To his surprise, he wanted nothing less than holiness.

He was, he wrote, 'sick of being sick.' By the mysterious workings of grace, Merton began to understand it was union with God and the saints that really mattered. See, I told myself, women and beer and smoky jazz clubs left Tom Merton with a stale taste in his mouth, an emptiness in his soul, and rumblings of regret in his gut. Merton's repudiation of his dissolute living, especially his early sexual indulgence at Cambridge and later at Columbia, was comforting. Months later, I plunged into The Seven Storey Mountain with a first-year-seminarian's thirst for spiritual adventure and with the idealism typical of a religious novice. I thanked her politely enough and stuck the book behind my fourth year Latin grammar text, fearing someone noticed her offering and might ask me about it. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, a first-edition copy of Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain. Sublimely discreet, she said one day after class when my senior friends were out of earshot, 'You might like this book.' She handed me, as if it were D. And I definitely did not want anyone, especially JoAnn, to think of me as pious.īut one of my teachers, a Sister of Charity with the eye of a Fr. I suspect my fear was that my high school friends would think me pious. The reason for the secrecy remains somewhat of a mystery to me to this day. None of my classmates, not one, knew of my intention. Now you should understand that my desire to be a priest was a pontifical secret. JoAnn Mahoney and celibacy! Still, in the spring of my senior year of high school I sat at my parents' dining room table and wrote the rector of Cleveland's Saint Mary Seminary seeking admission. While there was never a serious doubt about seminary studies, I nevertheless felt the ripples of tension and unease rooted in mandatory celibacy. I wanted to be a priest and I was in love with JoAnn Mahoney. In fact, these two certitudes were crystal clear to me as a first-grader at Holy Name Elementary School. I was 17 and knew two things for certain. Dianne Bergant and Michael Daley say, 'can inspire, affirm, challenge, change, even disturb.' Good books, as blog co-editors Congregation of St. Editor's note: 'Take and Read' is a weekly blog that features a different contributor's reflections on a specific book that changed their lives.

Merton the seven storey mountain