Quote by Thomas Merton

“we will realize that in Christianity, too, as well as in Islam, we have various admittedly unusual people who see beyond the “religious” aspect of their faith. Karl Barth for instance—in the pure tradition of Protestantism—protested against calling Christianity “a religion” and vehemently denied that Christian faith could be understood as long as it was seen embedded in social and cultural structures. These structures, he believed, were completely alien to it, and a perversion of it. In Islam, too, the Sufis sought Fana, the extinction of that social and cultural self which was determined by the structural forms of religious customs. This extinction is a breakthrough into a realm of mystical liberty in which the “self” is lost and then reconstituted in Baqa—something like the “New Man” of Christianity, as understood by the Christian mystics (including the Apostles). “I live,” said Paul, “now not I but Christ lives in me.”