The Mass wields enormous power through its connection to Christ's death on the cross, wrote Thomas Merton, the American Trappist monk, writer, theologian and mystic.
"O my God, with what might You sometimes choose to teach a man's soul Your immense lessons!" Merton wrote in his memoir the Seven Storey Mountain about his spiritual journey to finding God in his life.
"Here, even through only ordinary channels, came to me graces that overwhelmed me like a tidal wave, truths that drowned me with the force of their impact: and all through the plain, normal means of the liturgy – but the liturgy used properly, and with reverence, by souls inured to sacrifice."
One of the most influential Catholic authors from the US of the twentieth century, his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, has sold over one million copies and has been translated into over fifteen languages, notes the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University. He wrote over sixty other books and hundreds of poems and articles on topics ranging from monastic spirituality to civil rights, nonviolence and the nuclear arms race.
