Restless--

Having finished Dakota (Kathleen Norris) I've picked up where I left off with Thomas Merton's autobiography Seven Storey Mountain. As with other mentors, literary or physical, I often recieve gifts of insight long before I hear the whole of their stories. Same with Merton-- I had long pored over No Man is an Island and felt it was time that I sat down and heard his whole story. It's a long story--over 450 pages--but I'm sad to have set it aside for so long.

And, as is the case with other mentors, I'm naively astonished to discover that Thomas Merton, this great hero of the faith, was more messed up in his twenties than I am now. I suppose it's a bit of a relief (there's hope for me!) but I'm also intrigued, mystified by how he's gotten from point A to point B.

I know what Merton means when he talks about the disgust he looked at himself with at the end of his ventures into the world. I agree with this statement he makes--

I thought I was going to ransack and rob of all [the world's] pleasures and satisfactions. I had done what I intended, and now I found that it was I who was emptied and robbed and gutted. What a strange thing! In filling myself, I had emptied myself. In grasping things, I had lost everything. In devouring pleasures and joys, I had found distress and anguish and fear. (181)

Paradoxial, yes. And true. But I don't end it there, and neither does Merton. That last quote is near the end of Part I. Part II, however, opens with a very different tone, and I rejoice with what he says here--

What is "grace"? It is God's own life, shared by us. God's life is Love. Deus caritas est. By grace we are able to share in the infinitely self-less love of Him Who is such pure actuality that He needs nothing and therefore cannot conceivably exploit anything for selfish ends...

When a ray of light strikes a crystal, it gives a new quality to the crystal. And when God's infinitely diinterested love plays upon a human soul, the same kind of thing takes place. And that is the life called sanctifying grace. (186)


Like Merton, and like Lauren Winner, Kathleen Norris, and like so many others whose stories I've absorbed, I feel an irrisistable pull to the Church. I can't keep myself away. Faith literature remains my favorite genre. I am fascinated by the study of Spiritual Disciplines, even though there is something very deep and resistant in my heart towards all of this. I'm not sure what exactly that resistance is, or even how to fight it, but thank God that His grace is persistent. Thank God that His life can make my human potential into more than I could ever be on my own.


Betsy