A kind of submarine life...

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...

[A] faith that is afraid of other people is no faith at all. A faith that supports itself by condemning others is itself condemned by the Gospel.

Thomas Merton. "Apologies to an Unbeliever" in Faith and Violence. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968: pp. 213-214.

 

Merton, almost as an aside, is underlining something here that is becoming more and more urgent and important in my own life. When he writes of being a "solitary explorer" living "a kind of submarine life," my heart leaps in answer, like a lover's heart leaps when they see the name of their beloved. It really is that close, that physical.

Peculiar things are happening to me lately. I am getting less and less able to watch TV dramas involving human suffering and fear. The same thing applies to films, or novels, unless there is a strong current of redemption and grace running through the work. For instance, there is fear and suffering in the work of Tolkien, of Phil Rickman, and there is little else in some of Charles Williams'; yet these are luminous, redemptive works, like Solzhenitsyn, or Hesse. Poor Jan, she loves TV dramas. She like to watch them with me for company, and to exchange the odd remark or look at crucial moment, and yet increasingly I'm having to leave her to watch them on her own, while I come up here and write posts like this!

The world is not distant. I feel closer to the lives of the people and animals that populate it than I ever did, and yet I am increasingly distant from the way the world thinks, the things it wants. Sometimes I see an advertisement, or an article, about the things the world is supposed to long for - money, impressive possessions, power, prestige - and I catch myself thinking, "Why would anyone want something like that?" as if it were an advertisement for chenille Wellington boots, or a garden fork made of glass.

I long for dim, obscure places, like a hedgehog in the middle of a city square. Something in me weeps for the sea between islands, for the steep paths of the Black Mountains of Wales. I want to become trackless.

Lao Tzu describes the wise men of old:

Hesitant, like crossing a wintry river
Cautious, like fearing four neighbors
Solemn, like a guest
Loose, like ice about to melt
Genuine, like plain wood
Open, like a valley
Opaque, like muddy water...

(Tao Te Ching, tr. Derek Lin)

That would be a good way to be.