Thomas Merton on Prayer

Brian Drayton recently distributed to his worship sharing group the following passage by Thomas Merton, Trappist monk and celebrated spiritual writer:

Strictly speaking I have a very simple way of prayer. It is centered entirely on attention to the presence of God and to his will and His love. That is to say that it is centered on faith by which alone we can know the presence of God. One might say this gives my meditation the character described by the Prophet as "being before God as if you saw Him." Yet it does not mean imagining anything or conceiving a precise image of God, for to my mind, this would be a kind of idolatry. On the contrary, it is a matter of adoring Him as invisible and infinitely beyond our comprehension, and realizing Him as all. ...There is in my heart this great thirst to recognize totally the nothingness of all that is not God. My prayer is then a kind of praise, rising up out of the center of Nothing and Silence. If I am still present "myself" this I regard as an obstacle about which I can do nothing unless He Himself removes the obstacle...Such is my ordinary way of prayer or meditation. It is not "thinking about" anything, but a direct seeking of the Face of the Invisible, which cannot be found unless we become lost in Him who is invisible. 
(from Hidden Ground of Love, pp 63-4. Letter to o Abdul Aziz)

~ submitted by Richard Russell