More Prayers by Merton

"Grant us prudence in proportion to our power,
wisdom in proportion to our science and
humaneness in proportion to our wealth and might.
Bless our earnest will to help all races and people
to travel in friendship along the road to justice, liberty and lasting peace.
Grant us above all to see that our ways are not necessarily Your ways,
that we cannot fully penetrate the mystery of Your designs and
that the very storm of power now raging on this earth
reveals Your hidden will and Your inscrutable decision.
Grant us to see Your face in the lightning of this cosmic storm,
O God of holiness, merciful to all,
grant us to seek peace where it is truly found !
In Your will, O God, is our peace ! Amen."

"In one sense we are always traveling, and
traveling as if we did not know where we were going.
In another sense we have already arrived.
We cannot arrive at the perfect possession of God in this life,
and that is why we are traveling and in darkness.
But we already possess Him by grace, and therefore,
in that sense, we have arrived and are dwelling in the light.
But oh!
How far have I to go to find You
in Whom I have already arrived!"

"My God, I pray better to You by breathing.
I pray better to You by walking than by talking."

"Lord jesus Christ, true God and true Man,
in Whom the fullness of God dwells and is manifested,
whoever tries to be a contemplative without You is dead.
Whoever enters into interior darkness in which
You cannot be found enters into the gate of hell.
Whoever enters into a silence in which
Your voice cannot be heard enters into the antechamber of the devil.
Whoever goes where You cannot be seen is crazy.
I will not fear the darkness where, desiring to find You,
my desire does not seem to find You.
But if I desire You, I have already found You.
If I love You, You are with me.
If I cry out to You, You have already heard my voice."

Merton's words on his prayers

"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 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 th 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.

My prayer tends very much toward what you call fana.
(definition of fana: the annihilation of the individual human
will before the will of God.)
There is 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."