Mental prayer is therefore something like a sky-rocket. Kindled by a spark of divine love, the soul streaks heavenward in an act of intelligence as clear and direct as the rocket's trail of fire. Grace has released all the deepest energies of our spirit and assists us to climb to new and unsuspected heights. Nevertheless, our own faculties soon reach their limit. The intelligence can climb no higher into the sky. There is a point where the mind bows its fiery trajectory as if to acknowledge its limitations and proclaim the infinite supremacy of the unattainable God.
But it is here that our 'meditation' reaches its climax. Love again takes the initiative and the rocket 'explodes' in a burst of sacrificial praise. Thus love flings out a hundred burning stars, acts of all kinds, expressing everything that is best in man's spirit, and the soul spends itself in drifting fires that glorify the Name of God while they fall earthward and die away in the night wind!
...The contemplation of 'philosophers,' which is merely intellectual speculation on the divine nature as it is reflected in creatures, would be therefore like a sky-rocket that soared into the sky but never went off. The beauty of the rocket is in its 'death,' and the beauty of mental prayer and of mystical contemplation is in the soul's abandonment and total surrender of itself in an outburst of praise in which it spends itself entirely to bear witness to the transcendent goodness of the infinite God. The rest is silence.
- Thomas Merton
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