The Mass each day purifies and baffles me at the same time. This beautiful mixture of happiness and lucidity and inarticulateness fills me with great health from day to day. I am forced to be simple at the altar.

For this I am eternally grateful to our Western Liturgy, which has a peculiar intensity of its own precisely because it is so straight-faced and noncommital. There is never an exclamation. There is never an outcry.

But in the middle of this beautiful sobriety the indescribably pure light of God fills you with what can only be described as the innocence of childhood.

Thomas Merton, The Intimate Merton by Patrick Hart