Merton's Voice: ...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, A Merton Reader, ed. by Thomas P.  McDonnell, (New York: Image Books, 1989) p. 326 

Prayer: Praise the Lord! NRSV Psalm 147: 1.