Seek and you shall find...that which you were not looking for

I went searching for a Thomas Merton quote today.  I still haven't found the one I was looking for which is quite annoying because I remember reading it somewhere in the last 48 hours.  But I found this - which fitted the rather negative mood I was in beautifully.  And reminded me that silence is also an answer.

The quote comes from a letter he wrote to a woman named Katherine Champney on the 10th of November 1966.  It can be found in its entirity on the Web with a bit of searching, but these two paragraphs jumped straight out at me.

"That is my quarrel with religious people. They are selling answer and consolations. They are in the reassurance business. I give you no reassurance whatever except that I know your void and I am in it, but I have a different way of understanding myself in it. It is not that much more delightful. But it does to me make a great deal of sense—for me. I will say this, that it is to me after all reassuring to be able to run into Zen people and Moslem masters and so on and realize we understand each other perfectly. And I hasten to say that you don’t have to feel all that alone either. Incidentally, in an earlier and less chastened version of that article, I said that really I felt much more at home with unbelievers than with believers. In a sense I do. But I can’t that easily evade the embarrassment that Church people cause in me perpetually. 

So, friend Katherine, I am not Father Merton inside the warm Church calling you to come and sit by the fire of positive thinking or something. I am out in the cold with you because (forgive the flip saying) God is where He isn’t. And maybe that’s where the Church is, too (when all the miters are off and the vestments are hung in the closet). I won’t run on anymore, but I think I have said enough to make clear that I think the whole business of faith and the message of faith is in the process of finding a whole new language—or of shutting up altogether. Hence the answer to your question: if God does not speak to you, it is not your fault, and it is not His fault, it is the fault of the whole mentality that creates the impression that He has to be constantly speaking to people. Those who are the loudest to affirm they hear Him are people not to be trusted. But, nevertheless, there is a way of understanding that non-hearing is hearing. Maybe it is all too subtle."