my new page. i found this site and it seems to me that the lack of ads and absence of half-naked girls promoting dating services can work in my favor.
has anyone out there ever read any books by william faulkner? i had to read “the sound and the fury” for two different classes while in college. i only made it through once, which was plenty. i checked out “absalom, absalom!” from the library. it’s a very sluggish read, to say the least. stream of consciousness writing has its occasional thrills, but for the most part it acts like a dumptruck—continually heaping up piles of words onto the reader.
anyway, when i checked out the faulkner book, i also checked out a book called “conjectures of a guilty bystander.” it’s by thomas merton, an american who lived as a trappist monk in the ’60s. when i’m at the library, i think something in the air (possibly the smell of thousands of pages of type) makes me feel as if i am capable of more than i really am—so i check out three or four books, of which i hardly ever finish one.
i think the most appropriate thing that can be said about merton is that he is a deep thinker. maybe too deep. i guess that’s what happens when a guy who wrote a master’s thesis on william blake and hobnobbed in circles of artists and intellectuals retreats into self-imposed seclusion—conveniently right around the time of the U.S. entry into WWII. anyway, this book i’m reading contains some great nuggets of insight, some of which i plan on transferring onto this site. my hope is that retyping will help me (and you) better understand. here’s one:
“The Christian faith takes hold on each one of us when each one sees himself no longer in the perspective of individual fulfillment and satisfaction, but in the light of the Cross. This implies the renunciation of one attitude toward sin and death, and a completely new understanding of these realities. In the first case, you implicitly accept death as an inevitable but incomprehensible fact, from which you resolutely turn away in order to make the best you can out of time, and to live as if, in fact, you were never going to die. This implies a firm will to ignore death, and it may also imply an equally firm will to ignore sin and guilt. You come to terms with life and with your society, and you make the most effective possible use of the means which are offered, here and now, to achieve a relative happiness, a relative sense that you are a real and meaningful being.
The Christian faith on the other hand demands a recognition that this view of life is in reality a delusive form of wilfulness and of despair, since in fact it cannot make the moral effort to confront the most important and inscrutable realities of life. Christianity recognizes that these realities cnnot be understood by reason alone, but it accepts from God, on faith, a revelation of their true import. Death and sin are inextricably involved in one another: they are in fact two aspects of the same mystery—man’s separation from God by the wilful assertion of his individuality as ultimate, and by the determination to live as if, in fact, it were ultimate. In the end, this false view tends to assert, at least implicitly, the complete autonomy of the individual, who is no longer responsible to anyone, who is able to choose for himself any one of an unlimited number and quality of possibilities, and who is, in fact, free to do exactly as he pleases without rendering an account to anyone and without taking into consideration the moral and physical consequences of any of his acts.
This implicit claim to complete autonomy for man, dressed in various mythical trappings, constitutes the various beliefs by which modern man attempts to explain his existence.
An essential and obviously characteristic element of the Christian faith is the admission that this clam to autonomy is in fact rooted in despair and death. While appearing to be an affirmation of life and hope, it is actually a fallacious construction of the mind of man, by which he hopes to create for himself some kind of meaning in a life which will be resolved into meaninglessness by death. Furthermore, Christianity sees that a society that justifies its behavior and bases its existence on this supposed autonomy of man does, in fact, devote to destruction and death the very resources and energies which it claims to be using for the affirmation and improvement of life.
…
The basic Christian faith is that he who renounces his delusive, individual autonomy in order to receive his true being and freedom in and by Christ is ‘justified’ by the mercy of God in the Cross of Christ. His ’sins are forgiven’ in so far as the root of guilt is torn up in the surrender which faith makes to Christ. Instead of my own delusive autonomy I surrender to Christ all rights over me in the hope that by His Spirit, which is the Spirit and Life of His Church, He will live and act in me, and, having become one with Him, having found my true identity in Him, I will act only as a member of His Body and a faithful citizen of His Kingdom.”
merton is not saying we aren’t free to choose our own path, but he is saying that the purest form of freedom comes through Christ.
see John 8:31-47.
—A
