Merton: Epiphany in the World
“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 those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.”
—Thomas Merton.
This is the first line of Thomas Merton’s famous mystical revelation and epiphany which occurred in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. It is described in his journal Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1968, pp. 140-142).
Merton had been a Trappist monk for seventeen years, and was on an errand for the monastery in the middle of an ordinary day on March 18, 1958. The story became so famous that the city of Louisville erected a plaque at the site in 2008 on the fiftieth anniversary of Merton’s revelation. Ordinary people and popes continue to visit the corner of Fourth and Walnut, a site that was life changing for Merton and for those who read his works.
Merton’s experience seems similar to what James Finley describes in Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God as “having a finger in the pulse of Christ, realizing oneness with God in life itself.”
Merton’s epiphany may also be comparable to what St. Francis realized in nature when he called the sun his brother and the moon his sister. Richard Rohr calls it finding our True Self, “our basic and unchangeable identity in God.” 1
Methodists might relate it to John Wesley’s experience at 8:45 p. m. on May 24, 1738, at a Society meeting in Aldersgate Street, when someone read from Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to Romans and Wesley responded: “I felt my heart strangely warmed.”2
1Richard Rohr meditation, Center for Action and Contemplation, “Thomas Merton Part II,” October 6, 2017.
2John Wesley, Journal of John Wesley (London: Charles H. Kelly, 1903), p. 51.
Rebecca Spooner is leading a morning retreat about the Enneagram at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Saturday February 29th from 9 to 1. The Cost is $15. Sign up on St. Mark’s website lovesaintmarks.org. Go to What’s on, then Events.
Joanna . joannaseibert.com