In getting the best of our secret attachments - ones which we cannot see because they are principles of spiritual blindness - our own initiative is almost always useless. We need to leave the initiative in the hands of God working in our souls either directly in the night of aridity and suffering, or through events and other men. This is where so many holy people break down and go to pieces. As soon as they reach the point where they can no longer see the way to guide themselves by their own light, they refuse to go further. They have no confidence in anyone but themselves. Their faith is largely an emotional illusion. It is rooted in their feelings, in their physique, in their temperament. It is a kind of natural optimism that is stimulated by moral activity and warmed by the approval of other men. If people oppose it, this kind of faith still finds refuge in self-complacency.
But when the time comes to enter the darkness in which we are naked and helpless and alone; in which we see the insufficiency of our greatest strength and the hollowness of our strongest virtues; in which we have nothing in our nature to support us, and nothing in the world to guide us or give us light -- then we find out whether or not we live by faith.
Thomas Merton, The New Seeds of Contemplation, 1961, page 257-8.
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