This trip back through Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton has been slower. I’ve picked it up to read just a few pages, then put it down for awhile as I pondered something or I went back to reading other material.

This past week I was walking through a difficult spiritual battle and picked up Merton again to read just a few paragraphs. It was all I needed as those words brought in the presence of Jesus in a sweet way.

Merton, in this section of the book, was reeling from a decision to not enter a Franciscan order as he was trying to discern what was next. The daily offices kept him anchored to Christ, but the cumulative effect of the daily office brought him into a profound experience with Christ.

“Yes, and from the secret places of His essence, God began to fill my soul with grace in those days, grace that sprung from deep within me, I could not know how or where. But yet I would be able, after not so many months, to realize what was there, in the peace and the strength that were growing in me through my constant immersion in this tremendous, unending cycle of prayer, ever renewing its vitality, its inexhaustible, sweet energies, from hour to hour, from season to season in its returning round. And I, drawn into that atmosphere, into that deep, vast universal movement of vitalizing prayer, which is Christ praying in men to His Father, could not help but begin at last to live, and to know that I was alive. And my heart could not help but cry out within me, ‘I will sing to the Lord as long as I live: I will sing praise to my God while I have my being. Let my speech be acceptable to Him: but I will take delight in the Lord.’” 

— Seven Storey Mountain, p. 331

Merton saw it as Christ coming to bind Merton to the Spirit. In those sweet moments of reading those words, the presence of Christ touched me as well. All the struggle of those days were still real, but Christ’s presence enveloped me as I read those words. It is a matter of cultivation. Day by day. Week by week. Season by season. Allow the work of spiritual discipline plow deep into your heart.