Thomas Merton vividly describes the ongoing process of death and rebirth that we undergo in journeying into God:
‘It is sometime in June. At a rough guess, I think it is June 13 which may or may not be the feast of Saint Anthony of Padua. In any case every day is the same for me because I have become very different from what I used to be.
The man who began this journal is dead, just as the man who finished The Seven Storey Mountain when this journal began was also dead, and what is more that man who was the central figure in The Seven Storey Mountain was dead over and over. And now that all these men are dead, it is sufficient for me to say so on paper and I think I will have ended up by forgetting them. Because writing down what The Seven Storey Mountain was about was sufficient to get it off my mind for good. Last week I corrected the proofs of the French translation of the book and it seemed completely alien. I might as well have been a proofreader working for a publisher and going over the galleys of somebody else’s book. Consequently, The Seven Storey Mountain is the work of a man I never even heard of. And this journal is getting to be the production of somebody to whom I have never had the dishonour of an introduction.’
To speak of resurrection in terms of spiritual awakening is not to reduce it to a metaphor. The contemplative resurrections do not replace the resurrection of the body but rather anticipate it.
MLT.
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