The surfaces of the world are aesthetically uneven. You come around a bend in the road and the world suddenly falls open. When we come upon beautiful things . . . they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space.
The real journey in life is interior. It is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative love and grace in our hearts.
Since noise is increasing in all directions, the psychology of silence has taken on a special meaning. We are already so adapted to an abundance of screeching sound that we are surprised when stillness suddenly envelops us. Not that this happens very often. We begin to see that the whole question of our relation to the world, both positive and negative, centers in something like silence. So our service to the world might be simply to keep a place where there is no noise, where people can be silent together.
~ from THE SPRINGS OF CONTEMPLATION by Thomas Merton
This will be my solitude, to be separated from myself so that I am able to love You alone, to love You so much that I no longer realize I am loving anything. I no longer desire to be myself, but to find myself transformed in You, so that there is no "myself" but only Yourself. That is when I will be what You have willed to make me from all eternity: not myself, but Love.
The things of time are in connivance with eternity. There is a greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question. Eternity is in the present. Eternity is in the palm of the hand. Eternity is a seed of fire whose sudden roots break barriers that keep my heart from being an abyss.
Our being is silent, but our existence is noisy. Yet when our noisy actions stop, there is a ground of silence always there. Contemplatives must be in contact with that ground and communicate from that level to keep silence alive for other people.
There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, Mother of all, "Natura naturans."
The only true joy on earth is the escape from the prison of our own false selse, and enter by Love into union with the Life who dwells and sings within the essence of every creature and in the core of our own souls.
