I Abandon All Problems...

...to their own unsatisfactory solutions: including the problem of “monastic spirituality.” ...the Desert Fathers talked not about monastic spirituality but about purity of heart and obedience and solitude, and about God. And the wiser of them talked very little about anything. But the divine life which is the life of the soul as the soul is the life of the body: this is a pure and concrete thing and not to be measured by somebody else’s books. God in me is not measured by your ascetic theory, and God in you is not to be weighed in the scales of my doctrine. Indeed He is not to be weighed at all.

- Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas (SJ)

By striking out - intentionally or by accident - into contemplative territory there will inevitably be this ineffable immersion where there is no sound and nothing is happening. (SJ) The sense of God can, by definition, only be direct, and therefore only be responded to through direct interaction itself. All postulations, and even their action-based derivatives, are disingenuous, unreal, antithetical, and counterproductive.

...love burns with an innocent flame, the clear desire for death. ...clean death by the sword of the spirit... (SJ)

This absolute freedom is the freedom of no thought, as well as the freedom to pursue thought no further. This is...

...the peace that finds us for a moment in clarity, walking by the light of the stars, raised to God’s connatural shore, dryshod in the heavenly country, in a rare moment of intelligence. (SJ)

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And now my whole being breathes the wind which blows through the belfry, and my hand is on the door through which I see the heavens. The door swings out upon a vast sea of darkness and of prayer. Will it come like this, the moment of my death? Will You open a door upon the great forest and set my feet upon a ladder under the moon, and take me out among the stars? (SJ)