The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition

by Thomas Merton

  I considered the possibility of myself running around in a brown robe and sandals, and imagined I heard the novice master saying: “Frater John Spaniard, go over there and scrub that floor.” Or else he would put his head out of his room and say to one of the other novices: “Go and get Frater John Spaniard and bring him here,” and then I would come humbly along the corridor in my sandals—or rather our sandals—with my eyes down, with the rapid but decorous gait of a young Friar who knew his business: Frater John Spaniard. It made a pleasant picture.

  When I went back to the cottage on the hill, and timidly admitted that I thought I might take the name of Frater John Spaniard, Seymour at least thought it was a good choice. Seymour had a weakness for anything that seemed to have some sort of dash about it, and maybe in the back of his mind he was thinking of Torquemada and the Inquisition, although I don’t think the John Spaniard in question had much to do with that. But I have forgotten where that saint actually did belong in history.

  All this fuss about choosing a fancy name may seem like nothing but harmless foolishness, and I suppose that is true. But nevertheless I now realize that it was a sign of a profound and radical defect in the vocation which so filled my heart and occupied my imagination in those summer days of 1940.

  It is true I was called to the cloister. That has been made abundantly clear. But the dispositions with which I was now preparing to enter the Franciscan novitiate were much more imperfect than I was able to realize. In choosing the Franciscans, I had followed what was apparently a perfectly legitimate attraction—an attraction which might very well have been a sign of God’s will, even though it was not quite as supernatural as I thought. I had chosen this Order because I thought I would be able to keep its Rule without difficulty, and because I was attracted by the life of teaching and writing which it would offer me, and much more by the surroundings in which I saw I would probably live. God very often accepts dispositions that are no better than these, and even some that are far worse, and turns them into a true vocation in His own time.

  But with me, it was not to be so. I had to be led by a way that I could not understand, and I had to follow a path that was beyond my own choosing. God did not want anything of my natural tastes and fancies and selections until they had been more completely divorced from their old track, their old habits, and directed to Himself, by His own working. My natural choice, my own taste in selecting a mode of life, was altogether untrustworthy. And already my selfishness was asserting itself, and claiming this whole vocation for itself, by investing the future with all kinds of natural pleasures and satisfactions which would fortify and defend my ego against the troubles and worries of life in the world.

  Besides, I was depending almost entirely on my own powers and on my own virtues—as if I had any!—to become a good religious, and to live up to my obligations in the monastery. God does not want that. He does not ask us to leave the world as a favor to Himself.

  God calls men—not only religious, but all Christians—to be the “salt of the earth.” But the savor of the salt, says St. Augustine, is a supernatural life, and we lose our savor if, ceasing to rely on God alone, we are guided, in our actions, by the mere desire of temporal goods or the fear of their loss: “Be ye not solicitous, therefore, saying what shall we eat, or what shall we drink or wherewith shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the heathens seek. For your Father knoweth that you have need of all these things.” “And he said to all: If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; for he that shall lose his life, for my sake, shall save it.”

  No matter what religious Order a man enters, whether its Rule be easy or strict in itself does not much matter; if his vocation is to be really fruitful it must cost him something, and must be a real sacrifice. It must be a cross, a true renunciation of natural goods, even of the highest natural goods.

  Since I was the person that I happened to be, and since I was so strongly attached to material goods, and so immersed in my own self, and so far from God, and so independent of Him, and so dependent on myself and my own imaginary powers, it was necessary that I should not enter a monastery feeling the way I did about the Franciscans.

  The truth of the matter is simply this: becoming a Franciscan, especially at that precise moment of history, meant absolutely no sacrifice at all, as far as I was concerned. Even the renunciation of legitimate pleasures of the flesh did not cost me as much as it might seem. I had suffered so much tribulation and unrest on their account that I rejoiced in the prospect of peace, in a life protected from the heat and anguish of passion by the vow of chastity. So even this was a boon rather than a matter of pain—all the more so because I imagined, in my stupid inexperience, that the fight against concupiscence had already been won, and that my soul was free, and that I had little or nothing to worry about any more.

  No, all I would have to do would be to enter the novitiate, and undergo one year of inconveniences so slight that they would hardly be noticeable, and after that everything would be full of fine and easy delights—plenty of freedom, plenty of time to read and study and meditate, and ample liberty to follow my own tastes and desires in all things of the mind and spirit. Indeed, I was entering upon a life of the highest possible natural pleasures: for even prayer, in a certain sense, can be a natural pleasure.

  Above all, it must be remembered that the world was at war, and even now, at the cottage, we sat around the fireplace at night and talked about the Selective Service Law that would soon be passed in Washington, wondering how’ it would be, and what we should do about it.

  For Lax and Gibney this law involved a complicated problem of conscience. They were even asking themselves whether the war was licit at all: and if so, whether they could be justified in entering it as combatants. For my own part, no problems even arose, since I would be in a monastery, and the question would be settled automatically....

  I think it is very evident that such a vocation demanded more of a trial. God was not going to let me walk out of the miseries of the world into a refuge of my own choosing. He had another way prepared for me. He had several questions He wanted to ask me about this vocation of mine: questions which I would not be able to answer.

  Then, when I failed to answer them, He would give me the answers, and I would find the problem solved.

  It was a strange thing: I did not take it as a warning: but one night I was reading the ninth chapter of the Book of Job, and was amazed and stunned by a series of lines which I could not forget:

  And Job answered and said: “Indeed I know that it is so, and that man cannot be justified compared with God. If He will contend with him, he cannot answer Him, one for a thousand.... He is wise in heart and mighty in strength: who hath resisted Him and hath had peace?... Who shaketh the earth out of her place, and the pillars thereof tremble. Who commandeth the sun and it riseth not: and shutteth up the stars as it were under a seal.”

  It was a cool summer evening. I was sitting in the driveway outside the wide-open garage which had become a general dormitory, since we now had no car to put there. Rice and Lax and Seymour and I had all brought our beds out there to sleep in the air. With the book in my lap I looked down at the lights of the cars crawling up the road from the valley. I looked at the dark outline of the wooded hills and at the stars that were coming out in the eastern sky.

  The words of the vulgate text rang and echoed in my heart: “Qui facit Arcturum ct Oriona...” “Who maketh Arcturus and Orion and Hyades and the inner parts of the south....”

  There was something deep and disturbing in the lines. I thought they only moved me as poetry: and yet I also felt, obscurely enough, that there was something personal about them. God often talks to us directly in Scripture. That is, He plants the words full of actual graces as we read them and sudden undiscovered meanings are sown in our hearts, if we attend to them, reading with minds that are at prayer.

  I did not yet ha
ve the art of reading that way, but nevertheless these words had a dark fire in them with which I began to feel myself burned and seared.

  If He come to me, I shall not see Him: if He depart, I shall not understand.... If He examine me on a sudden who shall answer Him? Or who can say: why dost Thou so?

  There was something in the words that seemed to threaten all the peace that I had been tasting for months past, a kind of forewarning of an accusation that would unveil forgotten realities. I had fallen asleep in my sweet security. I was living as if God only existed to do me temporal favors...

  God whose wrath no man can resist, and under Whom they stoop that bear up the world.

  What am I then, that I should answer Him and have words with Him?

  And if He should hear me when I call, I should not believe that He had heard my voice.

  For He shall crush me in a whirlwind and multiply my wounds even without cause....

  “Even without cause!” And my uneasy spirit was already beginning to defend itself against this unfair God Who could not be unjust, could not be unfair.

  If I would justify myself, my own mouth shall condemn me: if I would shew myself innocent He shall prove me wicked.

  ...and multiply my wounds even without cause.

  I closed the book. The words struck deep. They were more than I would ever be able to understand. But the impression they made should have been a kind of warning that I was about to find out something about their meaning.

  The blow fell suddenly.

  I was within a few weeks of entering the novitiate. Already I was receiving those last minute letters from the novice-master, with the printed lists of things I was expected to bring with me to the monastery. They were few enough. The only perplexing item on the list was “one umbrella.”

  The list made me happy. I read it over and over. I began to feel the same pleased excitement that used to glow in the pit of my stomach when I was about to start out for camp in the summer, or to go to a new school....

  Then God asked me a question. He asked me a question about my vocation.

  Rather, God did not have to ask me any questions. He knew all that He needed to know about my vocation. He allowed the devil, as I think, to ask me some questions, not in order that the devil should get any information, but in order that I might learn a thing or two.

  There is a certain kind of humility in hell which is one of the worst things in hell, and which is infinitely far from the humility of the saints, which is peace. The false humility of hell is an unending, burning shame at the inescapable stigma of our sins. The sins of the damned are felt by them as vesture of intolerable insults from which they cannot escape, Nessus shirts that burn them up for ever and which they can never throw off.

  The anguish of this self-knowledge is inescapable even on earth, as long as there is any self-love left in us: because it is pride that feels the burning of that shame. Only when all pride, all self-love has been consumed in our souls by the love of God, are we delivered from the thing which is the subject of those torments. It is only when we have lost all love of our selves for our own sakes that our past sins cease to give us any cause for suffering or for the anguish of shame.

  For the saints, when they remember their sins, do not remember the sins but the mercy of God, and therefore even past evil is turned by them into a present cause of joy and serves to glorify God.

  It is the proud that have to be burned and devoured by the horrible humility of hell.... But as long as we are in this life, even that burning anguish can be turned into a grace, and should be a cause of joy.

  But anyway, one day I woke up to find out that the peace I had known for six months or more had suddenly gone.

  The Eden I had been living in had vanished. I was outside the wall. I did not know what flaming swords barred my way to the gate whose rediscovery had become impossible. I was once more out in the cold and naked and alone.

  Then everything began to fall apart, especially my vocation to the monastery.

  Not that it occurred to me to doubt my desire to be a Franciscan, to enter the cloister, to become a priest. That desire was stronger than ever now that I was cast out into the darkness of this cold solitude. It was practically the only thing I had left, the only thing to cover me and keep me warm: and yet it was small comfort, because the very presence of the desire tortured me by contrast with the sudden hopelessness that had come storming up out of the hidden depths of my heart.

  My desire to enter the cloister was small comfort indeed: for I had suddenly been faced with the agonizing doubt, the unanswerable question: Do I really have that vocation?

  I suddenly remembered who I was, who I had been. I was astonished: since last September I seemed to have forgotten that I had ever sinned.

  And now I suddenly realized that none of the men to whom I had talked about my vocation, neither Dan Walsh nor Father Edmund, knew who I really was. They knew nothing about my past. They did not know how I had lived before I entered the Church. They had simply accepted me because I was superficially presentable, I had a fairly open sort of a face and seemed to be sincere and to have an ordinary amount of sense and good will. Surely that was not enough.

  Now the terrible problem faced me: “I have got to go and let Father Edmund know about all this. Perhaps it will make a big difference.” After all, it is not enough merely to desire to enter the monastery.

  An attraction to the cloister is not even the most important element in a religious vocation. You have to have the right moral and physical and intellectual aptitudes. And you have to be accepted, and accepted on certain grounds.

  When I looked at myself in the light of this doubt, it began to appear utterly impossible that anyone in his right mind could consider me fit material for the priesthood.

  I immediately packed my bag and started out for New York.

  It seemed a long, long journey as the train crawled along the green valleys. As we were coming down the Delaware towards Callicoon, where the Franciscans had their minor seminary, the sky had clouded over. We were slowing down, and the first houses of the village were beginning to file past on the road beside the track. A boy who had been swimming in the river came running up a path through the long grass, from the face of the thunderstorm that was just about to break. His mother was calling to him from the porch of one of the houses.

  I became vaguely aware of my own homelessness.

  When we had gone around the bend and I could see the stone tower of the seminary on the hilltop among the trees, I thought: “I will never live in you; it is finished.”

  I got into New York that evening and called up Father Edmund, but he was too busy to see me.

  So I went out to the house at Douglaston.

  “When are you going to the novitiate?” my aunt asked me.

  “Maybe I’m not going,” I said.

  They did not ask me any questions.

  I went to Communion and prayed earnestly that God’s will should be done—and it was. But I was far from being able to understand it then.

  Father Edmund listened to what I had to say. I told him about my past and all the troubles I had had. He was very friendly and very kind.

  But if I had had any hope that he would wave all my doubts aside with a smile, I was soon disappointed. He said:

  “Well, Tom, listen: suppose you let me think it over and pray a bit. Come back in a couple of days. All right?”

  “In a couple of days?”

  “Come back tomorrow.”

  So I waited for another day. My mind was full of anguish and restlessness. I prayed: “My God, please take me into the monastery. But anyway, whatever You want, Your will be done.”

  Of course I understand the whole business now. My own mind was full of strange, exaggerated ideas. I was in a kind of a nightmare. I could not see anything straight. But Father Edmund saw clearly enough for all that.

  He saw that I was only a recent convert, not yet two years in the Church. He saw that I had had an unsettled life,
and that my vocation was by no means sure, and that I was upset with doubts and misgivings. The novitiate was full, anyway. And when a novitiate is crammed with postulants year after year it is time for somebody to reflect about the quality of the vocations that are coming in. When there is such a crowd, you have to be careful that a few who are less desirable do not float in on the tide with the rest....

  So the next day he told me kindly enough that I ought to write to the Provincial and tell him that I had reconsidered my application.

  There was nothing I could say. I could only hang my head and look about me at the ruins of my vocation.

  I asked a few faint-hearted questions, trying to feel my way and find out if my case were altogether hopeless. Naturally, Father did not want to commit himself or his Order to anything, and I could not even get what might seem to be a vague promise for the future.

  There seemed to me to be no question that I was now excluded from the priesthood for ever.

  I promised I would write at once, and that I would proclaim my undying loyalty to the Friars Minor in doing so.

  “Do that,” Father said. “The Provincial will be pleased.”

  When I walked down the steps of the monastery, I was so dazed I didn’t know what to do. All I could think of was to go over across Seventh Avenue to the Church of the Capuchins, next to the station. I went inside the church, and knelt in the back and, seeing there was a priest hearing confessions, I presently got up and took my place in the short line that led to his confessional.