conscience matter

You’ve read about our affair. They published his journals a few years ago. I am who he called M. This isn’t meant to tell any deep secrets. You may have some questions and I’ll be happy to take those when I finish this.

We met while he was recovering from back surgery as you know. The day felt dark and at noon the rain continued to pour after six hours. His room was lit only by his reading lamp as he sat up in bed. I brought him lunch and we talked about how he was faring, his pain, and the books he was reading at the time.

You know the rest. In my mind, I keep a calendar of that month of May. It feels like each of those days is souvenir in a magical box of memory. Sometimes I lift the lid, peer inside and take one to hold for a while. Still have my letters from him and my journal. The talks we had on the phone.

My husband and my children know about all of this of course. Have they read the letters and my journal? No. I have discussed it with them a few times. A few journalists have found me and asked for interviews but I haven’t given one. His biographer called me and we spoke for a time, but I feel he just wanted to know that I really existed somewhere as if that was enough for now.

So, I do exist and I am real and I am here before you, talking, flesh and blood, a bit embarrassed and wondering what I should say. I have a speech here, written. It took me a few weeks to write and I rewrote it many times and now I find that it doesn’t feel what’s coming forth in my brain at this moment. So, I’ll set this aside for you to read later, and for now just talk.

You must be interested in this because it must weigh upon your minds and upon your calling here. You are all human beings with compassion and doubt. You may have loved someone before coming here. You may dream of romantic love. You each have your story and your journey.

I am not here to apologize for him or defend his name. That’s not really needed because there’s so much that he wrote that shows us what he thought and the many ways he thought about things. All those questions. The way he would ramble on about things, talking fast, that joy in his voice when he was telling you a story or trying to explain things. Thinking out loud.

You have all read more about him than I have. You’ve probably listened to recordings of his talks, read his poetry. So what can I add to his story? I can only add mine to it and his story is forever attached to mine. You can’t forget something like that.

This is the manuscript for something I call “Conscience Matter”. It’s more like a series of sketches from that time as I remember and imagine them. We used the protection of “Conscience Matter” in a way of course not intended and for that I’m somewhat regretful. But at the time, being in love, it didn’t matter to us really.

The world feels very confusing to me at times these days. We have so many ways to communicate and learn things from so many places and sources. We can connect with people from all over the world instantly. Write things and have them appear to someone in an instant. So one thing I’d like to relate to you is the feeling of anticipation and how that felt at the time.

My work days were busy then. Twelve hour shifts sometimes longer if needed. Besides my ward duties, I had to study a great deal. Between studying, being on the ward, sleeping, eating, and reading, that was my day really. I had a small room that was quiet with two windows facing some trees.

I waited for his calls. He knew my shift schedule. I made sure of that. I would sit and watch the phone, not in a nervous way, but more in a longing way of wanting to hear his voice. So, in a way, with all that’s been written, you can pinpoint the events: the calls, the letters, the times we met. But what I remember with happiness are those blank spaces. The times of thinking and remembering, imagining our next meeting, and more often just the present moment of that feeling of love and tenderness.

Yet, here I am talking about memory. And you there, listening, some of you taking notes, waiting for my next word. I am making myself nervous, sorry. Felt myself drift back there just then. That’s really what I’m trying to explain. The drifting.

The in between times I filled with work and writing to him. You don’t have those letters because he burned them before he traveled to the Far East. But it makes you wonder, doesn’t it? It makes me wonder. Makes me sad sometimes that I cannot remember what I wrote. I remember the ideas and the emotions. But all those words. So let’s agree that we’d all like to reread those letters. But we cannot.

I have all of his letters and someday, you’ll see them. But not now. What did he write? How explicit was his writing? How romantic? You’ve gotten to know him by reading him. You can imagine. Let your imaginations fly and simply use the adjective of “very” next to each answer you imagine.

He could be subtle and very brash. Questioning himself and yet confident upon the next page. Erotic and then painfully aware of who he was. He wrestled with himself a great deal from what I saw in him. He wrestled with things inside of himself. He wrestled with his existence, the things around him, the people he met. Not in a fighting sense, but you know he enjoyed a good debate, right? And from his writing you see how he wrestled with ideas.

Maybe the word wrestle is not the right word for you, but that’s what I felt from him; struggle, tension, but at the same time he appeared to me to be motivated by a search for peace. A peaceful way for himself. Reconciled in the way he lived there alone. He enjoyed being alone, I think. I enjoyed being alone.

I enjoy time to think and write, read and listen to music. My husband’s dealt with this patiently for years. I have my own room for study and quiet. Like a refuge from the day to day things. Not a cave or hideout, but a place that’s my place. For me that’s important. Even then, being really away from home for the first time, working at a real hospital, studying, on my own, I was never really lonely. A few times, I felt sorry for myself when we couldn’t be together, but that was temporary.

Being alone felt very free to me. It’s not just the independence, but to me it was more a sense of feeling the freedom of thinking and the beauty of the quiet, the lack of distractions. He was like that as well. We talked often about that happiness that comes with being alone and the chance to know ourselves and feel comfortable in our own skin as people sometimes say.

I was young at the time we met, twenty-five that Spring and I felt beautiful. He thought so, too. Here’s a picture of us then at the picnic on May 7. And here I am with a friend; we’re in our nurses uniforms all crisp and starched, ready to save the world. My hair was longer then. I am happy you’re laughing about that picture. Do you see the smiles on our faces? I‘ll leave that picture up on the screen for a while to make this a bit more real for us.

That picture can be distracting for me but I’ll let it distract you from my boring talk here. Comfortable in our own skin. At peace. Not quite confidence, but rather a confidence together. For me, I felt complete with him. He filled what was missing in my life. What was missing for me? Tenderness, someone to listen to what I really felt about life, and someone who treasured me and what I wanted to give.

But let me just say, that I was not unhappy before I met him. I felt very happy with my life, my family and friends. I was not lonely because as I said before I relished that time to myself. He seemed happy to me, too. Full of life and ideas. He wrestled a great deal with life’s questions but it didn’t feel to me that he transferred any of that tension to me.

What he transferred, gave to me was kindness, care, and genuine love. That’s a big word, love. So small, just four letters. But we shared all the aspects of love in spite of the distance and the lives we had to lead. Yes, there was a beautiful physical aspect to our love and that has a graphic, visual quality that I suppose you can film and recreate with music in the background. People may want to see that, I’m sure.

But there was that lovemaking of the mind, the thoughts, which to me were more erotic and sensual than any kiss or embrace we shared. I mean that. It’s this essence of thought. That begins to explain what I mean as anticipation. What feelings do we have when we look forward to something, seeing someone?

Inside that space of time alone, I would deliberately place myself in a state of mind to remember and to daydream. I had a radio but no television in my room. Placing the radio on low, I listened to classical music sometimes. Then I would think of him and try to actually see what he was doing. Throughout the day, I could follow him. He mentioned often in letters and conversations what his day was like.

After a while, I knew when he would call and I would be sure to be in my room then. I knew that he had to be careful when he called. It often sounded as if he found the circumstances exciting and I remember a few times we laughed together comparing ourselves to teenagers. Te phone calls meant a great deal to me. We calmed each other and listened.

He always listened to my rambles and worries. I missed him very much and wanted to see him more often. I tried not to make him feel badly or pressured. It was hard at times to catch up on the phone. For me, it took about ten minutes to relax and feel connected with him again. Sometimes that bothered me because I wanted to be more spontaneous. The anticipation always wrapped around me like a cool exciting breeze.

I wrote him every day, sometimes twice, and mailed the letters to the office with “Conscience Matter” printed on the back of the envelope and I remember using an extra piece of writing paper to fold around my letters to prevent anyone from holding it up in the light and peering inside. Sometimes he used these extra sheets of paper in his own letters.

In the beginning I would rewrite things to make sure I said things well. He being a writer, I was self-conscious about my writing. But soon, that changed and I just would relax at my desk, clear my mind and just be with him in words. Rereading his letters, I would try to respond to what he said, and those things he asked about my days. Sometimes the phone calls and the letters blended and I would have to remember what we said and wrote. My journal filled during those days. Surprisingly my studies went well, I think because of the focus I had upon him and his encouragement.

So, you must wonder about how this changed him. I wonder about that too. It changed me. The intense longing and desire, the mental and physical awakenings took me places I had never felt before. And with each day, even being apart as we were, those feelings seemed to become stronger and truthfully this became exhausting sometimes.

Too feel that intensely takes a great deal of energy, I believe. I remember sleeping very well and then having these periods where I’d sleep only three hours a night. My mind felt like it was on fire. Because of that energy and emotion, I can remember a great deal about that month in particular. And because in my heart I knew that we would never be together, my record of the time, my journal, became like a sketchbook that never left my side. Today, I’m happy for that.

I’m happy that we’re here talking about this. It’s awkward for some of you because you think of him as a spiritual man. It’s definitely something that will stir up resentment in the church. I agree that we should remember him in certain ways and because of his body of work, all those writings, lectures, notes, journals, we have such a rich picture of him.

What is missing are my letters and for the time being his letters to me. I’ll be very clear with you today. His writing, even now seems very descriptive, poetic and sexual. He wrote poems to me. You have some of those. He was very much a man and I know you want to know. I can see it in your eyes. How graphic do you want me to be? We were deeply in love and we did those things short of having intercourse that couples do to please one another. And it was beautiful to share that with him.

People may or may not want to hear my story about that time. I’m thinking now that this story I’ve written is just a love story. Nothing more than that. People will discuss the fact that this story only means something because he was a priest. I cannot fault people for seeing it that way. For me, I believe that because of who we were, particularly because of who he was as a person, his capacity for love and his knowledge of love was immense. He’s written about that.

_______________________________________________________________