Reading Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain
Some books are interesting.
Others make you uncomfortable in exactly the way a good spiritual book should.
Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain did that for me.
I expected a conversion story. And, of course, that is what the book is: Merton’s account of his restless early life, his discovery of Catholicism, his Baptism, his struggle to understand his vocation, and eventually his entrance into the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani.
But the deeper I got into it, the less it felt like a story about becoming a monk.
It felt like a story about becoming free.
And Merton’s definition of freedom is almost the exact opposite of the one we are usually sold.
When Freedom Becomes a Prison
Merton opens his autobiography by looking back on a younger version of himself who believed he was free.
He could travel.
He could study what interested him.
He could pursue pleasure.
He could build the kind of life he wanted.
Yet looking back, he sees that this supposed freedom had become a kind of imprisonment.
That idea stayed with me.
We live in a culture saturated with choice.
I can decide what I want to watch, read, buy, listen to, follow, block, subscribe to, or scroll past. I carry a device in my pocket that gives me almost instant access to information from around the world.
By modern standards, that looks like freedom.
But having more choices does not necessarily mean becoming more free.
Sometimes it just means having more ways to distract ourselves.
Merton’s life keeps circling around a question that is still painfully relevant:
What am I actually made for?
The Catholic answer is not complicated.
We are made for God.
St. Augustine put it centuries before Merton:
“Thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless till they rest in thee.”
— Confessions, I.1
The Catechism teaches the same truth:
“The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God.”
— CCC 27
Merton spends years experiencing that restlessness without fully understanding what it means.
He looks for satisfaction in ideas, relationships, travel, ambition, art, pleasure, and intellectual achievement.
None of them are enough.
The problem is not that every one of those things is evil.
The problem is that none of them is God.
Grace Was Already There
One of the things I found most compelling about Merton’s conversion is that God does not suddenly appear halfway through the story.
Merton only gradually realizes that grace has been working long before he understands what is happening.
Books matter.
Conversations matter.
Churches matter.
Friendships matter.
Beauty matters.
Even disappointments matter.
Looking backward, the apparently disconnected pieces begin to resemble providence.
There is something deeply Catholic about that.
We often expect grace to arrive dramatically.
Sometimes it does.
But just as often, God works through the ordinary.
A conversation you almost ignored.
A book you happened to pick up.
A question that would not leave you alone.
A church you entered without quite knowing why.
A moment of silence when something suddenly became impossible to dismiss.
Conversion often looks obvious only in retrospect.
Only later do we realize:
God had been there the entire time.
Catholicism Becomes Concrete
Merton’s journey is also striking because his discovery of God does not remain an intellectual conclusion.
Catholicism becomes concrete.
He encounters the Church.
He receives Baptism.
He goes to Confession.
He receives Our Lord in the Eucharist.
He learns to pray.
He discovers the saints.
He develops devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
He begins discerning what God actually wants from his life.
That movement matters.
Merton had spent much of his life inside his own intellect. Yet God draws him toward a faith that refuses to remain merely intellectual.
Catholicism gives us water.
Oil.
Bread.
Wine.
Beads between our fingers.
Words of absolution spoken aloud.
Knees on a church floor.
And above all, God Himself taking flesh.
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”
— John 1:14, Douay-Rheims
The Catechism calls the sacraments “efficacious signs of grace” entrusted to the Church by Christ (CCC 1131).
Grace is invisible.
But Christianity is stubbornly incarnational.
And I think there is something particularly important about that for those of us who spend much of our lives around technology.
The CatholicG33k Problem
I love technology.
That is obviously part of the reason this site is called CatholicG33k.
Technology can do extraordinary things. It can teach us, connect us, organize our lives, preserve information, help us create, and put an enormous amount of human knowledge within reach.
But it also makes abstraction incredibly easy.
Our friendships can become messages.
Our communities can become feeds.
Our arguments can become comment threads.
Our identities can become profiles.
Our attention can become metrics.
Even prayer can become one more notification competing for space on a screen.
Merton’s journey moves in almost the opposite direction.
He moves from abstraction toward Incarnation.
From endless intellectual wandering toward sacramental reality.
From self-construction toward surrender.
From noise toward silence.
That does not mean technology is the enemy.
It does mean technology makes Merton’s question especially important:
Am I using these tools freely, or have these tools learned how to use me?
That question lands harder after reading this book.
The Monastery Should Not Look Like Freedom
Then Merton does something that makes almost no sense according to modern ideas about happiness.
He enters a Trappist monastery.
He gives up enormous amounts of personal independence.
His days become structured around prayer, work, community, obedience, silence, and the Divine Office.
He gives up the ordinary possibility of marriage, career advancement, possessions, and the ability to design every part of his life around personal preference.
From the outside, it looks restrictive.
Merton experiences it as liberation.
That paradox might be the heart of The Seven Storey Mountain.
The Catechism teaches:
“Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act… and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility.”
But it immediately places human freedom within a greater purpose:
“Freedom attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude.”
— CCC 1731
Freedom is not simply the ability to choose.
Freedom is the ability to choose the good.
And ultimately, to choose God.
Sin therefore does not make us more free simply because we chose it voluntarily.
Christ says:
“Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.”
— John 8:34, Douay-Rheims
And then:
“If therefore the son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.”
— John 8:36, Douay-Rheims
Merton had spent years possessing the freedom to do what he wanted.
What he lacked was the freedom to become what God created him to be.
Those are not the same thing.
Conversion Is Not the Credits Scene
Another thing I appreciated about the book is that Merton’s Baptism does not suddenly solve everything.
That is important.
Conversion stories can sometimes be told as though someone finds Christ and the credits roll.
Merton’s story keeps going.
He has to learn how to pray.
He has to grow in devotion.
He struggles to understand his vocation.
He makes mistakes.
His desires have to be purified.
Even after he reaches the monastery, God is not finished with him.
Of course He isn’t.
The spiritual life is not:
I converted. Done.
It is conversion followed by conversion followed by conversion.
Our Lord says:
“If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.”
— Luke 9:23, Douay-Rheims
That word matters:
daily.
God does not merely ask for one dramatic decision.
He asks for us.
And giving ourselves to Him takes a lifetime.
The Question the Book Left Me With
When I finished The Seven Storey Mountain, I did not find myself wondering whether I should become a Trappist monk.
I found myself wondering about the noise in my own life.
What do I reach for the instant I become bored?
How comfortable am I with silence?
What am I calling freedom that actually has power over me?
What habits would I have difficulty surrendering if God asked?
How often do I mistake stimulation for happiness?
How often do I know what the good is and still choose what is easier?
How much of my day is intentionally lived—and how much of it is simply reacting to whatever lights up a screen next?
And perhaps the most uncomfortable question:
If God interrupted the life I had planned for myself, would I recognize that interruption as grace?
We All Have a Mountain to Climb
Merton’s vocation was unusual.
The call behind it is not.
Not everyone is called to Gethsemani.
Some are called to marriage.
Some to priesthood.
Some to religious life.
Some to dedicated single life.
Most of us will live lives that never become famous enough for someone to publish our autobiography.
But every Christian vocation eventually confronts us with the same demand.
Christ asks for the whole person.
Our intellect.
Our desires.
Our work.
Our relationships.
Our ambitions.
Our bodies.
Our time.
Our attention.
Even the parts of ourselves we would prefer to keep under our own control.
That is why Merton’s mountain feels larger than Merton.
We climb.
We fall.
We get distracted.
We confuse lesser goods with the highest Good.
Grace finds us.
We begin again.
And God keeps calling.
Maybe Surrender Is the Upgrade
There is an assumption buried deeply in modern life that happiness comes from maximizing control.
More options.
More customization.
More convenience.
More independence.
A life optimized around me.
Merton discovered something very different.
The human person does not become fully alive by endlessly enlarging the kingdom of the self.
We become free when the self finally bows before the One who created it.
That surrender looks like losing something.
In a sense, it is.
Christ never pretended otherwise.
But what disappears is not the person God created.
It is the prison we built around that person.
Merton entered Gethsemani apparently leaving the world behind.
Instead, he discovered what Christians have always discovered when they finally surrender to Christ:
Losing the life we designed for ourselves may be the moment we finally begin living the life for which we were made.
And maybe that is the strange freedom at the heart of The Seven Storey Mountain.
Not freedom from every limit.
Not freedom to endlessly reinvent ourselves.
Not freedom to satisfy every desire.
Freedom to belong completely to God.
And therefore, finally, to become ourselves.
From the CatholicG33k Bookshelf
Book: The Seven Storey Mountain
Author: Thomas Merton
First published: AD 1948
Why read it: Conversion, vocation, grace, prayer, freedom, and the restless search for God.
Referenced sources: Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, particularly “Prisoner’s Base,” “With a Great Price,” “The Waters of Contradiction,” “The Sleeping Volcano,” and “The Sweet Savor of Liberty”; St. Augustine, Confessions, I.1; Catechism of the Catholic Church, 27, 1131, 1731, 1733; John 1:14; John 8:34–36; Luke 9:23 (Douay-Rheims).