This is one of the richest passages in Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation:
The prospect of this wilderness is something that so appalls most men that they refuse to enter upon its burning sands and travel among its rocks. They cannot believe that contemplation and sanctity are to be found in a desolation where there is no food and no shelter and no refreshment for their imagination and intellect and for the desires of the nature.
Convinced that perfection is to be measure by brilliant intuitions of God and fervent resolutions of a will on fire with love, persuaded that sanctity is a matter of sensible fervor and tangible results, they will have nothing to do with a contemplation that does not delight their reason and invest their minds and wills with consolations and sensible joy. They want to know where they are going and see what they are doing, and as soon as they enter into regions where their own activity becomes paralyzed and bears no visible fruit, they turn around and go back to the lush fields where they can be sure that they are doing something and getting somewhere.
And if they cannot achieve the results they desire with such intense anxiety, at least they convince themselves that they have made great progress if they have said many prayers, performed many mortifications, preached many sermons, read (and perhaps also written) many books and articles, paged through many books of meditations, acquired hundreds of new and different devotions and girdled the earth with pilgrimages. Not that all of these things are not good in themselves: but there are times in the life of a man when they can become an escape, an anodyne, a refuge from the responsibility of suffering in darkness and obscurity and helplessness, and allowing God to strip us of our false selves and make us into the new men that we are really meant to be. (from chapter 32).There is so much that could be said here. I’ve heard the “wilderness” mentioned frequently, in the Christian walk, but Merton hits the nail on the head here for what it really feels like. “No refreshment for the imagination or intellect and for desires of nature.” Spiritual depression. Drabness. Not necessarily the loss or questioning of the core of faith, but a loss of joy in living.
It’s easy to see what our next step usually is: Go back to stuff easy results. Foreign mission field sucks? Go back to your campus ministry job and reel those hoards of back-sliding freshman. Pastorate a drag? Time to go back to school for that PhD and get to work on that book idea. Following God, got a wife and kids, but dissatisfied with your day job? Looking for a “refuge from the responsibility of suffering in … obscurity.” Pick up Wild at Heart for a nice hot cup of open theism and go do something exciting (and most likely stupid). Screw the wilderness. Where’s can I buy my ticket out?
Now for the qualifications: Of course sometimes sticking with a bad situation isn’t the right thing to do. Both my wife and I have been too well trained in doing THAT when we probably SHOULD have moved on. Campus ministers are just fine. Thank God for the many helpful writings of Christian scholars who realized they weren’t cut out for being full-time shepherds. Etc. But THAT is the wilderness right there folks. The Lord has something to give us there. Perhaps we listen to him before running back to the green fields.