Remembering Thomas Merton

"On 10 December 2018, we marked the 50th anniversary of Thomas Merton's untimely death in Asia. On 31 January 2019, we celebrate the 104th birthday of this monk and writer whose writings on spirituality and on social issues continue to influence readers today. Unfortunately, Merton’s thoughts on the problem of war remain as relevant today as they were in the 1960s." *** Read the whole article here. ***

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It is, however, an experience Merton had on 18 March 1958 that seems to have permanently redirected Merton's eyes back to the world. For reasons not made clear in his journal, Thomas Merton was in Louisville on that day. Perhaps he was in the city for a doctor's appointment - he suffered from a variety of maladies - but it matters little why he was there. On this trip into the city, he found himself in downtown Louisville, on the corner of 4th Street and Walnut Street.

There are two versions of what happened. The first is that found in Merton's journal, written the day after his trip to Louisville. The second is the version found in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, published in 1965. For this version, Merton edited and re-wrote his original journal entry, which is more raw and unpolished. It is the original journal entry I want to cite here, specifically because of its rawness. The entire passage is worth quoting at length:

Yesterday, in Louisville, at the corner of 4th and Walnut, suddenly realized that I loved all the people and that none of them were, or, could be totally alien to me. As if waking from a dream ― the dream of my separateness, of the 'special' vocation to be different. My vocation does not really make me different from the rest of men or put me in a special category except artificially, juridically. I am still a member of the human race ― and what more glorious destiny is there for man, since the Word was made flesh and became, too a member of the Human Race!

Thank God! Thank God! I am only another member of the human race, like all the rest of them. I have the immense joy of being a man! As if the sorrows of our condition could really matter, once we begin to realize who and what we are ― as if we could ever begin to realize it on earth.
Here he was, a monk in an austere monastery, just outside a lavish hotel at the corner of a busy intersection in the middle of the shopping district. And far from experiencing revulsion or a sense of superiority in the face of people who lived radically different lives from his own, Merton fell in love.