questions cannot go unanswered
unless they first be asked.
And there is a far
worse anxiety,
a far worse insecurity,
which comes from being afraid to ask the
right questions –
because they might turn out to have no answers.
One of the
moral diseases we communicate to one another in society
comes from huddling together
in the pale light of an insufficient
answer
to a question we are afraid to ask.
W.Shannon, Silent Lamp. The Thomas Merton Story, (London :
1993), 22.
I remember the first time I read those words. One of those rare occasions when you realise that an important question can be as revelatory and as much an epiphany of Christ the Truth, as those "sound", clever, apologetically driven answers that hurtle out of our over-confident certainties and unexamined assumptions.
One of the signs of Merton's sanctity was his vulnerability and uncertainty. At times it got him into trouble, not only with his superiors but with the God for whom he searched and often in interrogative mood.
And yes – there is considerable incongruity and even cognitive dissonance in reading the passionate intensity of Bonhoeffer at his most Protestant Lutheran, and reading Merton the Trappist monk – but as C S Lewis said of such wildly different examples of authentic sanctity – they carry the same scent of the far country.
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