The Healing Journey

July 17, 2023

“We are under sentence of death, an extinction without remembrance or memorial, and we cling to life and to the present. This causes bitterness and anguish. But Christ will cure us of this clinging and then we will be free and joyful, even in the night.”
– Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton was one of the most influential spiritual writers of the 20th century, the author of more than 60 books, which included the story of his conversion to Catholicism, “The Seven Storey Mountain.”

By his own admission, he lived a dissolute life before that day in December 1941, when he entered a Trappist monastery in Kentucky at 26 years old. He had known loss in his early life. When he was 6, his mother died, and his father, who was pursuing a career as an artist in Europe, sent the boy to the United States to live with his grandparents. At 10, Merton joined his father and went to boarding schools in France and England. At 15, Merton’s father died of cancer, and a family friend became his guardian, but as the years passed, he became fed up with the life Merton was living.

A few years later, Merton was in Italy, and one night while he was alone in his room, writing in his journal, he had a spiritual experience. He felt his father’s presence.

As he recorded those transformative moments: “It was as real and startling as if he had touched my arm or spoken to me. The experience was over in a flash, but in that flash, instantly, I was overwhelmed with a sudden and profound insight into the misery and corruption of my own soul…. And now, I think for the first time in my whole life, I really began to pray … praying out of the very roots of my life and my being, and praying to the God I had never known.”

And that same God answered him.

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In our darkest, most desolate hours, we are being watched over by those who love us.