On January 31st, Thomas Merton (the Gethsemani Trappist monk, Fr. Louis) would have celebrated his 100th birthday. We will be hearing many things about Merton this year. There are many resources out there about Merton, books that he wrote, articles and poems and photos, even copies of lectures that he gave that have been reproduced. on CDs.
Here is a taste of Merton from his autobiography, THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN, as he writes about his first experience of prayer; this is well before his conversion and subsequent baptism:
I was in my room. It was night. The light was on. Suddenly it seemed to me that Father (his dad), who had now been dead more than a year, was there with me. 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. 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. 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.
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 ....
The one thing that seems to me morally certain is that this was really a grace, and a great grace. If I had only followed it through, my life might have been very different and much less miserable for the years that were to come.
Before now I have never prayed in the churches I had visited. But I remember the morning that followed this experience. I remember how I climbed the deserted Aventine (he was in Rome at the time), in the spring sun, with my soul broken up with contrition, but broken and clean, painful but sanitary like a lanced abscess, like a bone broken and re-set. ..... And it was a very definite experience, a conversion, not without struggle, even now, to walk deliberately in the church with no other purpose than to kneel down and pray to God. Ordinarily, I never knelt in these churches, and never paid any formal or official attention to Whose house it was. But now I took holy water at the door and went straight up to the altar rail and knelt down and said, slowly, with all the belief I had in me, the Our Father.
It seems almost unbelievable to me that I did no more than this, for the memory remains in me as that of such an experience that it would seem to have implied at least a half house of impassioned prayer and tears. The thing to remember is that I had not prayed at all for many years. .....
However, I prayed, then I looked about the church, and went into a room where there was a picture by Sassoferrato, and stuck my face out a door into a tiny, simple cloister, where the sun shone down on an orange tree. After that I walked out into the open feeling as if I had been reborn, and crossed the street, and strolled through the suburban fields to another deserted church, where I did not pray, being scared by some carpenters and scaffolding. I sat outside, in the sun, on a wall and tasted the joy of my own inner peace and turn over in my mind how my life was now going to change, and how I would become better.
(This excerpt appears on pages 111-113 of the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1948 paperback copy of THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN.)
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