Follow the Ecstasy

A Historical Novel by Rebecca Smith

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On December 13, 1968, Margie Smith learns from the front page of The New York Times that Thomas Merton is dead. The world mourns a Trappist monk and one of the twentieth century's great spiritual writers. Margie mourns the man who loved her in secret.

Follow the Ecstasy is literary historical fiction told in alternating voices — Margie in close third person, Tom in first — tracing the 1966 love affair between Merton and the student nurse who cared for him after back surgery at St. Joseph's Hospital in Louisville. What begins as letters and clandestine meetings becomes a passionate love affair between a cloistered monk and an engaged woman. When the affair is discovered, Tom is pulled back behind the enclosure walls and Margie is left to make sense of what happened without him — which she does, with the help of a wise feminist nun and the Baez sisters in Carmel. Tom faces the childhood wounds made famous in The Seven Storey Mountain, then travels to Asia where he kneels before a reclining Buddha at Polonnaruwa. Days later he is killed by accidental electrocution in Bangkok — but not before writing her one last letter. The story ends when a monk presses that sealed envelope into Margie's hands at a memorial for Tom ten years later.

This is a love story, but not one that ends in happily ever after. It ends in something far rarer — spiritual awakening. For them both. Follow the Ecstasy makes a radical claim: that Merton's enlightenment experience at Polonnaruwa was made possible only by first having been cracked open by the love of a woman. Romantic love and embodied intimacy were not detours on his spiritual journey but prerequisites. Eros is not the opposite of God, but its other face. For Margie the awakening is quieter but no less radical — the discovery that she is not a supporting character in someone else's story, but the protagonist of her own.