Thomas Merton on the Mystery of God's Love

The contemplative life is then the search for peace no I an abstract exclusion of all outside reality, not in a barren negative closing of the senses upon the world, but in the openness of love. It begins with the acceptance of my own self in my poverty and my nearness to despair in order to recognize that where God is there can be no despair, and God is in me, even if I despair. That nothing can change God’s love for me, since my very existence is the sign that

God loves me and the presence of his love creates and sustains me. Nor is there any need to understand how this can be or to explain it or to solve the problems it seems to raise. For there is in our hearts and in the very ground of our being a natural certainty which co-exists with our very existence: a certainty that so insofar as we exist, we are penetrated through and through with the sense and reality of God even though we may be utterly unable to believe or experience this in philosophic or even religious terms.

O my [brother/sister], the contemplative is the person not who has fiery visions of the cherubim carrying God on their imagined chariot, by simply [one] who risks one’s mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust, that is to say the surrender of our poverty and incompleteness in no longer to clench our minds in a cramp upon themselves as if thinking made us exist. The message of hope the contemplative offers you then, [sister/brother], is not that you need to find your way through the jungle of language and problems that today surround God: but that whether you understand or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing you have found in books or heard in sermons. The contemplative has nothing to tell you except to reassure you and say that if you dare to penetrate your own silence and risk the sharing of that solitude with the lonely other who seeks God though you, then you will truly recover the light and the capacity to understand what is beyond words and beyond explanations because it is too close to be explained; it is the ultimate union in the depths of your own heart, of God’s spirit and your own secret inmost self, so that you and He are all truth in One Spirit. I love you, In Christ.

From Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love, pp157-158

nb:The brackets [ ] are editorial adjustments for inclusive language