The Philosopher's Prayer

I found this passage in Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, IL; 1968), p. 125  I found it moving beyond compare. I offer it here, as the statement all philosophers would make to those who would decry their "incomprehensibility," but even more as an affirmation of the call of this great endeavor. To those of us who struggle in this morass of incomprehension and speechlessness, it is a reminder of the mission, and where its power resides and towards which it is directed:

"The philosopher speaks, but this is a weakness in him and an inexplicable weakness;  he should keep silent, coincide in silence and rejoin in Being a philosophy that is there ready-made.  But yet everything comes to pass as though he wished to put into words a certain silence he hearkens to within himself.  His entire 'work' is this absurd effort.  He wrote in order to state his contact with Being; he did not state it, and could not state it, since it is silence.  Then he recommences...
One has to believe, then, that language is not simply the contrary of the truth, of coincidence: that there is or could be a language -- and this is what he seeks.  It would be a language of which he would not be the organizer, words he would not assemble, that would combine through him by virtue of a natural intertwining of their meaning, through the occult trading of the metaphor -- where what counts is no longer the manifest meaning of each word and of each image, but the lateral relations, the kinships that are implicated in their transfers and their exchanges.... that operative language which has no need to be translated into significations and thoughts, that language-thin which counts as an arm, an action as offense and as seduction because it brings to the surface all the deep-rooted relations of the lived experience wherein it takes form, and which is the language of life and of action, but also that of literature and of poetry -- then this logos is an absolutely universal theme, it is the theme of philosophy.
... [Philosophy] is an operative language, that language that can be known only from within, through its exercise, is open upon the things called forth by the voices of silence and continues in an effort of articulation which is the Being of every being... "

...And so, we might say is the inexplicable weakness of Being itself.