Thomas Merton – 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.

A New Lax/Merton Center for Civil Discourse?

**(image from the Mt. Irenaeus website)**

Father Dan Riley, OFM, reports that he and a small group of others from different faith traditions have been discussing the establishment of a new center dedicated to Lax and Merton and committed to civil dialogue in an increasingly uncivil age. The center would probably be housed at the Mt. Irenaeus Fransciscan Mountain Community Father Dan founded near St. Bonaventure University many years ago. Here’s the community’s description of its location:

Mt. Irenaeus rests on nearly 400 acres of beautiful land in the Allegheny hills of Southwestern New York State, with seven cabins, large community House of Peace, Holy Peace Chapel, 10 miles of trails, labyrinth garden, reflective pond and other sacred outdoor spaces for contemplation.”

One possible design for the center is an octagon, to reflect that shape’s importance in several traditions. The building would also incorporate some parts of the Marcus cottage where Lax, Merton and their friends gathered during college summers, writing, making music, and practicing debating important matters in community.

**The fireplace in the Marcus cottage.**

Riley and others have been trying for years to find a way to move the Marcus cottage from the hills above Olean down near campus. Unfortunately, the cottage hasn’t been maintained, so it isn’t feasible (or cost-effective) to move the whole thing. Instead, they’ve secured pieces of the cottage to put in the center: the mantel over the living room fireplace and the sailing ship model above it, as well as the doors and hinges from the bedrooms Lax and Merton slept in. An expert is looking at the cottage to see if other parts are salvageable too.

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

According to Father Dan, the center would be a place outside the Mt. Irenaeus Franciscan structures where people from different backgrounds could talk about issues of any kind, whether they came out of a faith tradition or not. But it would be “a mystical place, not just dialogic,” he says. Its core value would come from the root of the word “conversation,” which means not just talking but turning or changing together.

If you’re interested in being connected to the project or just knowing more about it, you can write to the Mt. Ireneaus office coordinator, Michelle Marcellin, at mmarc@sbu.edu.

Remembering Robert Lax on the 20th Anniversary of His Death

Twenty years ago on this day (the feast day of St. John in the Orthodox calendar), I was getting ready to teach an evening class when I received word that my dear friend and mentor Bob Lax had died. I turned out my office light and let the tears flow–tears of gratitude as much as of grief, for I had been blessed with 15 years of close friendship with this warm, funny, smart, creative, and humanely spiritual man.

Of all the things I learned from Lax, perhaps the most important was to find and follow my own path in life. I suppose that is why I ended my biography of him, Pure Act, with these words:

Several people who knew Lax said he found what [his friend Thomas] Merton was looking for: a kind of solitude, simplicity, and peace that passes human understanding. Some have even said he was the one who became a saint. None of this would have meant much to him except perhaps as inspiration to others. What he--and Merton--found, he thought, was his own way of walking. His own way of singing the song. He own way of being pure act. For, as he once wrote,

there are not many songs
there is one song

the animals lope to it
the fish swim to it
the sun circles to it
the stars rise
the snow falls
the grass grows

there is no end to the song and no beginning
the singer may die
but the song is forever

truth is the name of the song
and the song is truth.

May the song Lax sang resound in all of us who loved him or love his work and love the truth he sang about. And may we find our own new ways to sing it too.

Eyes of Innocence

      “Whatever his failures,” Thomas Merton writes in his essay “Message to Poets,” “the poet is not a cunning man. His art depends on an ingrained innocence which he would lose in business, in politics, or in too organized a form of academic life. The hope that rests on calculation has lost its innocence.”
     I don’t know that Merton was thinking of Lax when he wrote these words, but he certainly might have been. It was Lax who encouraged him to try writing poetry himself, and one of the things he admired most in Lax was his enduring innocence.
      As for Lax, when he worked for the New Yorker as a young man, he seemed to know innately that its combination of cleverness, calculation, and commerce was killing his poetic soul. Once he left that position, he mostly stayed far away from business and politics—and even during his brief teaching gigs, no one would call his approach “organized.”
     I wish I could reprint Merton’s entire essay here because, though it was written in 1964, it speaks more clearly about the poet’s role at this moment in history than anything else I’ve read. And by “poet” I mean any person who seeks to speak of life as he or she truly sees it. I think that’s what Merton meant by the word too. “Poetry,” he writes, “is the flowering of ordinary possibilities. It is the fruit of ordinary and natural choice. This is its innocence and its dignity.”
     Almost every poem Lax wrote focused on the “flowering of ordinary possibilities.” This is especially true of his later, more minimalist works. It was the seemingly ordinary that fascinated him, the way it became extraordinary when studied intently. And he often said that the breaks in his poems came to him naturally. He would establish a rhythm and break from it where a break felt right.
     Two of the most important traits any artist needs are the ability to see the world and himself clearly and honestly, and the ability to express what he sees precisely, neither muddying it nor gilding it. As Merton asserts, these are traits of the innocent. One of the things Lax sought to do in his 20s and 30s was unlearn the things he had learned in school that weren’t true for him, so he could see the things that were true more clearly.
     Too few of us make the effort or take the time to do what Lax sought to do. Instead of doing whatever is required, taking whatever time is needed, to know and express our own thoughts, our own true beliefs, we accept the slogans and attitudes of one group or another. Sometimes consciously, sometimes passively. As a result, we can never see the world through innocent eyes—the eyes that see love rather than hate, solidarity rather than division, open-minded hope rather than the calculations that might lead to some imagined “victory.”
     “Collective life is often organized on the basis of cunning, doubt, and guilt,” Merton writes. “True solidarity is destroyed by the political art of pitting one man against another and the commercial art of estimating all men at a price. On these illusory measurements men build a world of arbitrary values without life and meaning, full of sterile agitation.”
     The results of this arbitrariness, Merton says, are despair and alienation. “In such a situation,” he writes, “there is no joy, only rage.”
     Lax believed deeply that all of us could see clearly and know what to do in any moment if we put ourselves in a place where grace could flow to us and through us. To him, that meant slowing down and waiting until he knew what he should do. It also meant quieting his mind and his heart, especially when everything around him was unquiet. He believed in a unifying spirit that disappeared from our sight only when we drifted away from it.
     There is no magic in the images and words poets see and use, Merton tells us. “It is the businessman, the propagandist, the politician, not the poet, who believes in ‘the magic of words,’” he writes. “For the poet there is precisely no magic. There is only life in all its unpredictability and all its freedom.”
     Lax was, above all, a poet of life as it truly is. As he truly saw it, through innocent eyes. He wrote again and again (as the title of one of his books suggests) of the “thing that is.” The life that is—not as we’d like it to be or might change it to be, but as we experience it right now.
     “When the poet puts his foot in that ever-moving river,” Merton writes, “poetry itself is born out of the flashing water. In that unique instant, the truth is manifest to all who are able to receive it.”
     “Let us obey life,” he says, “and the Spirit of Life that calls us to be poets, and we shall harvest many new fruits for which the world hungers—fruits of hope that have never been seen before. With these fruits we shall calm the resentments and the rage of man.”

© Michael N. McGregor

(This post by Lax biographer Michael N. McGregor originally appeared in the August 2020 issue of The Robert Lax Newsletter. To receive this bimonthly emailing, sign up on the robertlax.com homepage.)

Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaraguan Poet and Translator of Lax’s THE CIRCUS OF THE SUN, has died at 95

Robert Lax became acquainted with Ernesto Cardenal through Thomas Merton, who served as Cardenal’s novice master when he was studying to be a monk at Gethsemani Monastery in Kentucky. Cardenal eventually left the Trappists and returned to his native country, where he served as Minister of Culture from 1979 to 1988, a tumultuous time in Nicaragua’s history. A celebrated poet, he did the Spanish translation for the multilingual version of Lax’s The Circus of the Sun, published by Pendo in 1981.

You can read more about Cardenal’s extraordinary life on his Poetry Foundation webpage.

And in his obituary from the The Guardian.

You’ll find many of Cardenal’s books in English and Spanish at Amazon, including a collection of his correspondence with Merton.

Michael Mott, Thomas Merton Biographer and Lax Friend, Has Died at 88

(Photo of Michael Mott from the Wages & Sons Funeral Home website)

Michael Mott, who published a celebrated and definitive biography of Thomas Merton in 1984, died at 88 on October 11. While working on his Merton biography, Mott relied heavily on interviews with Lax for both details and interpretations of some events in Merton’s life. During their work together, the two became friends. (Mott’s writings about Merton and his archives at Northwestern University were hugely helpful to me in the writing of my Lax biography.)

In addition to his Merton biography, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Mott published 11 poetry collections, two adult novels, and two novels for children. You can read much more about his long life and many writings on his website.

Brother Patrick Hart, Merton Secretary and Lax Friend, Has Died at 93

Brother Patrick Hart was Thomas Merton’s last secretary and a beloved spiritual inspiration to many. Here’s an obituary for him from America Magazine. An editor of many Merton books, Brother Patrick wrote his own small book called Patmos Journal: In Search of Robert Lax, based on journal entries from a visit to Greece. Brother Patrick was 93.

“Image and Word,” A Merton-Lax Exhibit in Buffalo

The Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State is hosting an exhibit dedicated to the creative works of Thomas Merton and Robert Lax. According to The Public, an alternative publication covering Western New York, “The exhibit materials include framed literary items—mostly poems—and photos, and vitrines containing some of their books and other published works.” You can read more of The Public‘s write-up about the show here.

The exhibit, titled “Merton & Lax: Image and Word,” is an expanded remounting of the Lax exhibit displayed at the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts at St. Bonaventure University last year. Among its highlights are rarely-seen issues of Pax, the limited-circulation broadsheet Lax produced in the 1950s and 1960s with poems by friends such as Merton, Jack Kerouac, Mark Van Doren, and E.E. Cummings, and illustrations by painter Ad Reinhardt and graphic artist and publisher Emil Antonucci.

The exhibit, which runs through August 26, is curated by Anthony Bannon, two-time director of the Burchfield Penny Art Center, and Paul Spaeth, Rare Books and Special Collections Librarian at St. Bonaventure University, who is also the curator of the Thomas Merton and Robert Lax Archives at St. Bonaventure. For more information, see the exhibit posting on the Burchfield Penney website.

7 p.m. this Friday, June 16: Thomas Merton Society Keynote Address on the Merton-Lax Friendship to be Live-Streamed

I just learned that my keynote address at the International Thomas Merton Society conference at 7 p.m. (Eastern time) this Friday, June 16, will be live-streamed. The talk is titled “Harpo and the Clown of God: The Seven-Storied Friendship of Thomas Merton and Robert Lax.”

The other keynotes–by Scott Russell Sanders, M. Shawn Copeland, and Luke Timothy Johnson–will be live-streamed too.

To tune in, go to http://merton.org/2017/default.aspx#stream when it’s time for the talk and look for the blue box (where you’ll find the schedule too):

Decoding the Anti-Letters Between Lax and Merton

At the International Thomas Merton Society conference at Sacred Heart University in 2013, I gave a talk on the lifelong correspondence between Robert Lax and Thomas Merton titled “Decoding the Anti-Letters: A Whirling Dance of Wisdom and Wit.” Last spring, that talk was published in The Merton Journal in Great Britain. And now the Journal has made it available as a PDF online. You can read it here.

I’ll be talking about the friendship between Lax and Merton again as a keynote speaker at this year’s ITMS conference, to be held at St. Bonaventure University in Lax’s hometown of Olean, NY, June 15-18. My talk this time will be titled “Harpo and the Clown of God: the Seven-Storied Friendship of Thomas Merton and Robert Lax.” You’ll find full conference details here. I hope to see you in Olean in June!