Miscellaneous

?There are so many words that one cannot get to God as long as He is thought to be on the other side of the words.... That is where the silence of the woods comes in. Not that there is something to be thought and discovered in the woods, but only that the trees are all sufficient exclamations of silence, and one works there, cutting wood, clearing ground, cutting grass, cooking soup, drinking fruit juice, sweating, washing, making fire, smelling smoke, sweeping, etc. This is religion. The further one gets away from this, the more one sinks in the mud of words and gestures.?

? Thomas Merton, Essential Writings 82?83 (2005), from a letter written in 1965.