Hmm …

… ‘Becoming the writer-monk’: Mary Gordon on Thomas Merton | America Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I read The Seven Storey Mountain before I went to college (if memory serves)  and was both impressed and influenced by it. But in college I read Bede Griffiths's The Golden String and thought it superior to Merton's book. Oddly, both Merton and Griffiths became, in my view, somewhat dubious figures, proving once again that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God.