“The mystical night is not mere night, absence of light. It is a night which is sanctified by the presence of an invisible light (to which our visible, sacramental fire burning in the spring night is only a witness.) The brightness of the eternal light is so great that we cannot see it, and all other lights become darkness by comparison with it.”–Thomas Merton

From The New Man by Thomas Merton (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1961, p 247)