Thomas Merton had much to share about the contours and experience of spiritual contemplation. Here are some of his reflections from the concluding paragraphs of Chapter 15 of his book, Contemplative Prayer (1971):
In the contemplative life, it is neither desire nor the refusal of desire that counts, but only that "desire"...which acquiesces in the unknown and peacefully advances where it does not see the way. All the paradoxes about the contemplative way are reduced to this one: being without desire means being led by a desire so great that it is incomprehensible. It is too huge to be completely felt. It is a blind desire, which seems like a desire for "nothing" only because nothing can content it.
And because it is able to rest in no-thing, then it rests, relatively speaking, in emptiness. But not an emptiness as such, emptiness for its own sake. Actually there is no such entity as pure emptiness, and the merely negative emptiness of the false contemplative is a "thing" not a "nothing." The "thing" that it is is simply the darkness of self, from which all other beings are deliberately and of set-purpose excluded. Such emptiness is in fact the emptiness of hell.
But the true character of [spiritual] emptiness, at least for a Christian contemplative, is pure love, pure freedom. Love that is free of everything, not determined by any thing, or held down by any special relationship. It is love for love's sake. It is sharing, through the Holy Spirit, in the infinite charity [love] of God. And so when Jesus told His disciples to love, He told them to love as universally as the Father who sends His rain alike on the just and the unjust... This purity, freedom and indeterminateness of love is the very essence of Christianity. It is to this above all that monastic [contemplative] prayer aspires.
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