The Seven Storey Mountain

   I first heard of this spiritual classic when I read "The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage" by Paul Elie (which deserves a longer entry all its own). The latter book was a 500+ page biography of four great Catholic authors: Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Day, Walker Percy and Thomas Merton. They wrote to change lives, seeking to draw others to the Christian faith the same way that these four converts were led to salvation through literature.

   After reading "The Life You Save...," I was filled with immense curiosity about these four amazing people, whose lives demonstrated immense grappling with faith in post-war America. The lives of Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day, in particular, captured my imagination, and I immediately sought books by these authors.

   The Ateneo library had several well-thumbed copies of Thomas Merton's "Seven Storey Mountain," and for good reason. I imagine that many young men in generations past have read the very book I'm now holding, so that they may learn of the kind of contemplative life one might expect when joining a religious order. 

   Merton was born to a family of artists in France. Baptized an Anglican, he was brought up with a cosmopolitan education, living in various European countries and soaking in everything that the modern world had to offer. He gorged himself on movies, jazz clubs, women, wine and song. He studied in Cambridge but moved to Columbia University in New York after fathering a child in England. His life pretty much fits the stereotype of the brilliant aesthete. Immersing himself in Kafka, Marx and Joyce at first, he eventually moved on to Hopkins, Blake and Eliot, and eventually Augustine and Kierkegaard. He speaks of his love for Blake as "having something in it of God's grace."

    I am in awe of how Merton was able to capture the emotional drama of a lost soul seeking God. I felt his pain, his anguish as if it were my own... I rejoiced when he finally converted and was filled with curious longing at his descriptions of life as a Trappist monk in the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky. It is no wonder to me that this book is said to have sent thousands of young men to monasteries.

     Here are some quotes from Merton's autobiography:

    "...This is the pattern and prototype of all sin: the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it... Perhaps the inner motive is that the fact of being loved disinterestedly reminds us that we all need love from others, and depend upon the charity of others to carry on our own lives..."

   "The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything."

   "It is that Sacrament (the Eucharist), and that alone, the Christ living in our midst, and sacrificed by us, and for us and with us, in the clean and perpetual Sacrifice, it is He alone Who holds our world together, and keeps us all from being poured headlong and immediately into the pit of our eternal destruction. And I tell you there is a power that goes forth from that Sacrament, a power of light and truth, even into the hearts of those who have heard nothing of Him and seem to be incapable of belief."

   "Corruptio optimi pessima...The greatest evil is found where the highest good has been corrupted."

      "If the impulse to worship God and to adore Him in truth by the goodness and order of our own lives is nothing more than a transitory and emotional thing, that is our own fault. It is so only because we make it so, and because we take what is substantially a deep and powerful and lasting moral impetus, supernatural in its origin and in its direction, and reduce it to the level of our own weak and unstable and futile fancies and desires."

   "Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity."

   "I (used to) believe in the beautiful myth about having a good time so long as it does not hurt anybody else. You cannot live for your own pleasure and your own convenience without inevitably hurting and injuring the feelings and interests of practically everybody you meet."

   "I had enough sense to know that it would be madness to look for a group of people, a society, a religion, a church from which all mediocrity would absolutely be excluded... but God loves them, and He will not withhold His light from good people anywhere."

   "Consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover each time, and can still produce men and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity. How could all this be possible without the merciful love of God, pouring out His grace upon us? ... The quietness and hiddenness and placidity of the truly good people in the world all proclaim the glory of God."

   "No idea of ours, let alone any image, could adequately represent God... but also, we should not allow ourselves to be satisfied with any such knowledge of Him."

   "All our salvation begins on the level of common and natural and ordinary things. Books and ideas and poems and stories, pictures and music, buildings, cities, places, philosophies were to be the materials on which grace would work."

   "Virtues are precisely the powers by which we can come to acquire happiness: without them, there can be no joy, because they are the habits which coordinate and canalize our natural energies and direct them to the harmony and perfection and balance, the unity of our nature with itself and with God, which must, in the end, constitute our everlasting peace."

   "There are ways that seem to men to be good, the end whereof is in the depths of hell. The only answer to the problem is grace, grace, docility to grace."

   "Why should anyone be shattered by the thought of hell? It is not compulsory for anyone to go there. Those who do, do so by their own choice, and against the will of God, and they can only get into hell by defying and resisting all the work of Providence and grace. It is their own will that takes them there, not God's. In damning them He is only ratifying their own decision -- a decision which He has left entirely to their own choice. Nor will He ever hold our weakness alone responsible for our damnation."

   "There is nothing wrong in being a writer or a poet... but the harm lies in wanting to be one for the gratification of one's own ambitions, and merely in order to bring oneself up to the level demanded by his own internal self-idolatry."

   "The logic of wordly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men!"

   "That contact (with God) is something which we all need: and one of the ways in which it has been decreed that we should arrive at it, is by hearing one another talk about God."

    "He is much more anxious to take care of us, and capable of doing so, than we could ourselves. It is only when we refuse His help, resist His will, that we have conflict, trouble, disorder, unhappiness, ruin."

   "The beginning of love is truth, and before He will give us His love, God must cleanse our souls of the lies that are in them."

    And there is a lot more. This book is a spiritual treasure trove! I wish it were available in our bookstores.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

      The academic year is almost up, and with Summer comes more free time... something which I have little of, and I have to seize precious moments for reading and contemplation. It annoys me that the busier my external life, the emptier my inner life becomes... but it is the one that truly matters. I look forward to reading more Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day this summer!

    There is a movie about her already, entitled "Entertaining Angels." I understand that her cause for canonization is open to the Catholic Church. :)   I want to watch this!