The Silence That Holds All Things

There is a moment in centering prayer when the mind finally stops reaching. The sacred word dissolves. The breath slows. And in that vast interior silence, something shifts — not because we have achieved stillness, but because we have surrendered into the stillness that was already there, waiting beneath our noise.

Thomas Merton once described this surrender as falling into "the hidden ground of Love." It is the place where Romans 8:28 ceases to be a doctrine we defend and becomes a reality we inhabit. "All things work together for good" — not because we can trace the logic of our suffering on a whiteboard, but because in the silence, we encounter the One who holds every fractured thing in His hands and is making something we cannot yet see.

John of the Cross knew this. In his darkest night, when God seemed most absent, the soul was actually being drawn deeper into union with the Divine. The darkness was not punishment. It was intimacy — the kind that requires the eyes to close.

Hope, in the contemplative tradition, is not optimism. It is not a prediction that things will improve by Thursday. It is the quiet knowing, born in prayer and refined through surrender, that the God who works in all things is working still — especially in what we cannot understand.

Sit with that. Let the silence hold you. The One who holds all things together is holding you, too.