All truly contemplative souls have this in common: not that they gather exclusively in the desert, or that they shut themselves up in reclusion, but that where He is, there they are.
Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, p.95
And that does not make today a comfortable place to be, or even one that the mind can grasp, really. There is just this hollow silence, an absence of anything that thought can reach, or hold.
Prayer today is odd—a reaching out into what is not known, but still loved; almost as the Magdalene loved between the Cross and the empty tomb, perhaps. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing said it well, many years ago: “He can certainly be loved, but not thought. He can be taken and held by love but not by thought…” (Ch. 6)
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