It’s a Blessed Blur

“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…I have the immense joy of being… a member of a race in which… God became incarnate.”

     Have you ever experienced an aha moment? Have you ever felt like your world was turned upside down in an instant and that you were invited to see life through new eyes? This was monk and mystic Thomas Merton’s experience in the midst of busy downtown Louisville, Kentucky. For eight years he had been living in the confines of a monastery and in the confines of a monk’s mindset based on the belief that a life separated from the world positioned one to be closer to God.

     Merton’s sense of connection with the crowded mass of shoppers that day was based on the felt conviction that humanity is infused with divinity, that the bond that unites all people is spiritual, that any sense of separateness between us, God, and others is a blessed blur. We may be distinct from one another, but we share a common spiritual bond. We may be other than God traditionally understood as a supreme being, but we are nonetheless an incarnation of God understood as the spiritual ground of being. Someone else who felt deeply at one with divinity and thus with all others is philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson who opined “… the currents of Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God.”                                       

     When writing about his experience, Merton went on to say that there is no way of telling people that they are walking around shining like the sun. My guess is that if we dared to say such a thing, we might well be told to mind our own business – or worse. But whether or not we see the brilliance of ourselves or others, the world would be a better place if we looked at it through “aha eyes,” sensed the immense joy of belonging to the human race, and related to each other in ways that honor the presence of the divine.