Thomas Merton...

"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,
the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole
illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream.

Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life:
but the conception of "separation from the world" that we have in
the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion,
we are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the
bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the
world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest,
This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a
relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud ....

To think that for sixteen or seventeen years I have been taking
seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so much of our
monastic thinking ....

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 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."



~ Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander