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Let’s continue sharing excerpts from Chapter 3 of Thomas Merton’s book, “Life and Holiness,” where the Reverend offers profound insights on faith, human experience, and spiritual truth. Chapter 3 – Human Faiths “[…] The first step to living faith is then, as it has always been one way or another, a denial and a rejection of the standards of thought complacently accepted by nationalistic doubt. And in actual practice what this usually amounts to is not the rejection of ‘reason’ and the acceptance of ‘faith’ but rather a choice between two faiths. One, a human, limited, external faith in human society with all its inert patrimony of assumptions and prejudices, a faith based on fear of solitude and on the need to ‘belong’ to the group and to accept its standards with passive acquiescence. Or, in the second place, a faith in what we do not ‘see,’ a faith in the transcendent and invisible God, a faith that goes beyond all proofs, a faith that demands an interior revolution of one's whole self and a reorientation of one's existence in a contrary sense to the orientation taken by mundane prejudice. Such faith as this is a complete acceptance not only of the existence of God as a convenient hypothesis which makes the cosmos seem intelligible, but as the center and meaning of all existence, and more particularly of our own life. […]”NEW TESTAMENT FAITH “Here is the meaning of faith in the New Testament, and in the early history of the Church: the willingness to sacrifice every other value rather than the basic value of truth and life in Christ. Christian faith in the full sense of the word, is not just the acceptance of ‘truths about’ Christ. It is not just acquiescence in the story of Christ with its moral and spiritual implications. It is not merely the decision to put into practice, to some extent at least, the teachings of Christ. All these forms of acceptance are compatible with an acquiescence in what is ‘not Christ.’ It is quite possible to ‘believe in Christ,’ in the sense of mentally accepting the truth that He lived on Earth, died, and rose from the dead, and yet still live ‘in the flesh,’ according to the standards of a greedy, violent, unjust and corrupt society, without noticing any real contradiction in one's life. But the real meaning of faith is the rejection of everything that is not Christ in order that all life, all truth, all hope, all reality may be sought and found ‘in Christ.’ This of course must not be interpreted as a rejection of the material universe and of all of God's creation, for these too come from Christ, subsist in Christ, and have no other reason for existence than to serve the purposes of His mercy, truth, and love, thereby manifesting the glory of the Father. To reject the ‘world’ is not to reject people, society, the creatures of God or the works of man, but to reject the perverted standards which make men misuse and spoil a good creation, ruining their own lives into the bargain: […]”
