Blind Faith

I love this passage in the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton’s, “Seeds of Contemplation”:

And so, suppose your meditation takes you to the point where you are baffled and repelled by the cloud that surrounds God, who maketh the darkness His covert. Far from realizing Him, you begin to realize nothing more than your own helplessness to know Him, and you begin to think that meditation is something altogether hopeless and impossible. And yet the more helpless you are, the more you seem to desire to see Him and to know Him, and the contradiction of your desires and your failure generate in you a painful longing for God which nothing seems able to satisfy.

Do you think your meditation has failed? On the contrary: this bafflement, this darkness, this anguish of helpless desire is the true fulfillment of meditation. For if meditation aims above all at establishing in your soul a vital contact of love with the living God, then as long as it only produces images and ideas and affections that you can understand and feel and appreciate it is not yet doing its full quota of work. But when it gets beyond the level of your understanding and your imagination it is really bringing you close to God, for it introduces you into the darkness where you can no longer think of Him; and are consequently forced to reach out for Him by blind faith and hope and love.(p. 81)

For me, it articulates the modern Christian experience in this world, which really is how we experience the cross of our existence. Even though he is talking about meditation and the degrees of progress within it, I think it truly describes how I experience God lately.

Do we have the courage to go there? That is the question! Do we, in desiring to know God, have the courage to feel as though we are far, far from him?