Seven Storey Mountian-2

Merton describes his life at Cambridge University and his acquaintance with the works of Dante. He leaves the University without completing his studies and proceeds to Europe.In this section we find a very poetic rendering of the presence of God:

There is not a flower that opens, not a seed that falls into the. ground, and not an ear of wheat that nods on the end of its stalk in the wind that does not preach and proclaim the greatness and the mercy of God to the whole world. . . There is not an act of kindness, or generosity, not an act of sacrifice done... that does not sing hymns to

God. . . All these things, all creatures, every graceful movement, every ordered act of the human will, all are sent to us as prophets from God"(p.129)

He makes a beautiful prayer to the Blessed Virgin: "And when I thought there

was no God and no love and no money, you were leading me all the while into the midst of His love and His mercy. . . "

Merton criticizes the materialistic spirit of the age whose product he has been:

" I saw clearly enough that I was the product of my times, my society and my class... We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible... "

He was fascinated for a while with communist ideology while he was a student at Columbia University.

He expresses a very deep admiration for one of the professors ofEng.Lit.Prof Mark Van Doren: "His classes were literally "education"-they brought things out of you, they made your mind produce its own explicit ideas."

Merton mentions his grandfather's death in 1936: "Now a strange thing happened. Without my having thought about it. . . I closed the door and got on my knees by the bed and prayed."

He sees the emptiness in his life: "In filling myself, I had emptied myself In grasping things, I had lost everything."

He sees the need of God's grace in man's life, as he is unable to settle his problems. He explains grace, in this context, as God's own life, shared by us. " When a ray of light strikes a crystal, it gives a new quality to the crystal. And when God's infinitely disinterested love plays upon a human soul, the same kind of thing takes place. And that is the life called sanctifying grace." He mentions that Gilson's work "The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy" has been very much influential in leading him to the Church: "I began to have a desire to go to church."(p.175). Blake's poems too have been acknowledged to be influential. He meets with an Indian monk who urges him to read the "Confessions" of St. Augustine as well as the "Imitation of Christ. "He develops a strong interest to go to a Catholic church and attend a mass. He goes to the Corpus Christi church in Manhattan and while meeting a priest (Fr.Ford) there, on a sudden impulse; he expresses his desire to become a Catholic.

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