Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. New York: Image, 1968, pp. 156-7
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 . . . My happiness could have taken form in the words: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.”
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Loving God, help each of us to wake from our dream of separateness. Help us to feel our connectness, our love for one another. Help us to reach out from behind our isolation, our sense of superiority, our lethargy, our fear to be with others, to comfort and help them. Give us the courage to touch others and be touched.
A very similar experience happened to me on the day I count as being reborn. I had returned to church on August 15, 1979 after years of being away. During the Holy Communion segment, as people walked the aisle back to their seats after receiving the wafer bread, I was overtaken by sensing the common bond we all had as brothers and sisters, each and every one of us. This love from God, Whom I now call Godess, fills me occasionally to the brim, and I rejoice!
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