From Andy's Chapbook

I'm always on the lookout for quotations that I want to copy into my chapbook. I find them in journals and magazines, newspapers, books and commentaries, roadside graffiti, brochures, advertisements, comic strips, the lives of the saints, Internet postings, postcards--in short, from anything written (and sometimes spoken). When I find something that I want to chew on, I scribble it into a little leather chapbook, usually with an old-fashioned fountain pen; and then--now and then--I turn back on the pages and read what I thought was good and worth preserving for a rainy spiritual day. So tonight I thought I might start to share some of them with you periodically. Here's one:

Truth rises from the silence of being to the quiet tremendous presence of the Word. Then, sinking again into silence, the truth of words bears us down into the silence of God. Or rather God rises up out of the sea like a treasure in the waves, and when language recedes His brightness remains on the shores of our own being.

From Thomas Merton, Thoughts In Solitude (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1956) 86.