Where I'm at

Life has been a struggle these days. I've never been good at balancing things, and I'm terrible at discipline (if you want to know my new year's resolutions, those are them). So I've been feeling the truth of the passage from Night Prayer, "your opponent the devil is prowling like a lion for someone to devour. Resist him, solid in your faith," and haven't been doing a great job of resisting.

For some reason, Thomas Merton's book The Seven Storey Mountain called out to me this afternoon from the bookshelf. It was one I had read years ago in college, and as I was praying for a friend at the time, I thought there was some kernel of truth in it meant for her. But what I found was (surprise) for me. I opened up to the part of the book where Merton has just decided that if he can't join an order he's going to live life in the world as closely to that as a monk as he can. When I read what he was going through at that moment, the words rang true. Our lives are very different in the day-to-day sense, but the sentiment he expresses is very much what I've been feeling lately- the uncertainty, the solitude, all of it, the fear that underlies the words, all of it. And as his story does in fact end well, it gives me hope that perhaps I'll actually make it. So here's what he says:

It was a difficult and uncertain business, and I was starting again to make a long and arduious climb, alone, and from what seemed to be a great depth.
If I had ever thought I had become immune from passion, and that I did not have to fight for freedom, there was no chance of that illusion any more. It seemed that every step I took carried me painfully forward under a burden of desires that almost crushed me with the monotomy of their threat, the intimate, searching familiarity of their ever-present disgust.
I did not have any lofty theories about the vocation of a lay-contemplative. In fact, I no longer dignified what I was trying to do by the name of a vocation. All I knew was that I wanted grace, and that I needed prayer, and that I was helpless without God, and that I wnated to everything that people did to keep close to Him.
It was no longer possible to consider myself, abstractly, as being in a certain "state of life" which had special technical relations to other "states of life." All that occupied me now was the immediate practical problem of getting up my hill with this terrific burden I had on my shoulders, step by step, begging God to drag me along and get me away from my enemies and from those who were trying to destroy me.