Rome Reconsidered
An Ex-Catholic's Reconciliation
Wililam Brailsford
April 1, 1995
On one of those particularly gray and damp New York winter afternoons, when the only reasonable thing to be doing was either reading books or buying them, I found myself in the bookstore at Union Theological Seminary on 116th Street, in the murky shadow of the Riverside Church. I was looking for something, well, different. I was a student at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, and I often took the train to New York to escape the pressures of study. In this case, I believe winter Hebrew had just ended, and therefore the great bookstores of New York beckoned. I liked the bookstore at Union because its stock was almost exactly the opposite of Westminster's. The clash of mainline liberalism and Calvinist orthodoxy could nowhere be better seen than at these two seminaries. I seem to recall, in fact, that at Union, Calvin's Institutes were in the "alternative religions" section of the store. My purchase that day was Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain. I suppose I bought it for no other reason than that I knew nothing of him but felt I should. My evening train for Philadelphia was delayed at Pennsylvania Station, which was no surprise. What was a surprise, however, was the ferocity with which Merton's autobiography overpowered me. "On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in the year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the border of Spain, I came into the world," he begins. "Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born" He concludes: "That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God yet hating Him; born to love Him, living ...
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