Merton on Prayer

From No Man Is an Island starting at page 44:

There are many levels of attention in prayer.

First of all, there is the purely exterior attention. We "say prayers" with our lips, but our hearts are not following what we say although we think we should like to mean what we are saying...

At other times, we think of God in prayer but our thoughts of Him are not concerned with prayer. They are thoughts about Him that do not establish any contact with Him. So, while we pray, we are speculating about God and about the spiritual life, or composing sermons, or drawing up theological arguments. ... if we take prayer seriously we will not call them prayer. ...

Then there is the prayer that is well used: words or thoughts serve their purpose and lead our minds and hearts to God, and in our prayer we receive light to apply these thoughts to our own problems and difficulties, to those of our friends, or to those of the Church ....

There is a better way of prayer, a greater gift from God, in which we pass through our prayer to Him, and love him. We taste the goodness of His infinite mercy. We know that we are indeed His sons, although we know our unworthiness to be called the sons of God....

...there is another stage in prayer, when consolation gives place to fear. It is a place of darkness and anguish and of conversion: for here a great change takes place in our spirit. All our love for God appears to us to have been full of imperfection, as indeed it has. We begin to doubt that we have ever loved Him .... Instead of complacently calling ourselves sinners (and secretly believing ourselves just) we begin to find that the sins of our past life were really sins, and really our sins--and we have not regretted them! ... This is the time when we really learn to pray in earnest....

The man who can face such dryness... finally enters into pure prayer. Here the soul goes to God in prayer without any longer adverting either to itself or to its prayer. It speaks to Him without knowing what it is saying because God Himself has distracted the mind from its words and thoughts. It reaches Him without thoughts because, before it can think of Him, He is already present in the depths of the spirit, moving it to love Him in a way it cannot explain or understand.

from pages 44-50

I cannot say I have ever experienced that last, though I think it's what Paul talks about in Romans 8:26-27