Posted by Butch on July 03, 2001 at 04:15:34:
In Reply to: More distant Irish relatives posted by Murrisk on July 01, 2001 at 19:46:28:
**Here are the first two paragraphs from "The Seven Storey Mountain" by Thomas Merton.**** On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountain on the borders of Spain ,I came into the world. Free by nature in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers. Not many hundreds of miles away from the house where I was born, they were picking up the men who rotted in the rainy ditches among the dead horses and the ruined seventy-fives, in a forest of trees without branches along the river Marne. T. M.