The Least Common Currency

Some random thoughts from reading today since I don’t feel like writing many of my own words:

…You cannot tell me who I am, and I cannot tell you who you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you? Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within.

That brings us to a second problem. Although in the end we alone are capable of experiencing who we are, we are instinctively gifted in watching how others experience themselves. We learn to live by living together with others, and by living like them– a process which has disadvantages as well as blessings.

The greatest of disadvantages is that we are too prone to welcome everybody else’s wrong solution to the problems of life. There is a natural laziness that moves us to accept the easiest solutions– the ones that have common currency among friends. That is why an optimistic view of life is not necessarily always a virtuous thing. In a time like ours, only the coarse grained still have enough resistance to preserve their fair-weather principles unclouded by anxiety. Such optimism may be comfortable: but is it safe? In world where every lie has currency, is not anxiety the more real and the more human reaction?

Now anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.  It is the fruit of unanswered questions.  But questions cannot go unanswered unless they first be asked.  And there is a far worse insecurity, which comes from being afraid to ask the right questions– because they might turn out to have no answer.  One of the moral diseases we communicate to each other in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask.

But there are other diseases also.  There is the laziness that pretends to dignify itself as dispair, and that teaches us to ignore both the question and the answer.  And there is the despair which dresses itself up as science or philosophy and amuses itself with clever answers to clever questions– none of which have anything to do with the problems of life.  Finally there is the worst and most insidious despair, which can mask as mysticism or prophecy, and which intones a prophetic answer to a prophetic question.  That, I think, is likely to be a [religious person's] professional hazard, so I purify myself of it at the beginning, like Amos who complained, “I am not a prophet, nor am I the son of a prophet, but I am a herdsman, plucking wild figs.”

-Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island