The Emptying Silence

In centering prayer, there comes a moment when every thought, every ambition, every carefully constructed image of ourselves dissolves into silence. Thomas Merton called this the discovery of our "true self" — the self hidden with Christ in God, stripped of pretension. It is precisely what Paul describes in Philippians 2:3-4: "Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.…