100418 Thomas Merton pp 65-72

Does everyone else also reach a day when they realize the man inside their head has stopped responding? One day the voice that for so long seemed an adequate companion suddenly ceased offering its ceaseless commentary. It became dull and listless, apathetic in its responses. I wasn’t in agreement with its every uttering any longer, and in return it began to ignore me. We no longer lived in perfect harmony. One day the swelling loneliness inside my head pushed into the open so forcefully that my voice poured into the room like water from a faucet. There is a difference between thinking silently and thinking out loud. Silent thinking wanders. It’s an endless night lost in the forest. When I began speaking out loud to the other, I became aware of the presence of presence. There was something there even in the cold stark reality of my isolation. I stood face to face with the emptiness. It was pregnant somehow, more like an echo across a canyon. There was something more than ruminating taking place. There was an acceptance of conversation that would not necessarily offer the same covenant of automated agreement the man inside my head once offered. The echo sometimes differed from the source. This new presence made me aware of my own existence as a part of a whole where Alone is an impossibility. If I stopped speaking to the presence I would not know where to find myself, and so it was less a question of aloneness and more a question of location. Where do I begin, if I do not end at my fingertips? If I am blended into God, then by what reasoning do I have a name? I was a drop of water in an ocean, but with this new presence I was the ocean. It was a paradox. The presence remained still and steady, and perhaps too patient while I discovered that I had unwittingly been praying to myself.