Stillness · “Stillness Reveals”
Contemplative Prayer
To rest in silent, imageless attentiveness to God’s presence, ceasing the grasp of words and concepts so that grace, not effort, does the work.
Merton’s contemplative prayer in 5 moves: (1) Withdraw into quiet, settle the body.
(2) Let go of words and discursive thought.
(3) Attend, watchfully, with the heart.
(4) Stop grasping — rest empty in the presence, returning gently when thought pulls you off.
(5) Carry the silence into your day. ~15-30 minutes daily. Seek God, but expect to be shown, not to find.
What it is
For Thomas Merton, contemplative prayer is not a technique for getting something from God but a quiet, receptive resting in a presence already there.
It is wordless and imageless: the seeker lets go of discursive thinking, planning, and even pious phrases, and simply attends. Merton was blunt that the prayer cannot be engineered — “The only thing to seek in contemplative prayer is God; and we seek Him successfully when we realize that we cannot find Him unless He shows Himself to us.” The work, paradoxically, is to stop working and let oneself be found.
It operationalizes stillness (The Inner Creates the Outer), release-to-receive (The Inner Creates the Outer), and resting in the present (Everything Happens in the Now).
The Method
Faithfully drawn from Merton’s Contemplative Prayer and Thoughts in Solitude:
- Withdraw into quiet and settle the body. Merton frames prayer as “the orientation of our whole body, mind and spirit to God in silence, attention, and adoration.” Sit still; let exterior silence begin to settle interior noise.
- Let go of the flow of words and thoughts. Move from discursive prayer (sentences, requests, reflections) toward simple, attentive silence — what Merton calls “a wordless and total surrender of the heart in silence.”
- Attend, watchfully, with the “heart.” He describes contemplative prayer as “an attentive, watchful listening of ‘the heart.’” Not straining to concentrate — a quiet, alert openness.
- Stop grasping; let presence be received. Rest in “our emptiness in the presence of His reality, our silence in the presence of His infinitely rich silence.” When thought pulls you away, gently return to silent attentiveness without self-criticism.
- End simply, carrying the quiet into the day. Dose: Merton gives no fixed timer; in practice a daily period of roughly 15-30 minutes suits the rest he describes. (Sourcing note: quotations are short and attributed; the protocol is faithfully summarized from Merton’s prose, not reproduced.)
Source & Lineage
Thomas Merton (1915-1968), Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, set out this teaching across New Seeds of Contemplation (1961), Thoughts in Solitude (1958), and the posthumous Contemplative Prayer (1969).
His sources are the Christian apophatic stream: John of the Cross, the Desert Fathers, the Cloud of Unknowing, and Meister Eckhart, with late-life resonances drawn from Zen.
Common refinements
Turning silence into a technique to “succeed” at. Merton’s whole point is that the presence is given, not produced; chasing a result is a subtle grasping.
- Filling the silence with more words. When discursive prayer creeps back, let it go and return to attentive quiet.
- Reading dryness as failure. Apophatic prayer often feels empty or dark; faithful sitting is the practice.
- Straining to concentrate. This is watchful rest, not effortful focus; soften.
- Planning your own answer. Merton: do not pray while “busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer.”