The Seven Storey Mountain

And I think an important one is, is it about God's glory or my self-aggrandizement? Because if it's about me, um, that small I, ego me, it's a pretty good sense that that's not coming from God.

There, there's a great, um, incident recorded by Thomas Merton in, uh, "The Seven Storey Mountain," uh, describing one of his religious experiences, and I often use it with people, um, as a way to talk about qualities of real religious experience.

And one is, is the point we made much earlier, which is, is there an element of surprise in it as opposed to my controlling the situation? And, and I think most people...

I can certainly tell the difference when I'm imagining some conversation in my head, um, if I'm annoyed with my sister or someone and having a conversation.

The experience was all-consuming.

And, and when I read Thomas Merton's, uh, Seven Story Mountain, I remember sort of recognizing in the spiritual crisis that he had at Cambridge and, and Columbia, uh, some aspects of what I was experiencing.

M- for me, a solution could not be to go to a monastery or go to the church.

I had lost my religious faith, and, uh, restoration of my religious faith was not gonna solve the problem.

And in fact, around that time, um, Sheen had also published Peace of Soul, which is one of my favorite books.

Um, Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain came out at that point.

And in fact, The Seven Storey Mountain, the original edition of that, which was published in 1948, actually carries a blurb by Fulton Sheen.

And so Sheen's book, Co- Communism and the Conscience of the West, comes out at the exact same time in 1948.

But, um, yeah, no, that was, that, that was all part of what, uh, what made all of this fertile ground.

So in terms of public life and despair we might get from public life, there are people, I mean, just, uh, Frederick Douglass and John Lewis in particular.

I mean, um, when John Lewis is standing on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, facing all of those policemen and those dogs, and in his backpack he has The Seven Storey Mountain from, um, from, uh, uh, Thomas Merton, and then another book called The American Political Tra- Tradition by Richard Hofstadter, which has a quote in the beginning of it by John Dos Passos, which says, "In times of unease when, uh, mankind feels quicksand under their feet, history can offer a lifeline from the past to the present." And, and essentially, what others have gone through, you know-

Mm-hmm

...

But there were a number of key friends and colleagues that he was in kind of constant correspondence with, including his editors and his publishers.

And his literary agent, Naomi Burton Stone, who was the one that sold the Seven Story Mountain in 1946 to Bob Giroux at Harcourt Brace.

And that's kind of what made Merton a household name from the outset.

But they were very close friends over basically Merton's entire monastic career and literary career for sure.

I mean, there's so much there, but I'll just say that he continues, even as a young monk and through his profession and ordination to the priesthood, he's still reading Franciscan texts.

He writes a lot about Franciscan theology and philosophy.

In fact, the Seven Story Mountain, the manuscript that he submitted for publication was about 600 pages long.

Between the Trappist censors and his excellent editor, Bob Giroux, they cut out about a third of that.

What struck me first was Barron's own story.

He went from working ordinary jobs as a teenager to discovering Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain, which completely shaped his vocation.

And get this, he became a bishop because the Pope simply called and appointed him.

No interview process, no application.