I’ve always wanted to visit this site, in downtown Louisville, where the contemplative monk, Thomas Merton, had his epiphany about life. This weekend, I finally got the chance.
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 those 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, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream…There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun….
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 of the time.
~ Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander