Silence and Solitude - Journey with Merton

 

You rest in Him, and He heals you with His secret wisdom.
- Thomas Merton

I took my book - The Seven Storey Mountain -  out on a lunch date, complete with a cute heart-shaped straw in my iced matcha. With the Valentine's Day straw vibe and a red covered book, I was playing into the colours of the month, yet what I was reading was about love different from the way culture celebrates it on Feb 14. It was about love that leads to God, pointing to Him through everything that was created by their being.

This book is the spiritual autobiography of Thomas Merton and his journey into the Catholic Church and then the decision to become a Trappist Monk - taking place in the 1920s-1940s. But his journey is not smooth or expected. It is full of turbulence, loss, and bad choices - faltering, taking the easy road, living deeply in the world and acting fully selfish and seeking his own desires. This is the way we all live if we don't give ourselves and our desires to God. But it's a journey. We are caught in our own cycle of selfish living, spiraling downward deeper into what we think is love, but are greatly mistaken. 

When Merton was deliberating back and forth if he should be a priest, he wavered a lot. He visited monasteries, thought he knew, left, didn't think he knew, talked with priests for council, was more confused, he prayed. He danced around what he ultimately wanted all along through his young adult life - silence and solitude. He kept avoiding it, it seemed, by getting distracted with other things that came along. He ultimately felt most free behind the walls of the monastery, when he finally decided to join the Abbey of Gethesmani in Kentucky. 

Merton learned what love was - the disinterested love of God that gives and is fulfilled never lacking. He learned how easy it was to fall prey to the devil's snares, as it caught him over and over as he wrestled with his decisions. He felt the pull of the church, specifically the Catholic Church, but it took him a long while to join. "Why are you waiting?" was the voice he heard. Joyfully he entered in and found what he was missing and chasing all along.

I understand why this was a bestseller and still draws readers. We can all see ourselves in his journey. The wrong paths we take, ignoring the call toward God to pursue your own desires. It is a wrestling journey, and it gives us hope. The last part of the book is so clear-minded and desirous for God, it's beautiful to read. And inspiring.

Merton leaves us with many passages to contemplate on, to help us in our own journey:

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 creatures of psychosis.