O my brother,
the contemplative is not the man who has fiery visions
of the seraphim carrying God on their imagined chariot,
but simply he who has risked his 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 own poverty and incompleteness
in order no longer
to clench our minds in a cramp upon themselves,
as if thinking made us exist.
From Thomas Merton, "A Letter on the Contemplative Life" (1967), in The Monastic Journey, edited by Brother Patrick Hart
