Thomas Merton: Radically Redeeming Ordinariness

“We are all people walking around shining like the sun.” – Thomas Merton.

There is a beautiful and yet strangely ironic tale told by the modern mystic Thomas Merton. He was away for a day from his cloistered existence as a hermit Trappist monk—They’re seriously hardcore isolationists, those Trappist fellas—Out and about he had ventured, among the people. The decidedly ordinary people, just doing their thing on what to all intents and purposes was a completely unremarkable day.

Then, suddenly, without warning amid the hustle and bustle in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, he got struck by the radically redeeming power and beauty of the Divine. In that precious moment, he realized like never before the absolute presence of God in all the city dwellers scurrying hither and yon all around him. This, he would later recall, was the most profound life changing spiritual experience of his whole mystic life.

Herein lies the irony, I mean you could be forgiven for thinking that when it comes to getting up close and personal with the living Divine, surely a mystic hermit monk like Merton, would experience the heavenly vision thing during one of his countless hours, days, and yes, long years of meditative isolation.

But no, it was out on a bustling city street among the people that the ever-present living God was profoundly and intimately revealed to him. It was as if the illusionary barrier between heaven and earth that has seemingly stunted the minds of men for longer than anyone can remember got shattered completely. There was, he realized, no separation between heaven and earth, and certainly no division between people. We are all One. Not just children of God, but people who have the life of God, shining like the sun deep within us.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that he was a renowned spiritual author by this time, Merton eventually took to the old story telling pen to describe what happened to him that miraculous day.¹ He writes: “In Louisville…I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all 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…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 a man, a member of a race in which God became incarnate. It was as if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could no longer overwhelm me. Because now I realize what we all are…We are all people walking around shining like the sun.”

—My god, the man could write.

Now, among Merton’s devotes, there is general agreement that this spiritual experience left him profoundly changed. He was, in a sense, fully radicalized by what the living God had revealed to him. He knew hence forth—in what would be the last ten years of his life that human structures, be they socio-economic, cultural, religious, or any other that thrive on separation and hierarchy, were, and always had been flawed. Human imposed walls of race, religion, sexuality, or wealth just cannot be justified when we are all walking around with the living God shining in us like the sun. It was this beautiful mystic insight, above all, that settled in his soul and drove his insistence on inclusion and his non-violent peace activism and anti-racism.

But this certainly didn’t mean that all would be sweetness and light for our hermit mystic monk. Dark nights of the soul and scandalous days lay in wait for him. More about that in my next post…

– Cormac Stagg, author of The Quest for a Humble Heart

1. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New Your: Doubleday, 1966), 140-142. [↩]