Faith & Spirit Quote by Thomas Merton

Silence, in Merton's hands, is less a spa-day luxury than a high-risk spiritual discipline. "Remaining quietly" sounds passive, even easy, until he flips it: stillness "requires a lot of courage and know-how". The line is a quiet rebuke to the modern habit of treating attention as disposable and prayer as performance. Merton is saying that the hardest thing isn’t finding God in some dramatic epiphany; it’s enduring the unglamorous minutes where nothing happens except your own mind showing up, loud and unedited.

The intent is practical, almost technical. "Know-how" demystifies contemplation: it’s learned, trained, and inevitably awkward at first. He’s writing against the romantic idea that spirituality is effortless if you’re sincere. No - you need craft: how to sit with boredom, how to notice distraction without turning it into self-hatred, how to let the urge to control the experience pass.

The subtext is psychological and cultural. To be "attentive to Him" means relinquishing the ego’s favorite job: narrating, judging, producing. That’s why it takes courage. Silence threatens the identities we build from busyness and moral competence. It also threatens religious consumers who want reassurance on demand; Merton suggests God isn’t a vending machine, and attention isn’t a transaction.

Context sharpens the edge: a Trappist monk writing mid-century, when American life was speeding up and Cold War anxiety made inner quiet feel suspect or indulgent. For Merton, the monastery wasn’t escape; it was resistance - training the self to stay present without grabbing for noise, certainty, or applause.