Transformative Power of Suffering in Spiritual Growth

Merton invites us to merge the living of our natural days into God's life to let nature and Grace that is your story in his story merge and become one. Thomas Merton was born in 1915. He was quite brilliant but suffered horrible loss on his life. His mom died when he was six, his dad died when he was 15. [00:02:52]

He lived a quite prodigal life when he was at College in Columbia. He was a brilliant writer, and through isolation, separation, and actually pain, this doesn't sound terribly severe, but some of you know how bad this can be. My wife is one of them. Her mouth is so bad that we have put the children of several dentists through colleges. [00:03:24]

Merton had abscessed teeth and at one point developed Gang Green and almost died from it, and that prompted him to pray for the first time. When he finally becomes converted, he goes to his First Act of confession and he says, I tore those sins up by the root like teeth and eventually he enters into the priesthood. [00:03:49]

He writes a book called the seven story monaster Mountain about his journey and although it received no promotion was never advertised it such struck such a core in people that it sold millions and millions of copies. New York Times would not list it as a bestseller because they said it was a religious book. [00:04:13]

When he was only 15 years old, he's called to a nearby hospital where his father is dying and at first all he can feel is suffering his father's and his own. Now again I want to invite you to think about your problem, your battle. It might be real deep. I know for many it is a death, a grief, a loss, an addiction. [00:05:04]

The more you try to avoid suffering the more you will suffer because you will be afraid of everything and everything will become a possible occasion of suffering. But through his tears he realizes that his father is a man of faith and that his essential kindness has not deserted him. [00:05:42]

Much later he will say of his father's battle with cancer, souls are like athletes that need opponents worthy of them if they are to be tried and extended and push to the full use of their powers. My father was in a fight with this tumor and it was making him great. [00:06:08]

Merton goes on to write about how in the struggles of his life he came to realize that he was not as smart or as stable as he thought. He wrote a lot about prayer, which is really just a form of grappling with God and he said, nobody wants to be a beginner but we must face the fact that when it comes to the spiritual life, we are all beginners. [00:08:20]

At the end of a very very very difficult life Thomas Merton died. It's thought that he was coming out of a shower and he touched an exposed wire, current of a fan and was electrocuted. Lia writes this many have interpreted the last sentence in the seven story Mountain as a cryptic forecast of his life and death. [00:08:46]

In one of his journals Merton explains the phrase in this way I know well the burnt faces of the prophets and the evangelists transformed by the white hot dangerous presence of inspiration for they looked at God as into a furnace. His comment inadvertently reprises the scene of his mother's cremation. [00:09:18]

It is his word for The God Who melted him down and made of him someone altogether new. The is of course in the Bible the story of those young men Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego who are thrown into the furnace and there to their great surprise there they find God. [00:09:51]

It gives them a story that would inspire people for Millennia now sometimes it is said God Saves us from the furnace but sometimes but sometimes he meets Us in the furnace. This is our story make it great. [00:10:13]