THOMAS MERTON
(1915-1968)
In our age everything has to be a “problem.” Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by forces from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.
Sanctity in such an age means, no doubt, travelling from the area of anxiety to the area in which there is no anxiety or perhaps it may mean learning, from God, to be without anxiety in the midst of anxiety.
Fundamentally, as Max Picard points out, it probably comes to this: living in a silence which so reconciles the contradictions within us that, although they remain within us, they cease to be a problem.
Contradictions have always existed in the soul of man. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.
Silence, then, belongs to the substance of sanctity. In silence and hope are formed the strength of the Saints. “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (Isaiah 30:15).