Mott (The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, 1984). Both accounts are balanced and well-written, as is Jim Forest's Living with Wisdom (1991, revised 2008). For Merton's own thoughts and feelings, there is no substitute for going directly to the source: his journal, Learning to Love.

In August 2008, my wife and I had the opportunity to participate in a retreat led by Jonathan Montaldo. The retreat was "Poetry of the Sacred: Thomas Merton and Mary Oliver." The retreat was held at Bethany Spring Retreat Center near the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky.The retreat was transformative for me. We had the opportunity to spend Saturday afternoon in Merton's hermitage with Jonathan and Brother Paul Quenon. Brother Paul, a poet in his own right, was a student under Merton.Since then I have become a Merton enthusiast. I have read Merton and commentaries on Merton. I now highly recommend a new published biography, Beneath the Mask of Holiness: Thomas Merton and the Forbidden Love Affair That Set Him Free (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) by Mark Shaw. Mark is a former defense attorney and columnist, and has been a television legal analyst. He maintains his Merton web site at [...].During the retreat, Jonathan Montaldo told us about the Merton affair with a nurse half his age. He talked about the women in Merton's life, especially the Proverb girl of his dreams. I had read some of Merton's work but was unaware of the affair which was first documented by Michael Mott in Merton's Seven Story Mountain. Merton discussed his side of the affair extensively in the sixth volume of his journals, Learning to Love: Exploring Solitude and Freedom.My initial response to what I learned from Montaldo was, "Gosh, he was human." Having read Beneath the Mask of Holiness my reaction is, "Gosh, he was really human." He struggled in his lifelong search for God and solitude because he was plagued by his past sins, especially his sins against women. Shaw's major premise, which is well documented, is that the affair with M finally set Merton free shortly before his death.Shaw begins by reviewing Merton's biography, The Seven Story Mountain. Both Merton and his censors in the Trappist order were less than honest about Merton's past. Merton's mother and her sternness, her death when he was six, his father's death when he was 16 left Merton an orphan who had a distorted sense of the feminine within him. Initially, the monastery was a refugium peccatorum for Merton; however, he soon came to see that he was one with all people even in solitude. He became the conscience of the peace movement and was silenced by the Abbot General in France.Shaw then performs an extensive analysis of what Merton himself wrote in his journals. He follows this with a review of what has been written by his biographers.For Shaw, Merton masked his internal struggles because he was the poster boy for contemplative monastic spirituality. He had an ongoing love-hate relationship with his Abbot, Dom James, who was jealous of Merton.When Merton fell in love with M, he struggled with love and solitude. Finally, he came to understand that he was worthy of being loved by a woman.I highly recommend Shaw's book. It made Thomas Merton so real for me. I can now identify even more with my anam cara. His pilgrim struggle is every person's journey--we are worthy of the love of God and the love of other people.

Long time Merton reader and beneficiary. I thoroughly enjoyed Mr. Shaw's work on a life I find flawed and fascinating. The lawyerly evidence sifting was a fresh approach and the weaving together of Journals, interviews and other Merton books made for nice pacing all the way through. By my lights Mr. Shaw has been kind to Merton and offers a charitable evaluation of a crisis time in the curious life of a very complex man.The critical reviews posted here are entertaining, but mostly pompous and silly, sounding like proposals for better books the critics could never write. I notice they read Mr. Shaw's book and it's merciful we will never have to read theirs.Highly recommended.

Thank Judy Collins, for me reading or at least starting this book. Given she sang of this man and the story, she sang got me interested.Saying that this is not about the mystery of his death but instead his relationship with Margie Smith, a nurse who was half his age that he became involved with. So much for being a Catholic priest?But on the other hand, it taught him about the nature of love and the reality of life, so it was a worthy experience, surely?The author himself does not impress me, though. He describes everything in what feels like an epic scale, even if it is as simple as sitting in the garden. It tires you out very quickly, alas. Sometimes sitting in the garden is just a hollow little gesture like … sitting in the garden, not life changing! Remember that, Mark!

I am not sure how accurate Shaw's research was because this was my first Merton bio. Certainly he made an effort to put the "romance"/affair in context. The Merton you read about here does not come across well. My feeling is that he had a sexual infatuation with an attractive young woman who quite literally bathed him/touched his body in the hospital and thus aroused feelings he could not control. This had to be couched in the most high-flown terms of holy love to make it acceptable to him, though I think he felt some conflict. I found it creepy trying to picture this 50-year-old Trappist monk making out feverishly with a 25-year-old nurse, and calling it a holy experience. Over and over he denies that he had real sex with her, but - oh come on, human beings are human beings, and what I see here is a lot of dishonesty. It doesn't matter if he "broke his vows" (which in his mind means sexual intercourse and nothing else) or not, he admits the two of them were kissing, "making love" for five hours, meeting in a psychologist's empty office space, becoming sexually aroused, and doing all sorts of other furtive things that the abbey never EVER would have permitted/tolerated.Had he been at all committed to his vows, he should have been doing nothing the (hated) abbot couldn't have witnessed. He forfeited true privacy when he took those vows. The truth is he wanted it both ways. His fame and status had corrupted him and, he believed, put him in a special position. Whether this takes anything away from his prodigious writings, I can't say, but I don't much respect a man who treats a much-younger, lower-status, even marginalized woman this way, dangling her on a string for months then dumping her when she seemed to be threatening his status as the great and spiritual monk. I think people are bothered by this book because it dares to pose some questions that tarnish Merton's godlike status in the eyes of millions. He acted like an infatuated teenager trying to preserve (his) virginity while still being sexually gratified. Maybe he finally just grew up a little which was actually what "set him free". Anyway, let's all go for a Coke or something.

To be honest I felt a lot of the book was written to be way longer than needed.Not being a scholar I was hoping to learn about Merton in a biographical sense. It was frustrating and over done in my opinion. No doubt he was a man who should possibly something else with his life.

Excellent