Monday, July 16, 2007

Your Holiness...?

"The heresy of individualism: thinking oneself a completely self-sufficient unit and asserting this imaginary "unity" against all others. The affirmation of the self as simply "not the other". The true way is just the opposite: the more I am able to affirm others, to say "yes" to them in myself, by discovering them in myself and myself in them, the more real I am. I am fully real if my own heart says yes to everyone.

I will be a better Catholic, not if I can refute every shade of Protestantism, but if I can affirm the truth in it and still go further.

So, too, with the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists, etc. This does not mean syncretism, indifferentism, the vapid and careless friendliness that accepts everything by thinking of nothing. There is much that one cannot "affirm" and "accept," but first one must say "yes" where one really can.

If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic: and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it."

Thomas Merton. Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander. New York: Doubleday, 1966: p. 144.

2 comments:

Kelly Joyce Neff said...

Wonderful! Thanks for this, Mike. definition of self by affirmation rather than negation. The Holy Spirit says Yes rather than No, is encompassing rather than exclusive.

Jane R said...

Wonderful quote. Reminds me again why Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander is one of my favorite Merton books. I must re-read it. I'd forgotten he'd said that. Thank you, Mike. How timely.