When Thomas Merton entitled his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain he joined the spiritual tradition of describing the search for God and himself as a journey ascending a mountain. The references to ascending holy mountains in Scripture are legion: Noah and Mount Ararat in Genesis, Moses and Mount Sinai in Exodus and Jesus and Mount Golgotha in the gospels.
Merton’s quest begins in Prades, France, the place of his birth, deep in the Pyrenees Mountains. While he is primarily considered an American theologian he did not become a United States citizen until June 22, 1951 when he was thirty-six years old.. Little attention is paid to this late conversion in his life but renunciation of the country of one’s birth for another completed his establishing his citizenship in America. Perhaps it was in his genetic makeup: his father was from New Zealand and his mother was American. At a young age he was already living in a larger world.
The motif of mountains suggests other metaphors: a journey, pathways to follow, pathways to blaze, pathways to avoid and ascending to a higher plane and perhaps reaching a holy ground no one had experienced before. However, if the metaphor of mountain is to be true then the quest for God should also recognize that mountains also have more ominous metaphors which destroy: earthquakes, avalanches and volcanoes.
Merton never completed his journey. He died unexpectedly at the age of fifty-three in 1968 when the world needed the leadership of a prominent spiritual man. What might have this man done to change the moral course of a nation? John Greenleaf Whittier was correct, “For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest of these it might have been.”
That year the captains of our spiritual journeys died at an alarming rate leaving only their writing to guide us: Robert Kennedy in June, Romano Guardini in October, John Steinbeck, Karl Barth and Thomas Merton in December.
Elizabeth Bowen writes, in commenting on Joseph Conrad: “When a writer has been brought to a halt by death, one kind of activity in him has to be replaced by another.”
Reflection
“Our real journey in life is interior.”
Thomas Merton in The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton
Response
What writings of Merton led us on our journey then and might lead us again?
Correction: The year for Merton's naturalization was 1951 not 1981.