silence shall be my answer

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.

~ Thomas Merton

from Dialogues with Silence

.

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 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.

from The Climate of Monastic Prayer

(one of last books he prepared for publication)

sketch by the author