Thomas Merton

And here all adjectives fall to pieces. Words become stupid.

Everything you say is misleading. Unless you list every possible experience and say, That is not what it is. That is not what I am talking about. Metaphor has now become hopeless altogether.

Talk about darkness if you must, but the thought of darkness is already too dense and too coarse. Anyway, it is no longer darkness. You can speak of emptiness,

But that makes you think of floating around in space. And this is nothing spatial.

It is the fruition of God. It is not freedom in hearing in some subject. It is not love as an action dominated by an impulse, germane to one's own being.

It is not renunciation that plans and executes itself after the manner of a virtue. It is freedom, living and circulating in God. Who is freedom?

It is love loving in love. It is the purity of God rejoicing in its own liberty.

And here, where contemplation becomes what it is really meant to be, it is no longer something infused by God into a created subject, so much as God living in God

and identifying a created life with their own life, so that there is nothing left of any significance but God living in God.

If a person who has thus been vindicated and delivered and fulfilled and destroyed

could think and speak at all. It would certainly never be to think and speak of themself as someone separate or as a subject of a grandiose experience. And that is why it does not really make much sense to speak of all this

as the high point of a series of degrees, and as something great by comparison with other experiences which are less great. It is outside the limit within which comparisons have meaning.

It is beyond the level of ways that correspond to any of our notions of travel. Beyond the degrees that correspond to our ideas of a progression.

Yet this too is a beginning. It is the lowest level in a new order, in which all the levels are immeasurable and unthinkable. It is not yet the perfection of the interior life.

in which the soul vanishes out of itself by the perfect renunciation of all desires and of all things, is that it can have nothing to do with our ideas of greatness and exaltation.

and is not therefore something which is subject to the sin of pride. In fact, this perfect contemplation implies by its very essence the perfection of all humility,

Pride is incompatible with it in every possible way. It is only something that a person could be proud of or desire inordinately or in some other way make material for sin. When it is completely misunderstood

and taken for something which it is not and cannot be. For pride

which is the inordinate attribution of goods and values and glories to one's own contingent and exterior self, cannot exist where one is incapable of reflecting on a separate self, living apart from God.

How can a person be proud of anything when they are no longer able to reflect upon themself or realize themself or know themself? Morally speaking, they are annihilated because the source and agent and term of all their acts are God.