I wanted this post to be about “I’m feeling this right now,” not a day or a minute in the past.  Alas that was not to be. 

Three hours ago, I was deep inside something stunning.  If you read my post yesterday, you’ll sense what’s been happening in my mind.  There’s often a wordless exploding of love in all directions.

I just got off a Zoom call with thirty-five folks.  The connection was vivid across our screen rectangles and the residue of love is still with me, but it’s far less intense that it was when I was gazing at human beings sitting in a Ghent café or walking by.  The photo can’t capture the volume of the moment which resided in my head.

I’m disappointed that I’m not living the shock and awe of a few hours ago. C’est la vie. What I do have is a memory of something Thomas Merton said years ago. He was an American Trappist monk and theologian:

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 …

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. 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.

Then it was as if 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 the time.

***

Two people

Separated by decades

Joined in the heart