Happy New Year!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

2019 is finally under way.

At my age it seems like no big deal. One year looks pretty much like the last and the last.

However, during the last bit of 2018 my heart began to move in a new and different direction. I’m not sure what that even means. Perhaps, I’ll share some of it as I see it more clearly.

Until then, though, I want to share something from Fr Thomas Merton. Merton was a Trappist monk who lived at the Cistercian monastery at Gethsemani, KY. His writings are golden for those of us called to a more contemplative path toward faith. Here is how he recorded a personal epiphany. This is something that more of us would do well to consider and embrace.

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. . . . 

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.”

― Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guily Bystander