It’s time for all of us to experience Merton’s miracle

Delaware Gazette - Oct 26, 2018

Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” Trappist monk Thomas Merton describes an experience he once had while standing on a street corner in a Midwestern city (It was in Louisville, Kentucky, where I lived for eight years while I was in seminary. I am familiar with the spot where this experience happened, although there was a Galleria when I lived there, and the name of Walnut Street had been changed to Muhammad Ali Boulevard).

Merton writes, “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.”

He writes about it from the perspective of a monk, who has “left the world.” His conclusion is that we are all a part of the same world and that it is absurd to think one could “leave it” for the cloister as he had done. We all belong to God, whether we are conscious of it or not.

He could have drawn other conclusions. It would have been understandable if he had been overwhelmed with the realization that he hated all those people, that they were threatening to him.

He may also have realized that he didn’t know any of them and was further alienated by their strangeness, the different racial and ethnic groups represented among them, the different religious and political persuasions, the different social classes. He may have felt afraid of them. It is possible that he may just have realized how annoyed with them he was and that he didn’t care very much about them or whether he ever saw them again.

The realization that he loved them seemed like a miracle to him and came in the middle of a long and arduous spiritual journey, which for Merton had led to a monastery in Kentucky, of all places. In the end, the places where these things either happen or don’t happen are not relevant. How does one open their eyes and heart to other people so that an experience like the one he describes can become possible?

It occurs to me that though many people have been inspired by the experience Merton described, our world is filled up with people who feel stranger and more strange to one another, and are increasingly alienated from one another. The more alienated, the more frightening we become to one another. Something has to give.

My prayer is that what gives will turn out to be the result of more and more people embarking on the arduous journey in which they realize that they are in love with all the people around them, like Merton did on that Louisville, Kentucky, street corner.

Merton considered prayer to be his vocation. Most of us have other vocations that take up time and energy, but each of us can find time to pray.

While we may hope that our prayers may change the mind of God or at least some of our circumstances, diminishing the affect of the negative things and increasing the positive, the hint from Merton’s life story is that it is just as likely that we will experience personal change, the changing of the inner life.

God’s love in us overcomes alienation, separation, and draws us near to one another and to those strange to us, even to those we don’t know. That is the miracle the world needs.

I love the season of the year we call fall. The temperatures are cooler, and the color comes to the trees. On the weekends, people are playing in and watching football games, and we await the World Series.

Everyone is set in their seasonal routines. Thanksgiving and Christmas are on the way. It is a good time for the miracle.

Dr. Mark Allison is pastor of the First Baptist Church in Delaware.

Your Pastor Speaks

Dr. Mark Allison