.
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All things change and die and disappear.
Questions arrive, assume their actuality, and disappear.
In this hour I shall cease to ask them
and silence shall be my answer.
The world that Your love created,
that the heat has distorted,
that my mind is always misinterpreting,
shall cease to interfere with our voices.
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~ Thomas Merton
from Dialogues with Silence
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The true contemplative is not one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but is one who remains empty because he knows that he can never expect to anticipate the words that will transform his darkness into light. He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation. He does not demand light instead of darkness. He waits on the Word of God in silence, and, when he is "answered," it is not so much by a word that bursts into his silence. It is by his silence itself, suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full of the voice of God.
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from The Climate of Monastic Prayer
(one of last books he prepared for publication)
sketch by the author
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