I recently came across this excerpt from Thomas Merton and I wanted to share it. As someone who continues to grow in my own monastic calling and in contemplative prayer, I deeply appreciate silence. Peace to you this day.
O my brother[s and sisters], the contemplative is [not] the [person] who has fiery visions of the cherubim carrying God on their imagined chariot, but simply [those] who have risked their mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust, that is to say, in the surrender of our poverty and incompleteness in order no longer to clench our minds in a cramp upon themselves, as if thinking made us exist.
The message of hope the contemplative offers you, then, is not that you need to find your way through the jungle of language and problems that today surround God: but that whether you understand or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, [abides with] you, calls you, saves you, and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing ever found in books or heard in sermons.
The contemplative has nothing to tell you except to reassure you and say that, if you dare to penetrate your own silence and risk the sharing of that solitude with the lonely other who seeks God through you, then you will truly recover the light and the capacity to understand what is beyond words and beyond explanations because it is too close to be explained: it is the intimate union, in the depths of your own heart, of God’s spirit and your own secret inmost self, so that you and [God] are in all truth One Spirit. I love you, in Christ.
Merton,
The Hidden Ground of Love, 157-158
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