Perhaps the best way to understand this is the experience of Christopher Bellitto who writes:
"Many people talk about the high points of prayer: moments of great comfort or insight where they hear God's answer to their important question loudly and clearly. ... I once thought this was the typical prayer experience. But mostly all I heard was silence, ....I finally gave up on words in prayer because I felt God was asking me to make a major decision but wasn't giving me any help. I kept asking for signs, then spent hours wondering if a word from someone, a song on the radio at a particular moment, or a letter from a special person was "the sign." I got so angry with God that I went for a long walk alone and found myself shouting to the air. "If you want me to do this, you've got to tell me!" I yelled up at a gray afternoon sky. "You can't ask me to take this step and leave me alone. It's your fault I'm being pulled in two directions, not mine. And until you give an answer, I'm not talking with you any more!"
When I did [finally] sit down to pray, I had no words, no list of questions, no desire to analyze anything. All I did was sit and listen, letting my mind wander until I felt it was time to get up. Sometimes that took five minutes; one day it took more than four hours." (Christopher M. Bellitto)
In contemplative prayer we cease to engage our imagination and reason in exploring the mysteries of God in Christ and let the profoundity of God reveal itself to our soul. Like an autumn leaf which fall to the ground in obedience to the laws of nature which is God's will, we sit silently realizing a loving presence without words, images or thoughts which we abandon in the realization that the reality of Christ now in glory cannot be grasped by our limited imagination and reason. This awareness of God's presence takes place on the level of faith and love. "Contemplative prayer is silence, the "symbol of the world to come" or "silent love." ... In this silence, unbearable to the "outer" man, the Father speaks to us his incarnate Word, who suffered, died, and rose; in this silence the Spirit of adoption enables us to share in the prayer of Jesus." (Cath. of Cath. Church #2717)
There are those who say that in this kind of prayer we are abandoning Christ in his humanity and going directly to his divinity. This is not the case because Christ humanity and divinity are united in One Person. "Our love and knowledge of Christ do not terminate in His human nature or in His divine nature but in His Person." (Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, New Direction Publishing Corp., 1961, p. 153) All we abandon in this kind of prayer is the image of his humanity and our limited conceptions of Him which are not His reality but merely the symbols to aide our understanding.
