So far, however, there had been no deep movement of my will, nothing that amounted to a conversion, nothing to shake the iron tyranny of moral corruption that held my whole nature in fetters. But that also was to come. It came in a strange way, suddenly, a way that I will not attempt to explain.
I was in my room. It was night. The light was on. Suddenly it seemed that Father, who had now been dead more than a year, was there with me. The sense of his presence was as vivid and as real and as startling as if he had touched my arm or spoken to me. The whole thing passed in a flash, but in that flash, instantly, I was overwhilmed with a sudden and profound insight into the misery and corruption of my own soul, and i was pierced deeply with a light that made me realize something of the condition I was in, and I was filled with horror at what I saw, and my whole being rose up in revolt against what was within me, and my soul desired escape and liberation and freedom from all this with an intensity and an urgency unlike anything I had ever known before. And now I think for the first time in my whole life I really began to pray-praying not with my lips and with my intellect and my imagination, but praying out of the very roots of my life and of my being, and praying to the God I had never known, to reach down towards me out of His darkness and help me to get free of the thousand terrible things that held my will in their slavery.
There were a lot of tears connected with this, and they did me good, and all the while, although I had lost that first vivid agonizing sense of the presence of my father in the room, I had him in my mind, and I was talking to him as well as to God, as though he were sort of intermediary. I do not mean this in any way that might be interpreted that I thought he was among the saints. I did not really know what they might mean then, and now that I do know, I would heitate to say that I though he was in Heaven.
Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 111-112
"The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!
"In so far as men are prepared to prefer their own will to God's will, they can be said to hate God: for of course they cannot hate Him in Himself. But they hate Him in the Commandments which they violate. But God is our life: God's will is our food, our meat, our life's bread. To hate our life is to enter into death, and therefore the prudence of the flesh is death...
...But I did not clearly realize all this. Because of the profound and complete conversion of my intellect, I thought I was entirely converted. Because I believed in God, and in the teachings of the Church, and was prepared to sit up all night arguing about them with all comers, I imagined that I was even a zealous Christian.
But the conversion of the intellect is not enough. And as long as the will, the domina voluntas, did not belong completely to God, even the intellectual conversion was bound to remain precarious and indefinite, For although the will cannot force the intellect to see an object other than it is, it can turn it away from the object altogether, and prevent it from considering that think at all.
Where was my will? 'Where your treasure is, there will be your heart be also,' and I had not laid up any treasures for myself in heaven. They were all on earth. I wanted to be a writer, a poet, a critic, a professor. I wanted to enjoy all kinds of pleasures of the intellect and of the senses and in order to have these pleasures I did not hesitate to place myself in situations which I knew would end in spiritual disaster-although generally I was so blinded by my own appetites that I never even clearly considered this fact until it was too late, and the damage was done."
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