Catholic Thought discussion
Seven Storey Mountain
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Seven Storey Part One: Chapters 1 and 2
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When I was a kid we used to play the game of Prisoner's Base with other kids in the neighborhood or on the school playground during recess. I had completely forgotten about this game until I read the title of chapter two. I wonder if kids play this game any more? Anyway, I thought it was a good title for the chapter since young Merton was at the mercy of others and had no choice or stability in his life as he was moved about from various homes, caregivers, and boarding schools. The one true stable thing in his life was God although he did not yet know this.
Very early in chapter 1 Merton sets a literary tone speaking of himself; Pg. 13 “Here was a will, neutral, undirected, a force waiting to be applied, ready to generate tremendous immanent powers of light or darkness, peace or conflict order or confusion, love or sin.” I see this as a young Fr. Louis looking back on his early childhood.Every time I read chapter 1 I am struck by a six year old being handed a note, in his mother’s hand writing, and left alone to read it under a maple tree in the backyard. As he comes to the realization that he will never see his mother again tremendous weight of sadness and depression settles upon him. When I first read this I wondered how long the wounds of such inhumane treatment would remain with him.
On Pg. 18 Merton states; “Mother’s death made one thing evident: father now did not have anything to do but paint. He was not tied down to any one place.” Think of a young child adopting that attitude. Another blow delivered by a self-centered, immature guy posing as a father.
Clearly, in chapter 2 he displays his love of France. The beauty sought by his artist dad and his exposure to churches that displayed beauty would pay large dividends in future years. Even at such a young age he remembered that the layout of these old towns, with the church in the center, causing people to become aware of the steeple and the house of the Lord numerous times throughout the day.
Finally, we have Aunt Maud and Mrs. Pearce as they present him with a study in contrasts. Merton views Aunt Maud as an angel. Why? One possibility would be that as a teenage boy he wanted to put forth some conjecture about the future, his future; and Aunt Maud actually listened. She actually was encouraging. When he floated the topic of being a writer, she thought it would be a fine profession and then encouraged him to have a backup plan to earn money while waiting for stories to sell. She spoke with him not at him. This was clearly welcomed by the young Merton, which is how she earned the title of “angel”. Contrast this with the reactions of Mrs. Pearce – the boy is thinking of being a journalist – “Nonsense”, let him go into business. She didn’t even talk at him she spoke about him in the third person as if he was not present. No angel wings for Mrs. Pearce.
Susan Margaret wrote: "When I was a kid we used to play the game of Prisoner's Base with other kids in the neighborhood or on the school playground during recess. I had completely forgotten about this game until I read t..."Thank you for sharing. I was unfamiliar with that game so had to look it up. I had the exact same thought, that it was fitting for his life in that time.
Mike wrote: "Very early in chapter 1 Merton sets a literary tone speaking of himself; Pg. 13 “Here was a will, neutral, undirected, a force waiting to be applied, ready to generate tremendous immanent powers of..."The death note was hard for me to read as well. As for the father, perhaps he was self-centered, or maybe he didn't know how to cope with an unexpected death leaving him in charge of two young boys. Or maybe, it's both.
I think Aunt Maud was the first person to focus on him. She asked his opinions, listened carefully, gave his musings serious consideration and, was quite likely, the only person concerned about his future. She treated him with respect and dignity which we all wish for and deserve.
I loved Merton's description of the Privats on page 62. "And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within, and from the habitual union of their souls with God in deep faith and charity."
And earlier, page 56, when I read his description of the day's youth, it struck me how timeless his thoughts really were. This paragraph could just as easily be stated today.
"Is it any wonder that there can be no peace in a world where everything possible is done to guarantee that the youth of every nation will grow up absolutely without moral and religious discipline, and without the shadow of an interior life, or of that spirituality and charity and faith which alone can safeguard the treaties and agreements made by governments."
Leslie, I am glad you mentioned the Privats. They made a big impact on Merton. My parents also divorced when I was around the age of twelve. My best friend and her family used to take me with them on canoe trips in the boundary waters of Minnesota and backpacking trips in the Porcupine Mountains in Michigan. Those trips gave me a love for nature and being outdoors. They also gave me some peace when it was needed the most. Those were the best times during my teenage years and I have many fond memories. Thank God for kind people.I also like Merton's additional description about the Privats:
"Their farm, their family, and their church were all that occupied these good souls; and their lives were full."
Yes, that was so beautiful. I'm glad you had those trips. Nature is so healing.
I have not begun my re-read of this yet. I think I misread the schedule and did not think the discussion of Ch. 1&2 was beginning until Nov. 13. But, I have already read this twice, so I don't have to fear spoilers. I remember the first time reading this book judging Merton's father very harshly. The second time through, I was less condemning. I think we see a man whose idea of child rearing was shaped in a very different climate, with very different expectations. By today's standards, he makes many very poor parenting decisions, but I am less willing to pass judgement on him as a father. now. I wonder wat I will think with my third read.
Really enjoying this read. The thought of Merton moving from place to place in his early years must have been difficult.
Regarding the death of Merton's mother..he reflects on being told to wait in the car during the last hospital visit at her death. He asserts "What would have been the good of my being plunged into a lot of naked suffering and emotional crisis without any prayer, any Sacrament to stabilize and order it, and make some kind of meaning out of it?"
In that sense he feels his mother spared a child the 'ugliness of death'.
Regarding the Privats, they seemed not only kind but wisely generous in allowing the young Merton his space with respect to his beliefs or lack of them.
And following Leslie's citing of Merton's view of religious instruction, a paragraph chastises those of us who lament the state of the world, and yet 'let our children grow up according to the standards of a civilization of hyeneas.' Not funny but I had to laugh.
I appreciate his adult asides about social mores and matters of the spirit, particulary as they pertain to Catholicism. To have all that with the detail of his childhood so beautifully expressed is a real gift. This volume could use an index actually.
Jane, the hyeneas are probably laughing too! Its funny, sad, and true all at the same time.
Irene wrote: "I have not begun my re-read of this yet. I think I misread the schedule and did not think the discussion of Ch. 1&2 was beginning until Nov. 13. But, I have already read this twice, so I don't have..."I think I know what you mean. For me, it seems the older I get, the more forgiving I am. I'm willing to chalk up his bad behavior to growing pains, a lack of immaturity, unexpected loss, etc. I just feel like, if we are really honest, we have to admit we've sometimes neglected those we love, sometimes failed to nurture a relationship or properly be there for someone who suffered through an event with us. I think maturity helps us to understand the need to go beyond ourselves and time spent on the short end of things. I think I've been mistreated enough now that I go out of my way to consider other's feelings. Sometimes we are born and raised to be wise, compassionate, nurturing and forgiving, and sometimes it's develops after knowing the pain of these experiences.
When I read these passages, I felt like Merton was forgiving and understanding of his parents. He seemed to take an optimist view point to the moves with primary grumbling occurring with the school situations.
I honestly think people who grow up in times of hardship tend to fare better in this world. A lot of moves often translates into a more flexible adult who is less rigid socially, less prone to judge others, and more realistic about people's limitations.
I enjoyed everyone's comments. The are interesting and add much to reading Merton.Merton’s style, relaxed and simple, almost conversational is what makes this writing immediately appealing. He invites us into his home life, his family. The American parts of his early life are familiar. Early on he mention The Cloisters, a Medieval retreat in Manhattan that is probably mostly the same today as it was in his time, indicating his attraction to the Medieval world.
The narrator is the voice of a young boy early on but as the whirlwind of the next few years of his life unwinds the narration clearly switches between the young boy and Merton as an adult looking back in retrospect. Certainly this becomes obvious in such early passages as:
"And yet now I tell you, you who are now what I once was, unbelievers, it is that Sacrament, and that alone, the Christ living in our midst, and sacrificed by us, and for us and with us,in the clean and perpetual Sacrifice, it is He alone Who holds our world together, and keeps us all from being poured headlong and immediately into the pit of our eternal destruction." (p.37, First Edition, 1948)
He doesn’t seem too concerned about being shuttled so much between places he lived in the four countries because he considered this the normal. We hear much of course about keeping young children in the same environment and schools. Our family made a drastic move akin to Merton’s from rural Eastern Europe to urban New York with the three of us children aged 7, 8, and 13. It was shocking and painful.
After reading everyone's comments, it seems like all of us are relating in some way to Merton's experiences in these first few chapters.
Galicus, I'm glad you mentioned medieval because three times now I've sat down to comment on this, and every time I've forgotten to. LOL.
It was mentioned briefly in our chapters that Merton was influenced by the Middle Ages. This was also discussed in the book I just finished by Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. Elie said Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy were ALL influenced by the Middle Ages.
That seems so strange to modern ears.
I know this comment will seem a little out of place, but it was out of place in Elie's book as well. Anyway, this passage helps to elaborate on this a bit.
"Meanwhile, James’s Harvard colleague Henry Adams was being born again. In France in 1895 Adams, whose chronicle of the history of America ran to nine volumes, had undergone a religious conversion of sorts— not to God or Christ but to a mystical sense of history grounded in the Middle Ages and epitomized by the order and beauty and fixity, the sheer absoluteness, of the great French cathedrals. Declaring himself “head of the Conservative Christian Anarchists , a party numbering one member,” Adams wrote two books in which he sought to impress his vision of things upon the reader as boldly as possible . First came Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904), which is not so much a work of history as an imaginative pilgrimage, in which Adams slips into the skin of a French peasant who, in his view, saw and felt and understood life more directly than the stereotypical industrial-age American. Three years later came The Education of Henry Adams, Adams’s third-person account of himself as a representative American man called Adams— whose problem, as he sees it, is that he is the descendant of pragmatic Enlightenment Protestants rather than of French Catholics, and so grew up with no knowledge of the religious energy that had inspired the cathedral builders of Europe—“ the highest energy ever known to man."
A little further he discusses our book:
"As he writes, twenty years have passed and he is cloistered in the Abbey of Gethsemani, the closest thing to a medieval French village to be found in America. The order and unity of the French village, he believes, are the attributes of the Catholic faith, and their fulfillment is the monastery; the longing he first felt as a boy in France he has satisfied as a Trappist.
There is more to it than that, however. The son of a painter, he describes the village so as to give it the wholeness and harmony and radiance of a landscape. painting. He, too, will wind up a painter of landscapes in his way, for in entering a monastery he has sought not just to return to France or the Middle Ages but to enter into the vision he had seen over his father’s shoulder in St. Antonin that summer, in which the imperfect world was made perfect in the mind’s eye."
I thought you might enjoy some pictures.Merton as a young boy.
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=...
Owen Merton - biographical sketch, gallery of his artwork, and family pictures.
http://www.merton.org/owen/
St. Antonin, France
http://www.thomasmertonsociety.org/om...
Where Merton was born in France.https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=...
Painting of St. Antonin by Owen Merton
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=...
Prades, France, Merton's birthplace
http://www.merton.ca/archives/pilgrim...
Modern pictures of St. Antonin.
http://informationfrance.com/st-anton...
You're welcome. I know I always enjoy looking at pictures of the places and things I'm reading about. :-)
Leslie, thanks for the pictures they enhance the reading.
You are welcome. I don't want to overkill things, but I love pictures and videos. It helps to put what you are reading into place. I've been kind of wordy with this selections commentary, but it feels like more needs to be said. I've noticed everyone else has longer comments too. I guess it's because the writing resonates with so many feelings and experiences in life.
Leslie wrote: "Galicus, I'm glad you mentioned medieval because three times now I've sat down to comment on this, and every time I've forgotten to. LOL.
It was mentioned briefly in our chapters that Merton was..."
Thanks for interesting comments and quotes Leslie. Prades looks quite nice now. You can "take a ride" through it with Google Earth. "Education of Henry Adams" is somewhere in my deep reading past. The Adams family made their mark for sure.
Let me begin by stating the obvious. If you haven't read these chapters and don't want to have the reading spoiled for you, don't read any further.
I thoroughly enjoyed these opening chapters. Merton takes us from a beautiful description of his birth in 1915, through his mother's death at age 6 and from there to a series of travels where he is raised at various times by both family and friends. We hear of the almost total lack of religion in his life and of a nonexistent prayer life. The story moves to the heartbreaking way in which he was shut out of his mother's death and his reflections that his lack of religion possibly made this an easier experience in some ways.
As he travels and is moved from home to home we see the earliest influences on bis religious background and early influences from which he will come to develop his sense of how people are to treat one another. He travels at age ten back to France and we hear his reflections on the way in which his new hometown is oriented such that the church is the very focus of the community. Church architecture become important here to both father and son in a way that is foreshadowing of his later thoughts on the Trappist monastery from which this story was written.
There is a quite funny story of Merton's "gang days" and we see glimpses of his relationship with his younger brother, a relationship that as an adult he laments later for it's lack of depth.
Merton is uprooted again and again, changing schools, changing friends, learning about the world with each encounter. He describes differences in the way classmates treat one another in different communities and sees in this behavior failings of the community itself.
In these chapters we travel around France, England, and America. We end at age 14 in England embarking on yet, another, adventure with his father. We end with his thoughts on the superficiality of The Church of England.
I think these early chapters show clearly why this book became so popular. Merton is very much a real person who has experienced the world. He wasn't kept in isolation. He wasn't raised a devout Catholic. He found religion as many people do, notably by feeling an absence of something important. He longs for a sense of connectedness as he admires the chapels and churches along the way. He eventually finds himself in Protestant churches and finds them good in some ways but superficial.
Merton's story really resonated with me. I, also, was raised in early childhood in a near complete absence of religion. Then, I distinctly remember one day my mother taking me to an Episcopalian church so she could pray (just before her divorce). I can remember as a child my deep interest in this unique building that we needed to go to specially to talk to God. She was raised Methodist but our town was so small the only church was Episcopalian. I still laugh as I remember this, but the preacher came in, he and mom said a few words then I offered to help him because someone had left their books all over the room (hymnals) and as he walked away shouted out.....Hey, you forgot your dishes! (The water pitcher and bowl on the table). Clearly my mother had not been bringing me to church. LOL.
As a child our family went through many tragedies and I was largely shut out of the ones that didn't involve me. Prayer was for my mother and grandparents, but no one thought to tell me I could pray to God.
Like Merton we moved, a lot. I changed cities, schools, and at times was raised by grandparents. Like Merton, that was not felt to be a bad thing. I saw bullying in our neighborhood among the public school kids and I remember thinking about why they felt that way.
Finally, around fourth grade my grandparents started taking me to the Methodist church to which they belonged. Like Merton, I found the music sweet, the Bible stories nice, etc. It felt good to have religion and God in my life, but I longed for something deeper. I can completely relate to his feelings on this. It was at that age that I became friends with some Catholic kids, heard about their schools and attended a Catholic wedding. It was after going to this wedding that I knew I wanted to become Catholic, and not because of a romantic idea of love to a man.
I hope you enjoyed the first leg of our journey with Merton.