Early on in his memoir, when Thomas Merton was still an agnostic—at best—he was ill enough to consider death. He was still in his teens, a reluctant student in a parochial school. And here is how his thoughts unfolded:

“If I have to die—what of it. What do I care? Let me die, then, and I’m finished.”

Religious people, those who have faith and love God and realize what life is and what death means, and know what it is to have an immortal soul, do not understand how it is with the ones who have no faith, and who have already thrown away their souls. They find it hard to conceive that anyone could enter into the presence of death without some kind of compunction. But they should realize that millions of men die the way I was then prepared to die, the way I then might have died.

They might say to me: “Surely, you thought of God, and you wanted to pray to Him for mercy.”

No. As far as I remember, the thought of God, the thought of prayer did not even enter my mind, either that day, or all the rest of the time that I was ill, or that whole year, for that matter. Or if the thought did come to me, it was only as an occasion for its denial and rejection. I remember that in that year, when we stood in the chapel and recited the Apostles’ Creed, I used to keep my lips tight shut, with full deliberation and of set purpose, by way of declaring my own creed which was: “I believe in nothing.” Or at least I thought I believe in nothing. Actually, I had only exchanged a certain faith, faith in God, Who is Truth, for a vague uncertain faith in the opinions and authority of men and pamphlets and newspapers—wavering and varying and contradictory opinions which I did not ever clearly understand.

(The Seven Storey Mountain: An Autobiography of Faith, p. 108)