Revisiting The Seven Storey Mountain
 

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ROBERT GIROUX

e was one of the greatest persons of our time or of
any time. I shall mourn for him as long as 1 live."
. These were Mark Van Doren's words about Thomas
Merton, when he heard the news of his death in Bangkok in 1968.
In the years since then Van Doren's words have become even more
valid. Perhaps we see more clearly what Van Doren saw then, as
Merton's meaning and message and writings reach a wider and
wider audience every year. Like all great persons, Thomas Merton
was ahead of his time.

It was the other Tom Wolfe of Asheville who said "You Can't Go
Home Again," but when I revisited the Abbey of Gethsemani in
Kentucky in 1989—I had been present at Merton's ordination there
in 1949—1 recognized that it had been transformed after forty
years. The old entrance with its greeting, "Pax Intrantibus," was
gone but the new guest house, the splendid sweep of the paved-
avenue approach, the lofty simplicity of the reconstructed church,
the beautiful Skakel Memorial Chapel, and the new works of art
everywhere have made it an even finer home. Abbot Timothy
O'Keefe welcomed us and Brother Patrick Hart showed us every¬
thing, including the specially bound 100,000th copy of The Seven
Storey Mountain which I had presented to Tom on my first visit to
the monastery. A high point was visiting Merton's hermitage, from
whose porch I gazed at the hills in the distance, realizing that I had
first met Tom at college in 193 5—fifty-four years earlier.

I began to jot down the various roles or functions Thomas
Merton had performed during his lifetime, and in a short time I had
listed thirty activities, in alphabetical order from A to Z. This was
the list:
 

activist
 

forester
 

Latinist
 

artist
 

hermit
 

Icttcr-'w titer
 

cenobite
 

humorist
 

Hstcner
 

contemplative
 

interpreter
 

monk
 

farmer
 

jazz-hound
 

mystic
 

fdm-buff
 

journal-keeper
 

non-violence advocate