By Deacon Scott Dodge
Like many 20th century converts to the Catholic Church, reading Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain was instrumental in my conversion. It would be an exaggeration to say that reading Merton’s autobiography was the catalyst for my conversion. It was not. I first read this book about half-way through my RCIA process at the University of Utah Newman Center. I was 24 years-old. It was early in the year 1990.
The Seven Story Mountain utterly fascinated me. I read it fast and then quickly re-read it. A few months earlier, around my twenty-fourth birthday, I also discovered Donald Fagen’s album The Nightfly. I know, I know, Fagen released this album in 1982. Nonetheless, I only picked up a copy (on cassette) just before my birthday in 1989. Having been Catholic now for more than twenty-seven years, whenever I start to feel a little discouraged in my faith, I am able to read Pater Tom and listen to some cuts from The Nightfly and I am buoyed.
In 2006 the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops published their United States Catechism for Adults. While the universal Catechism was a publishing success, the United States adult catechism was a bit of a dud. One of the things pointed out by numerous critics was that nowhere in its more than 600 pages is the Trappist monk Thomas Merton mentioned.
Despite the adult catechism slight, it was gratifying that Pope Francis chose Pater Tom, along with Dorothy Day, both of whom converted to the Catholic Church as young adults, to exemplify U.S. citizens who gave shape and form to “fundamental values which will endure forever in the spirit of the American people.” According to the Holy Father, Merton, along with Day, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Abraham Lincoln, “offer us a way of seeing and interpreting reality.”
As Pope Francis pointed out in his speech: “Merton was above all a man of prayer, a thinker who challenged the certitudes of his time and opened new horizons for souls and for the Church. He was also a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions.” Given my own, rather narrow, religious upbringing, it was the catholic, or universal nature, of the Church that drew me to Catholicism. One of the greatest joys of my ministry is engaging in ecumenism and interfaith activities.
Merton gave us a most catholic way of seeing and interpreting reality in his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander: “I will be a better Catholic, not if I can refute every shade of Protestantism, but if I can affirm the truth in it and still go further. So, too, with the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists, etc. This does not mean syncretism, indifferentism, the vapid and careless friendliness that accepts everything by thinking of nothing. There is much that one cannot ‘affirm’ and ‘accept,’ but first one must say ‘yes’ where one really can. If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it.”
What a great post, Scott!
My wife has a Thomas Merton Reader which I sometimes work my way through for Lenten reading. It includes, among other things, some passages from Seven Storey Mountain that didn’t make it into the published version. They are so good that I have to wonder what the editor found objectionable about them. Writers and editors–it’s always a cat and mouse game!
I remember first learning about Merton as a boy when visiting the Trappist monastery in Huntsville. They had photos up of him, just like of a family member. It was very cool.
My conversion to Catholicism was also partly due to reading Merton. Like Mike O’Brien, I was introduced to Merton at the Trappist monastery that used to exist in Huntsville, Utah. I have tons of Merton books, and every time I open one to read, I feel as if I have come home.