My own
peculiar task in my Church and in my world has been that of the solitary
explorer who, instead of jumping on all the latest bandwagons at once, is bound
to search the existential depths of faith in its silence, its ambiguities, and
in those certainties which lie deeper than the bottom of anxiety. In these
depths there are no easy answers, no pat solutions to anything. It is a kind of
submarine life in which faith sometimes mysteriously takes on the aspect of
doubt when, in fact, one has to doubt and reject conventional and superstitious
surrogates that have taken the place of faith. On this level, the division
between Believer and Unbeliever ceases to be so crystal clear. It is not that
some are all right and others are all wrong: all are bound to seek in honest
perplexity. Everybody is an Unbeliever more or less! Only when this fact is
fully experienced, accepted and lived with, does one become fit to hear the
simple message of the Gospel-or any other religious teaching. The religious
problem of the twentieth century is not understandable if we regard it only as
a problem of Unbelievers and of atheists. It is also and perhaps chiefly a
problem of Believers. The faith that has grown cold is not only the faith that
the Unbeliever has lost but the faith that the Believer has kept. This faith
has too often become rigid, or complex, sentimental, foolish, or impertinent.
It has lost itself in imaginings and unrealities, dispersed itself in
pontifical and organization routines, or evaporated in activism and loose talk.
Thomas
Merton. "Apologies to an Unbeliever" in Faith and Violence. South Bend,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968: 213-214.
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