Daily Reading for March 8

It is true that the solitary life must also be a life of prayer and meditation, if it is to be authentically Christian . . . But what prayer! What meditation! . . . Utter poverty. Often an incapacity to pray, to see, to hope . . . a bitter, arid struggle to press forward through a blinding sandstorm.

Do not mistake my meaning. It is not a question of intellectual doubt. . . . It is something else, a kind of doubt that questions the very roots of a person’s own existence, a doubt which undermines their very reasons for existing and for doing what they do. It is this doubt which reduces a person finally to silence, and in the silence which ceases to ask questions, they receive the only certitude they know: The presence of God in the midst of uncertainty and nothingness, as the only reality but a reality which cannot be placed or identified.

From The Power and Meaning of Love by Thomas Merton (Sheldon Press, 1976).