Raised without a strong sense of religion, Thomas Merton’s conversion story, The Seven Storey Mountain, can be read by people of all different backgrounds. Growing up Merton did not have a stable sense of religion, but through the grace of God, found the Catholic faith, which resulted in a life of contemplation and solitude. Like many conversions, it is hard to pinpoint one incident in Merton’s life that formed his faith. Places he visited, people he met, books that he read, all impacted his conversion. In his book, Merton was able to look back on his life and see the sacramental principle weaved into his life to led him to a life of faith. His numerous readings and an unexpected impact of a Hindu monk demonstrate the sacramental principle …show more content…
Himes, a professor of theology at Boston College, construes the sacramental principle in “Finding God in All Things”: A Sacramental Worldview and Its Effects. “The sacramental principle means that what is always and everywhere the case must be noticed, accepted, and celebrated somewhere sometime. What is always and everywhere true must be brought to our attention and be embraced (or rejected) in some concrete experience at some particular time and place.” Here, Himes explained how the principle is noticing the grace of God’s ever-present, everlasting love throughout life. God gives graces in all the time, whether expected or not. It is up to the person to see and accept those graces. In The Seven Story Mountain, Merton reflects on his life and notices God’s work throughout his …show more content…
Merton was first introduced to Blake as a child when his father would read to him. In his young adult years, Merton picked Blake backup, which resulted in Merton writing his thesis on the works of Blake. Although many of Blake’s poems are easily interpreted literally, Merton saw the deeper, figurative meanings behind each poem. This encounter with Blake as a young adult was a starting block to Merton’s exploration of Christianity. Merton saw the grace of God working through Blake in his poetry which caused Merton to see the need for faith. “As Blake worked himself into my system, I became more and more conscious of the necessity of a vital faith, and the total unreality and unsubstantiality of the dead, selfish rationalism which had been freezing my mind and will for the last seven years.” In this quote, Merton reflected on how Blake’s work utterly changed how he thought about faith. “By the time the summer was over, I was to become conscious of the fact that the only way to live was to live in a world that was charged with the presence and reality of God.” He realized that no matter what he does or where he goes, God is always with him in every moment. Before reading Blake, he never noticed God’s power in his life, Merton started to realize he needed to live with and through God. Although Blake did strike opened Merton’s mind to seeing God,
How tragic that we in this dark day have had our seeking done for us by our teachers. Everything is made to center upon the initial act of 'accepting' Christ … and we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls. We have been snared in the coils of a spurious logic which insists that if we have found him we need no more seek him. This is set before us as the last word in orthodoxy, and it is taken for granted that no Bible-taught Christian ever believed otherwise. Thus the whole testimony of the worshipping, seeking, singing Church on that subject is crisply set aside. The experimental heart-theology of a grand army of fragrant saints is rejected in favor of a smug interpretation of Scripture which would certainly have sounded strange to an Augustine, a Rutherford or a Brainerd (pp. 16-17).
highlights the importance of the sacraments and the clergy, can be seen as a response on
What a fascinating adjustment in perspectives, motive, and determination from the once deeply connected to God the unprofessed theologian. The man who we admired for his crafty dexterity to be a Christian Apologetic emerges to be torn from the foundations of his faith and experiences of how to respond to the unspecified. This book is openly troubling for the believer because all too often we know that this is a very real situation that our author is experiencing. However, while it may appear that a staunch believer has lost his way were hastily reminded that this not the case at all. In the book "A Grief Observed" by C. S. Lewis we see, what I call, a defining mature Christian transition, disruption to the norm, or bump in the road all Christians
The window was cold to the touch. The glass shimmered as the specks of sunlight danced, and Blake stood, peering out. As God put his head to the window, at once, he felt light shining through his soul. Six years old. Age ceased to define him and time ceased to exist. Silence seeped into every crevice of the room, and slowly, as the awe of the vision engulfed him, he felt the gates slowly open. His thoughts grew fluid, unrestrained, and almost chaotic. An untouched imagination had been liberated, and soon, the world around him transformed into one of magnificence and wonder. His childish naivety cloaked the flaws and turbulence of London, and the imagination became, to Blake, the body of God. The darkness lingering in the corners of London slowly became light. Years passed by, slowly fading into wisps of the past, and the blanket of innocence deteriorated as reality blurred the clarity of childhood.
"EXPLORING THEOLOGY 1 & 2." EXPLORING THEOLOGY 1 2. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 May 2014.
William Blake is a literature genius. Most of his work speaks volume to the readers. Blake’s poem “The Mental Traveller” features a conflict between a male and female that all readers can relate to because of the lessons learned as you read. The poet William Blake isn’t just known for just writing. He was also a well-known painter and a printmaker. Blake is considered a seminal figure in the history of poetry. His poems are from the Romantic age (The end of the 18th Century). He was born in Soho, London, Great Britain. He was the third of seven children. Even though Blake was such an inspiration as a writer he only went to school just enough to read and write. According to Bloom’s critical views on William Blake; one of Blake’s inspirations was the Bible because he believed and belonged to the Moravian Church.
The theme of authority is possibly the most important theme and the most popular theme concerning William Blake’s poetry. Blake explores authority in a variety of different ways particularly through religion, education and God. Blake was profoundly concerned with the concept of social justice. He was also profoundly a religious man. His dissenting background led him to view the power structures and legalism that surrounded religious establishments with distrust. He saw these as unwarranted controls over the freedom of the individual and contrary to the nature of a God of liberty. Figures such as the school master in the ‘schoolboy’, the parents in the ‘chimney sweeper’ poems, the guardians of the poor in the ‘Holy Thursday’, Ona’s father in ‘A Little girl lost’ and the priestly representatives of organised religion in many of the poems, are for Blake the embodiment of evil restriction.
Blake’s poetry focuses on imagination. When Blake created his work, it gained very little attention. Blake’s artistic and poetic vision is reflected in his creations. Blake was against the Church of England because he thought the doctrines were being misused as a form of social control, it meant the people were taught to be passively obedient and accept oppression, poverty, and inequality. In Blake’s poems “The Lamb,” “The Tyger,” and Proverbs of Hell, he shows that good requires evil in order to exist through imagery of animals and man.
45-48) Here we learn from Benedict that the road to salvation is paved in the monastery by living the monastic life in service to God. His intention is not to lay out anything so harsh as to make salvation unattainable, and, as an understanding father would, tells his children not to run from the road though at first it be narrow. Benedict is convinced that under the guidance of the Rule, service to God in the monastery will lead to salvation. It is from this understanding that the school for the Lord’s service becomes a haven for conversion.
In Abbot Mark’s lecture, he taught the Freshman class about one of the forefathers of Christianity and this college. Saint Benedict’s journey to God perfectly exemplifies the phenomenon that as one’s position in life changes, they must to alter the values they practice and live by in order to achieve the same goal. An acetic hermit should seek the virtue of self-discipline as they must create guidelines that will allow themselves to develop a deeper relationship with God, while a monk who is an acting member of a greater community must practice strict obedience so that he can better the community and his relationship to God. It is important for a liberal art’s student to understand what truths should be sought in what setting so that they too
Book Review of The Path of Prayer: Four Sermons on Prayer by St. Theophan the Recluse
In A Short and Easy Method of Prayer, Madame Guyon touches on how one can accept all things God through prayer. Through the simple steps of meditation and reading accompanied by meditation, Madame Guyon teaches the reader how to use those steps to have a relationship with God. As a person of the Quietism faith in the seventeenth century, Madam Guyon was going against the norm of the church structure. Not only was she advocating people did not need to go to weekly services but she was also going against the male’s leaders of the church. One of the questions this book can help historians to answer is how religion shape everyday life. However, the readers need to keep in mind the biases surrounding this book. This is just one of the many religious
In several poems found in Songs of Experience and Innocence Blake presents the church, as well as religion, as corrupt and damaging to the innocence and purity of youth’s souls. The poe...
For Blake, God is like the human in that He also feels the inevitable sorrow that comes with somebody else’s pain. “He doth feel the sorrow too.” The reader becomes aware of a divine force inside of himself, something he should not search for elsewhere.
...h. Benedict would want someone to be a part of one church for the rest of their lives and not try and find a higher quality one. Happiness is in our fingertips and salvation is at hand if we practice stability. Through Tomaine’s aspect of stability I have realized that many of them operate within my own life. I need to live in the now and not in the past. I also realized that through my relationship with god, I have met challenges in life and have created great relationships on all accounts. I believe that I should not take great relationships for granted because they might crumble if I do. I also learned that through stability and perseverance I have hung on to life when it was doubtful. In modern times we need to live in a world of Stability and practice Benedict’s way of being stable. By doing this, the relationship with god and the world will be incredible.