Michael N. McGregor – Robert Lax

Robert Lax and the Endless, Enduring, Eternal Friendship

One of Robert Lax’s many friends on Patmos: Pandelis the grocer.

I’ve been thinking recently about the concept of friendship in relationship to Robert Lax. When Lax and I exchanged letters, he would ask me about friends I’d mentioned to him even though he’d never met them. And in conversation, he talked about his old friends as if I’d known them too. I suppose we all do this to some extent, but with Lax it seemed as if he saw the connections of friendship as one vast web or pool, with all of us in it at the same time.

I wrote about many of Lax’s friendships in Pure Act and made a point of highlighting the friendship aspect of his relationship with Merton. I also mentioned that he had hundreds of correspondents, many of whom had never met him. Some of them write to me still, marveling that he wrote back when they wrote to him and even more that he carried on a correspondence with them as long as they continued to write to him.

What I’ve been thinking lately is that friendship was the holy ground of life for Lax. It was the place he saw God. This may sound odd when talking about a man who chose to live alone on an island far from most of those he knew. But Lax often spoke of being alone for others. He spent his aloneness loving not only God but also those he felt were made in God’s image. Which is all of us.

I don’t think Lax would have been surprised at all if he had rounded one of those whitewashed buildings in the port town of Skala and run into his Uncle Henry or his cousin Bob Mack or his college roommate Seymour Freedgood. He was a man of presence, and, strange as it may sound, presence didn’t require being physically present.

Presence meant being present to the fullness, humanness, and godliness of a person, whether that person was with you or not. Having shared presence with someone in any way, whether through time together or correspondence or simply a mutual friend’s loving story, Lax felt an enduring connection to that person.

This presence, I believe, is why he could be so intuitive in letters and why his life was one long series of serendipitous connections. Lax didn’t need to look forward to a heaven where he would reunite with people he loved; he was with them all the time already. Just as I feel every day that he is with me now.

When love is multifarious and indiscriminate, when it flows out like a flood that embraces rather than overwhelms, when it encompasses presence and patience and positivity, believing the best in those it meets and keeping them continually in one’s mind and heart, it takes no heed of barriers of time or space or life or death.

It becomes endless, enduring, and eternal, all at once. That’s how Lax loved.

(This post was adapted from a piece in the Summer 2024 issue of The Robert Lax Newsletter. To subscribe to this free quarterly email publication, click here.

Robert Lax’s Words are Inspiration for Meditation in New Book

Padraic O’Hare, professor emeritus of religious and theological stuies at Marrimack Colllege in North Andover, MA, has made Lax’s writings the center of a mediation in his new book, An Invincible Summer Within: Contemplation Practice.

The book is composed of 72 sessions of contemplation practice.

Among the Lax quotes from Pure Act O’Hare includes is this one:

“Each moment should have the power of an instinctive movement, but should be fully informed by thought–a combination of reflection and spontaneity; an immediate response to stimulus: immediate but total and mature.”

You can order An Invincible Summer Within here.

Padraic O’Hare is the author and editor of eight books, including two prior works on contemplation (meditation) practice: The Way of Faithfulness: Contemplation and Formation in the Church (1993) and Busy Life, Peaceful Center: A Book of Meditating (1995). The 1993 work received First Prize as Best Book in Catholic Education of the Catholic Press Association for l995. His other books deal with religious education, social justice, and Jewish-Christian relations.

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A Few Gems from the Book Collection in Robert Lax’s Old House on Patmos

A few images from lesser-known Lax publications I found on the shelves in his old Patmos house while staying there this past winter.

This post appeared originally in the Spring 2024 issue of The Robert Lax Newsletter. To subscribe to this free quarterly publication–with news of Lax-related events, articles, quotes, and images–click here.

A YouTube Video Featuring Steve Georgiou Talking About Robert Lax

Steve Georgiou was one of the young people who spent time with Lax on Patmos in the 1980s and 1990s. He went on to write three books about him, including The Way of the Dreamcatcher: Spirit Lessons with Robert Lax, a collection of interviews.

Last summer, Father John Dear, a leading Catholic activist for nonviolence, hosted a Zoom chat in which Georgiou talked at length about his relationship with Lax and his views on Lax’s life and importance. You can view it on YouTube by clicking below.

Robert Lax’s Patmos House Today

Robert Lax’s Pendo books on a shelf in his Patmos house. The photograph shows those who traveled with him when he left Patmos for the last time in 2000. (Photo by Michael N. McGregor)

Almost 40 years have passed since I first set foot in Robert Lax’s small house above the port town of Skala on Patmos. Three months ago, I had a chance to return for the first time in 18 years and stay in it, thanks to the kindness of those who own it now.

I went back to Patmos because I’m writing a book called An Island to Myself: The Place of Solitude in an Active Life (forthcoming from Monkfish Publishing, spring 2025). Much of the book is about the two months I lived on Patmos in 1985 when I was 27. I spent the first in total solitude and the second in a modified solitude that included time with Lax.

My purpose in returning was to see how different living in that kind of solitude would be as an older man. (I’m only three years younger now than Lax was when I met him.) Staying in the house of a man who lived every day in solitude was a bonus. Few of Lax’s things remain there, but one wall of the small main room is still lined with his books.

Looking through his shelves brought several thoughts to mind:

Lax was more interested in simply getting his writing out into the world than in worrying about how big his publisher was.
He collaborated with an astonishing number of people on small books and limited press runs, and he was friends with most of them.
The books on his shelves that weren’t his own (which means the books he read) fell into five main categories: a. books by friends, b. books on religion or philosophy, c. books of poetry or on the craft of poetry, d. dictionaries for the languages he spoke (English, French, Italian, and Greek), and e. books people had given him.
Because he lived without a television and used his radio primarily to listen to the BBC for half an hour once a day, his books represent the ideas and knowledge he filled his mind with.
He drew from a wide variety of traditions as he sought to improve his consciousness and deepen his faith.

The front door of Robert Lax’s house on Patmos. (Photo by Michael N. McGregor)

I was glad to see that Lax’s house had changed in the 24 years since his death. These days, a painter stays and works in it for much of the year. It’s a living space where creativity still takes place. But it was good to see his books there too, to find his spirit in them. The one other obvious reminder of him was a poster on the wall with his lovely face above one of his best-loved poems:

turn
ing

the

jun
gle


in
to

a

gar
den


with
out

des
troy
ing


a

sin
gle

flow
er

–Michael N. McGregor

Robert Lax’s 108th Birthday

Today is Robert Lax’s 108th birthday. Here’s a quote from him to mark the occasion:

“the words were like precipate that rose from a stream which flowed with remarkable consistency within him. he took them as they came, often ungrammatical, often incorrect, and not infrequently of a character not to be used in gentle society. he wrote them as they came, feeling often that the errors, the incorrect and the gross expressions were the ones which told the most, conformed to the contours, the flow of the stream. for it was the stream, the nature of the stream, he had set himself now to reveal.”

[p. 303, Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax]

Happy Lax Day!

Robert Lax at Columbia University

I recently acquired a copy of the Columbia University yearbook, The Columbian, from 1938, the year Robert Lax graduated. It shows Lax being voted “best writer” by the senior class and serving as editor of the Columbia Review

He also appears in the university’s Hall of Fame for 1938.

Here’s his regular senior class listing.

I like this yearbook line about his poetry in the Review.

Note: The information and images in this post appeared originally in the Robert Lax Newsletter. To receive this free publication in your inbox four times a year, sign up on the left-hand side of this page.

Robert Lax at Play

I just sent out the fall edition of the Lax Newsletter with this photograph in it of Robert Lax playing the bongo drums when he was quite young. I don’t know where or when the photograph was taken, or by whom, but it is one of my favorites of him. I think it shows his true inner spirit at an early age.

The photograph came to me from Jeffrey Weinberg, who used a version of it on the cover of his 2014 letterpress publication Dear Jack: Heart Not Head. The limited-edition book features an intimate letter Lax sent to Jack Kerouac when they were good friends in the 1950s. You can purchase a copy, with an introduction by Lax archivist Paul Spaeth, from Jeffrey’s Water Row Books eBay page.

If you don’t already receive the free Robert Lax Newsletter, which goes out four times a year, you can sign up for it by clicking here or inserting your email address in the white box on the upper-left-hand side of this page.

In Memoriam: Robert Lax

Visiting Lax in his house on Patmos a couple of years before he died.

Today is the day Robert Lax died 23 years ago. It’s hard to believe he’s been gone that long. Here’s a brief quote from him (from my biography of him), in memoriam:

what a writer writes should have some relation (though not necessrily a discoverable relation) to the meaning of his life.

and the meaning of our lives should have some relation (to the meaning of the life of the world)

but the meaning of our lives, and what we write, and what we do, is somehow in us from the beginning: in this sense, the child’s only duty is to live and grow

Lax’s Writings in New Book on “Franciscan Lectio”

Father Dan Riley, OFM, has a new book out focused on “Franciscan lectio,” a variation on lectio divina, a traditional monastic practice involving meditation and prayer centered on scriptural passages. Today, many people of faith outside monasteries use not only scripture but other meaningful writings to center their meditation and prayer. In Father Dan’s book, for example, he says he includes more passages by Robert Lax than anyone else.

According to an article on the St. Bonaventure website, “Fr. Dan hopes to inspire one’s spiritual imagination in “Franciscan Lectio” through story, art, poetry, nature, Franciscan mysticism and Scripture – helping readers to see that all of life is unitive and sacred.”

**Father Dan Riley, OFM (image from the St. Bonaventure U. website)**

“I entered the project thinking Merton and St. Francis were my heroes,” Fr. Dan says, “but it turned out Lax and St. Clare played the prominent roles.”

The book, published by Paraclete Press, is called Franciscan Lectio: Reading the World Through the Living Word. You can read more about it (including what others have said about it), sample the opening pages, and order a copy here. It’s also available on Amazon.