a season in purgatory

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A discussion forum on theology, faith, doubt, prayer, the afterlife, and other religious topics. How Does One Find Faith? Doubting is the Dialectical Partner of Faith. Redisovering Faith After the Grieving Process. So whether starting from a background of having practiced a religion and then fallen away, or whether pursuing the search for faith for the first time, the question becomes why should a person take the time to read and learn about God? There are more than one hundred reasons for having faith and pursuing a spiritual journey, but the chief motivating factor could be that it brings the person peace, understanding, and the grace to overcome the sorrows that afflict that person during his life on earth.

The 20th Century theologian philosopher and Trappist monk Thomas Merton explored what it meant for each of us to be called to become saints. The following excerpts from the official biography of Thomas Merton, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, illustrate Merton's, and through extension our own, spiritual journey to become saints.

"According to Robert Lax, nobody argued with Merton about his being a Catholic neither did they argue about the Spanish Civil War or Pope Joan with Merton. Merton [in his autobiography] lists more arguments that usual for those years, but only two with Lax, the debate over mortification, and the one on November 30, 1939. . . .On the night in November when [the reasons for Merton’s lack of success with his published article writing] became too heated, Lax tried to get Merton to focus on his real aims. Did he want to be a poet, a novelist, an essayist, a critic? “What do you want to do anyway?"

The question threw Merton back on the inner debate he had pursued since his baptism the November before. He struggled now with his priorities. The answer he gave was that he wanted to be a good Catholic. "What do you mean, you want to be a good Catholic?" The explanation I gave was lame enough, and expressed my confusion, and betrayed how little I had really though about it at all. Lax did not accept it.

"What you should say," he told me "what you should say is that you want to become a saint." A saint! The thought struck me as a little weird. I said: "How do you expect me to become a saint?" "By wanting to," said Lax, simply.

Lax had not said "by trying to become one." By wanting to become a saint you could become one, just as sufficient faith moved mountains. The idea Lax had planted was not to go away. For the time Merton turned to reading the lives of the saints, not into himself. it dismayed him to find both Lax and [Professor] Mark Van Doren closer to an understanding of what it mean to lead a holy life than he was. He listed all the things that stood between him and the way of poverty. Then he decided the very lists were another distraction.” THE SEVEN MOUNTAINS OF THOMAS MERTON, p. 140, (internal quotation marks omitted)

"By 1941, Merton’s vocation was clear. It was not to be a priest, not to enter a religious order, not to be a secular priest in social work for the Church. These were possible ways, not the end. The end he sought was to be a saint. As Leon Bloy had said: "The greatest sadness was not being a saint." This was close to the aim Lax had set, with one important difference. Merton sought sainthood in struggle, not in acceptance; in becoming, not in being. All this is referred to obliquely in the journals. The reason is easy enough to understand. The day-to-day struggle to become a saint provided a dangerous opportunity for the very thing he was avoiding. It had to be an almost unspoken goal for Merton himself: it would be disastrous to speak of it to others.

In the Catholic Church perhaps the very process of canonization had caused the greatest confusion. For the Protestant sects of the seventeenth century, a saint was simply a believer. For Catholics, a saint was, at least in one aspect, a show. In the case of a “finished” saint this aspect made little difference. Something of a comparison could be drawn with Merton’s other vocation. There were complications in claiming you were trying to become a poet. Often it was s sure sign that a writer of verse was not a poet if he or she insisted on this public recognition. To an even great degree this was true of a saint. One who claimed to be a saint was, by this very claim, shown to be wanting in what is needed most for sainthood, humility. . . . Just, watchful, and secret. The man or woman trying to be a saint hid any beginning of saintliness. There was no “show” in this; exactly the opposite. St. Francis of Assisi, Merton wrote, had hidden his stigmata in wrappings of old rags. Merton praised "Kierkegaard’s remarkable intuition that the greatest and most perfect saints are those whose saintliness cannot be contained except beneath some exterior that appears totally mediocre and normal, because it is an incommunicable secret."

Whether Thomas Merton ever became a saint is thus totally irrelevant here – and henceforth in these pages. That his vocation was to be a saint is clear from 1941. In terms of his true vocation, then, he had to decide which circumstances would be enable him to become what he sought to become. He had already talked of this, admittedly rather superficially, when he compared the opportunities for sainthood in the two parishes in Miami.

Long after, when visitors to the hermitage tried to chide him into admitting that he was not "a true hermit," Merton would ask, "What’s your idea of a hermit?" If the question gave him an easy out, it also threw the visitor back on his or her own preconceptions of what a hermit ought to be in order to be a "real one." What’s your idea of a saint?" THE SEVEN MOUNTAINS OF THOMAS MERTON, pp. 186-87.

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