{"id":67,"date":"2006-09-07T12:46:32","date_gmt":"2006-09-07T19:46:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rhinoblues.com\/thoughts-wp\/?p=67"},"modified":"2011-08-02T19:34:03","modified_gmt":"2011-08-03T02:34:03","slug":"the-seven-storey-mountain-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rhinoblues.com\/thoughts\/2006\/09\/the-seven-storey-mountain-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"The Seven Storey Mountain (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning I completed the first part of The Seven Storey Mountain<\/em> by Thomas Merton.\u00a0 The book is the story of his “search for faith and peace.” (according the back cover of the book)\u00a0 This section of the book covers the time of his childhood through his college years at Columbia.\u00a0 At this point in the book, I don’t really like Merton, though I suspect that Merton himself didn’t like Merton at this point in his life.\u00a0 Perhaps, as the note to the reader suggests, this is just a matter of perception.\u00a0 The Catholic church and the world at large were much different places in the years immediately following World War II.\u00a0 This is surely part of it, however, there were numerous times that I was put off by the arrogance of “Father Louis” (Merton’s monastic name) and how it related to Thomas Merton the child and young adult.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most telling example of this occurs in a scene after his father has died:<\/p>\n

First a scene from right before his father’s death:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Of us all, Father was the only one who really had any kind of a faith.\u00a0 And I do not doubt that he had very much of it, and that behind the walls of his isolation, his intelligence and his will, and not hampered in any essential way by the partial obstruction of some of his senses, were turned to God, and communed with God Who was with him and in him, and Who gave him, as I believe, light to understand and to make use of his suffering for his own good, and to perfect his soul.\u00a0 It was a great soul, large, full of natural charity.\u00a0 He was a man of exceptional intellectual honesty and sincerity and purity of understanding.\u00a0 And this affliction, this terrible and frightening illness which was relentlessly pressing him down even into the jaws of the tomb, was not destroying him after all.<\/p>\n

[…] We thought he was done for, but it was making him great.\u00a0 And I think God was already weighing out to him the weight of reality that was to be his reward, for he certainly believed far more than any theologian would require of a man to hold explicitly as “necessity of means,” and so he was eligible for this reward, and his struggle was authentic, and not wasted or lost or thrown away.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However, just over a year after his fathers death, the young Merton (through the eyes of the monastic Merton) seems to have forgotten his earlier admiration of his father’s faith, during what could be considered the beginning of Merton’s conversion experience:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Suddenly it seemed to me that Father, who had now been dead more than a year, was there with me.\u00a0 The sense of his presence was as vivid and as real and as startling as if he had touched my arm or spoken to me.\u00a0 The whole thing passed in a flash, but in that flash, instantly, I was overwhelmed with a sudden and profound insight into the misery and corruption of my own soul, and I was pierced deeply with a light that made me realize something of the condition I was in, and I was filled with horror at what I saw, and my whole being rose up in revolt against what was within me, and my soul desired escape and liberation and freedom from all this with an intensity and an urgency unlike anything I had ever known before.\u00a0 And now I think for the first time in my whole life I really began to pray–praying not with my lips and with my intellect and my imagination, but praying out of the very roots of my life and of my being, and praying to the God I had never known, to reach down towards me out of His darkness and to help me to get free of the thousand terrible things that held my will in their slavery.<\/p>\n

There were a lot of tears connected with this, and they did me good, and all the while, although I had lost that first vivid, agonizing sense of the presence of my father in the room, I had him in my mind, and I was talking to him as well as to God, as though he were a sort of intermediary.\u00a0 I do not mean this in any way that might be interpreted that I thought he was among the saints.\u00a0 I did not really know what that might mean then, and now that I do know I would hesitate to say that I thought he was in Heaven.\u00a0 Judging by my memory of the experience I should say it was “as if” he had been sent to me out of Purgatory.\u00a0 For after all, there is no reason why the souls in Purgatory should not help those on earth by their prayers and influence, just like those in Heaven: although usually they need our help more than we need theirs.\u00a0 But in this case, assuming my guess has some truth in it, things were the other way ’round.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It really just amazes me that the “elder” Merton can look back on his father, a man who’s faith he could not question, and still think his father would not be in Heaven.\u00a0 Is it just because his father was not a Catholic?\u00a0 I can’t be completely sure, since this is my first real exposure to Merton’s works, but based on the way he speaks of the “Protestant” denominations elsewhere in the book, I suspect that is a large part of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning I completed the first part of The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton.\u00a0 The book is the story of his “search for faith and peace.” (according the back cover of the book)\u00a0 This section of the book covers the time of his childhood through his college years at Columbia.\u00a0 At this point in … <\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1327,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[527,217,388,372,528],"class_list":["post-67","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reading","tag-discernment","tag-family","tag-heaven","tag-merton","tag-reading","item-wrap"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.rhinoblues.com\/thoughts\/upload\/\/app_1_220086724709892_1567717122.gif","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rhinoblues.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rhinoblues.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rhinoblues.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rhinoblues.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rhinoblues.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rhinoblues.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":541,"href":"https:\/\/www.rhinoblues.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions\/541"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rhinoblues.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rhinoblues.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rhinoblues.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rhinoblues.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}