The Well Beneath Words

In the monastery at Gethsemani, Thomas Merton once described a moment during centering prayer when every thought finally fell silent — not the silence of emptiness, but the silence of a room so full of Presence that language simply stepped aside. He called it being "found by God in the depths where we did not know we existed."

This is the love John speaks of when he writes, "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God." The Greek agape here is not sentiment or effort. It is the underground river that has been flowing beneath our awareness all along, waiting for us to stop digging shallow wells of self-sufficiency and simply descend.

Teresa of Avila mapped the soul as an interior castle with many mansions, and at the very center — past the rooms of distraction, past the corridors of self-knowledge, past even the dark night that strips us bare — she found not a doctrine about love but Love Himself, the Living God, already dwelling there. "God is love," John declares, and whoever has sat long enough in lectio divina with those three words knows they are not a definition. They are an abyss.

The contemplative practice is simply this: stop speaking long enough to discover you are already being spoken. Stop reaching long enough to notice you are already held. The next time you sit in silence, let 1 John 4:8 be your only prayer. Not analyzed. Not explained. Just received, the way the earth receives rain — wordlessly, gratefully, all the way down.