Faith and Doubt at 40 Below
Thomas Merton, the famous author, Trappist monk, and mystic said:
“Dread means that we cannot any longer hope in ourselves, in our wisdom, our virtue, our fidelity. We see too clearly that all that is ‘ours’ is nothing and can completely fail us.”
To be spiritual is to acknowledge that dread is an essential part of the spiritual quest. Aspiration is the heady inspiration that draws us to seek God, but dread is that scary feeling at the pit of our stomach that drives us to seek God. Dread trembles to know that nothing can satisfy but God even if there might not be one. Or even if there is, that he would have anything to do with a flawed creature like you.
St. John of the Cross said the last stage before the Unio Mystico or union with God is dread. It is when we are so utterly cognizant of our flaws, inadequacies, and contingent nature that we are tempted to despair as we imagine that even God cannot help us, or won’t help us. According to St. John it is this ‘dark night’ and the temptation to despair that is transcended through authentic surrender.
Michael Washburn in his book The Ego and the Dynamic Ground put it succinctly. “Dread is a wonderful thing. It is so painful and so unremitting that it is has the magical property of being the only thing that can force the ego to admit to its utter nothingness in the face of God. And with this admission the ego surrenders.”
To be spiritual is to be at home with dread. To be spiritual is to search for God like an entrepreneur with two mortgages, maxed out credit cards, and a bunch of former friends who think he’s nuts. To be spiritual is to take whatever incremental steps you must until you live each moment like the boy dying in that freezer and wanting God with his whole heart and his whole soul. It means arriving at a point where you search for Truth as if your hair were on fire and want it only for its own sake and regardless of the price. T.S Eliot called it a “condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything.”
I never saw that boy again. I knew I wouldn’t. But I will never forget him, and I sometimes pray for him. And yet I don’t really worry about him. Blaise Pascal once said: “You would not seek Me if you had not found Me.” And I know in my heart that a hunger as deep, as awful, as his will not — cannot — be denied. I am continually asked why I do the work that I do. The answer is simple. I do it for him. I do it for that boy in all of us, trapped in this freezer called earth with no time to lose, alone, terrified, and groping for that emergency door. An emergency door custom fit for each of us, installed eternally from the beginning, and that some people call God.
