Have you ever wondered what it means to search for true meaning in a life full of distractions, doubts, and worldly desires? // Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain invites us into that search. // It is a spiritual autobiography tracing his journey from a restless youth to a Trappist monk devoted to God—a story of awakening, vocation, and the pursuit of a life aligned with purpose.
Merton writes with honesty and vulnerability, sharing his struggles, doubts, and the transformative experiences that guided him toward monastic life. // Through his narrative, we witness both his inner life—his contemplations, fears, and spiritual insights—and his external journey through the challenges and decisions that led him to surrender to a higher calling. // The book gives us a window into the profound tension between worldly desires and the call to spiritual life, and the sacrifices and rewards that come with answering that call.
At its heart, the book explores themes of spiritual awakening, vocation, and personal transformation. // Merton illustrates that true growth often requires letting go of familiar comforts and embracing uncertainty. // He shows us that surrendering to a higher purpose is not a loss of self, but a path to fulfillment, clarity, and connection with the divine. // Each chapter becomes a reflection on how life can be reshaped when one commits to values, discipline, and faith.
Philosophically, Merton emphasizes that true fulfillment comes from living in alignment with spiritual principles, cultivating reflection, and committing to devotion. // He invites readers to consider their own paths, to examine the ways in which vocation and faith can guide choices, and to explore what it means to live intentionally. // His journey demonstrates that courage, humility, and perseverance are essential companions on the quest for a meaningful life.
So—why should you read The Seven Storey Mountain? // Because it offers insight into the spiritual journey, showing both the challenges and rewards of following one’s calling. // It resonates with anyone seeking purpose, direction, or understanding of how to align life with values and faith. // The book is not just an autobiography—it is a guide, a meditation, and an invitation to reflect on what it truly means to live a life of integrity, devotion, and spiritual courage.
In the end, Thomas Merton leaves us with a story of awakening and transformation. // His journey reminds us that the pursuit of meaning is often difficult, sometimes lonely, but ultimately profoundly rewarding. // The Seven Storey Mountain challenges us to consider: How will we respond to the call of our own hearts? // How might we live a life that reflects not just ambition, but devotion, purpose, and faith?
Reading 1 (Part 2)
ONE
PRISONER’S BASE
ON THE LAST DAY OF JANUARY 1915, UNDER THE SIGN OF the Water Bearer, in a
year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on
the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of
God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own
selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world
was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating
Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless selfcontradictory hungers.
Not many hundreds of miles away from the house where I was born, they
were picking up the men who rotted in the rainy ditches among the dead
horses and the ruined seventy-fives, in a forest of trees without branches
along the river Marne.
My father and mother were captives in that world, knowing they did not
belong with it or in it, and yet unable to get away from it. They were in the
world and not of it—not because they were saints, but in a different way:
because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the
level of the world without delivering him from it.
My father painted like Cézanne and understood the southern French
landscape the way Cézanne did. His vision of the world was sane, full of
balance, full of veneration for structure, for the relations of masses and for
all the circumstances that impress an individual identity on each created
thing. His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were
without decoration or superfluous comment, since a religious man respects
the power of God’s creation to bear witness for itself. My father was a very
good artist.
Neither of my parents suffered from the little spooky prejudices that
devour the people who know nothing but automobiles and movies and
what’s in the ice-box and what’s in the papers and which neighbors are
getting a divorce.
I inherited from my father his way of looking at things and some of his
integrity and from my mother some of her dissatisfaction with the mess the
world is in, and some of her versatility. From both I got capacities for work
and vision and enjoyment and expression that ought to have made me some
kind of a King, if the standards the world lives by were the real ones. Not
that we ever had any money: but any fool knows that you don’t need money
to get enjoyment out of life.
If what most people take for granted were really true—if all you needed
to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate
every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy
person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now.
If happiness were merely a matter of natural gifts, I would never have
entered a Trappist monastery when I came to the age of a man.
II
MY FATHER AND MOTHER CAME FROM THE ENDS OF THE EARTH, to Prades, and
though they came to stay, they stayed there barely long enough for me to be
born and get on my small feet, and then they left again. And they continued
and I began a somewhat long journey: for all three of us, one way and
another, it is now ended.
Reading 2 (Part 3)
It did not take very much reflection on the year I had spent at Cambridge
to show me that all my dreams of fantastic pleasures and delights were
crazy and absurd, and that everything I had reached out for had turned to
ashes in my hands, and that I myself, into the bargain, had turned out to be
an extremely unpleasant sort of a person—vain, self-centered, dissolute,
weak, irresolute, undisciplined, sensual, obscene, and proud. I was a mess.
Even the sight of my own face in a mirror was enough to disgust me.
When I came to ask myself the reasons for all this, the ground was well
prepared. My mind was already facing what seemed to be an open door out
of my spiritual jail. It was some four years since I had first read the
Communist Manifesto, and I had never entirely forgotten about it. One of
those Christmas vacations at Strasbourg I had read some books about Soviet
Russia, how all the factories were working overtime, and all the ex-moujiks
wore great big smiles on their faces, welcoming Russian aviators on their
return from Polar flights, bearing the boughs of trees in their hands. Then I
often went to Russian movies, which were pretty good from the technical
point of view, although probably not so good as I thought they were, in my
great anxiety to approve of them.
Finally, I had in my mind the myth that Soviet Russia was the friend of
all the arts, and the only place where true art could find a refuge in a world
of bourgeois ugliness. Where I ever got that idea is hard to find out, and
how I managed to cling to it for so long is harder still, when you consider
all the photographs there were, for everyone to see, showing the Red Square
with gigantic pictures of Stalin hanging on the walls of the world’s ugliest
buildings—not to mention the views of the projected monster monument to
Lenin, like a huge mountain of soap-sculpture, and the Little Father of
Communism standing on top of it, and sticking out one of his hands. Then,
when I went to New York in the summer, I found the New Masses lying
around the studios of my friends and, as a matter of fact, a lot of the people
I met were either party members or close to being so.
So now, when the time came for me to take spiritual stock of myself, it
was natural that I should do so by projecting my whole spiritual condition
into the sphere of economic history and the class-struggle. In other words,
the conclusion I came to was that it was not so much I myself that was to
blame for my unhappiness, but the society in which I lived.
I considered the person that I now was, the person that I had been at
Cambridge, and that I had made of myself, and I saw clearly enough that I
was the product of my times, my society, and my class. I was something
that had been spawned by the selfishness and irresponsibility of the
materialistic century in which I lived. However, what I did not see was that
my own age and class only had an accidental part to play in this. They gave
my egoism and pride and my other sins a peculiar character of weak and
supercilious flippancy proper to this particular century: but that was only on
the surface. Underneath, it was the same old story of greed and lust and
self-love, of the three concupiscences bred in the rich, rotted undergrowth
of what is technically called “the world,” in every age, in every class.
“If any man love the world, the charity of the Father is not in him. For all
that is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh and the concupiscence
of the eyes and the pride of life.” That is to say, all men who live only
according to their five senses, and seek nothing beyond the gratification of
their natural appetites for pleasure and reputation and power, cut themselves
off from that charity which is the principle of all spiritual vitality and
happiness because it alone saves us from the barren wilderness of our own
abominable selfishness.
Reading 3 (Part 4)
IV
THE MONTHS PASSED QUICKLY, BUT NOT QUICKLY ENOUGH for me. Already it
was June 1940: but the two months that remained until the date in August
when the doors of the novitiate would open to receive thirty or forty new
postulants seemed infinitely far away.
I did not stay long in New York when I came back from Cuba. I was
there only a few days, in which I went to the monastery on 31st Street, and
learned from Father Edmund that my application for admission had been
accepted, and that some of the necessary papers had arrived. It was a very
good thing that this was so, because postulants entering a religious Order
need documents from every diocese where they have lived for a morally
continuous year since their fourteenth year, as well as a birth certificate and
a lot of other things as well.
But this was precisely the time when the German armies were pouring
into France. At the moment when I stepped off the boat in New York, they
had made their first great break through the French lines, and it had at last
become obvious that the impregnable defence of the Maginot Line was a
myth. Indeed, it was only a matter of very few days before the fierce
armored divisions of the Nazis, following in the path broken out before
them by the Luftwaffe, pierced the demoralized French army and embraced
the betrayed nation in arms of steel. They had Paris within a fortnight, and
then they were at the Loire, and finally the papers were full of blurred
wirephotos of the dumb, isolated dining-car in the park at Compiegne
where Hitler made the French eat the document on which the 1918
armistice had been written.
So, too, if my father and mother’s marriage certificate from St. Anne’s in
Soho, London, had not come in that year, it might never have come at all. I
don’t know if the parish records of St. Anne’s survived the blitzkrieg that
was about to be let loose over the head of the huge, dark city full of sins and
miseries, in whose fogs I had once walked with such wise complacency.
Everything seemed clear. A month would go by, and then another, and
soon I would be walking, with my suitcase, up some drab, unimaginable
street in Paterson, New Jersey, to a small brick monastery which I could not
very well envisage. But the drabness of the city would be left behind at the
door and I knew, although I had no special illusions about St. Anthony’s
novitiate either, that inside I would find peace. And I would begin my
retreat, and after a month or so I would put on the brown robe and white
cord of a friar and I would be walking in sandals with a shaved head, in
silence, to a not too beautiful chapel. But anyway, there I would have God,
and possess Him, and belong to Him.
Meanwhile, I would go upstate. The best thing I could think of was to
join Lax and Rice and Gerdy and Gibney and the red-headed Southerner
Jim Knight who were all living at the cottage on the hill over Olean. But on
the way, I went through Ithaca to see my brother at Cornell.
Perhaps this was the last time I would see John Paul before I entered the
novitiate. I could not tell.
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