In Silence (Thomas Merton)

In Silence
By Thomas Merton

Be still
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
To speak your

Name.
Listen
To the living walls.
Who are you?
Who
Are You? Whose
Silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
Are you (as these stones
Are quiet). Do not
Think of what you are
Still less of

What you may one day be.
Rather
Be what you are (but who?) be
The unthinkable one
You do not know.

O be still, while
You are still alive,
And all things live around you
Speaking (I do not hear)
To your own being,
Speaking by the Unknown
That is in you and in themselves.

"I will try, like them
To be my own silence:
And this is difficult. The whole
World is secretly on fire. The stones
Burn, even the stones
They burn me. How can a man be still or
Listen to all things burning? How can he dare
To sit with them when
All their silence
Is on Fire?"

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Trappist Monk, poet and peace activist. He was one of the first Christian monks to take an active interest in the spiritual traditions of the East. He was especially drawn to Buddhism because of its profound understanding of the human mind, and its placing of spirituality in the recesses of the human heart, rather than in outer forms and rituals. Merton was not only a monk but also a prolific, bestselling author and a gifted poet. In this extraordinary poem "In Silence", Merton tells us that even the stones speak, that they know who we are, and that they will tell us if we can be still enough to hear them. The universe, then, is alive with an intelligence that mirrors the light of knowledge that lives in us. Not the information in our frontal lobes, but the intelligence of the heart's deep core. If we can be still enough -- an that if is everything -- Merton says we might hear the stones speak our own true Name.

In 1947, his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, was a surprise best-seller, and profoundly influenced the immediate postwar interest in monasticism and religion. In the sixties, he became one of the first authoritative Christian voices to take a serious interest in Eastern spirituality, especially Buddhism. He translated Buddhist poets, and in 1968 attended an interfaith meeting of monastic superiors in Bangkok. On that same journey, he met the Dalai Lama in India, and they recognized each other as kindred spirits. Tragically, Merton was electrocuted accidentally in his Bangkok hotel room, and died there.