Understanding "Religion"
Julien Green says: "Religion is not understood. Those who wish themselves pious, in order to admire themselves in this state, are made stupid by religion. What is needed is to lose ourselves completely in God; what is needed is perfect silence, supernatural silence. Pious talk has something revolting about it."
There is precisely a revolt against this kind of "religion" even among the most earnest of present-day Christians. The word "religion" itself comes to be used equivocally, since it has been made profoundly ambiguous by religious people themselves.
"Religion", in the sense of something emanating from man's nature and tending to God, does not really change man or save him, but brings him into a false relationship with God: for a religion that sstarts in man is nothing but man's wish for himself. Man "wishes himself" (magically) to become godly, holy, gentle, pure, etc. His wish terminates not in God but in himself. This is no more than the religion of those who wish themselve to be be in a certain state in which they can live with themselves, approve of themselves: for they feel that, when they can approve of themselves, God is a peace with them. How many Christians seriously believe that Christianity itself consists of nothing more than this? Yet is is anathema to true Christianity.
THe whole meaning of Paul's anger with "the Law" and with "the elements of this world" is seen here. Such religion is not saved by good intentions: in the end it becomes a caricature. It must. For otherwise we would never see the difference between this and the "religion" which is born in us from God and which perhaps ought not to be called religion, born from the devastation of our trivial "self" and all our plans for "our self," even though they be plans for a holy self, a pure self, a loving, sacrificing self.
This is one of the deep problems that Eliot suggests at the end of Murder in the Cathedral, where Thomas is faced with the realization that he may be gladly admitting martyrdom into a political and religously ambitious scheme for himself: punishing the wicked and making himself a saint by treading down his enemies, stepping upon their heads into heaven. It is in this sense that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom - and of true religion. This fear questions our own religiosity, our own ambition to be good. It begins to see with horror the complacency of speeches that "know all about" piety, possess the right method of pleasing God and infallibly winning Him over to our side, etc. This "fear" is what imposes silence. It is the beginning of the "supernatural silence" Green asks for.
Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, pp. 153-155.
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