Fourth and Walnut

I only came across this passage from Thomas Merton in October and was so struck by it. Maybe you have already read it? In any case, it resonated with me strongly. Today at Mass, our dear visiting Jesuit, Father Norm, mentioned this episode in his homily and it made me want to share it with you too:

“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. ...

It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.

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.
-From Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander (1966)

I struggle so much with what I really ought to be doing with my life, with how to be in the world, and the last line of this excerpt really gets me, because that is what I have always wanted to do- to tell people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. Maybe that is why I like it so much at St. Leo’s —the people there seem to have some humble inkling that they are shining like the sun, and they are not afraid to tell each other, or to hear it from someone else.

And my dears, let me tell you what Thomas Merton told me and I know in my marrow to be true: You are shining like the sun. Shining.