Merton: Epiphany

Merton: Epiphany

 “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

Merton Marker in Louisville

This is the first line of Thomas Merton’s famous mystical revelation and epiphany in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, described in his 1968 journal about the world of the 1960s. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. 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 18th, 1958. The story became so famous that Louisville erected a plaque at the site in 2008 at the 50th anniversary of Merton’s revelation. Ordinary people and popes continue to visit the corner of Fourth and Walnut, which was life-changing for Merton and those who read his works. 

 Merton’s experience seems similar to what James Finley describes in Christian Meditation: Experiencing God’s Presence as “having a finger in the pulse of Christ, realizing oneness with God in life itself.”

 This experience may also be similar 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 pm on May 24th, 1738, at a Society meeting in Aldersgate Street when someone read from Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to Romans, and Wesley says, “I felt my heart strangely warmed.” 2

Many readers may be going to Louisville this summer. We hope you have a chance to go to the corner of Fourth and Walnut and let us know what it is like.

1 Richard Rohr in Center for Action and Contemplation,” Richard Rohr Meditation: “Thomas Merton Part II,” October 6th, 2017.

2 John Wesley in Journal of John Wesley (London: Charles H. Kelly, 1903), p. 51.

Joanna       https://www.joannaseibert.com/

 

Celtic Hospitality in Community

Celtic Spirituality: Celtic sacred life of hospitality in community

         “I sought my God;

    My God I could not see.

    I sought my soul

    My soul eluded me.

    I sought my brother

    And I found all three.”

In the Celtic hospitality tradition, God is present not only in Nature, but also in our neighbor, ourselves, and especially in the stranger. This is a sacredness in relationships. I am told there is no word in the Irish language for private property. Faith is lived in a community with a combination of periodic seclusion and community and mission. Anamchara or soul friends or spiritual friends or spiritual directors are essential relationships. Women are regarded as equals, and communities are not hierarchical. Monasteries rather than parishes are the basis of the church. The Celts value education, art, and music.

We traveled to Iona off the western coast of Scotland twice and would return in a heartbeat. You don’t simply stumble on Iona, however. You really do have to want to go there by ferry, down a one-lane winding road, and finally walking over on a ferry onto the small, three-mile-long island in the Inner Hebrides where Columba brought Celtic Christianity to England in 563. Here, the breathtakingly illuminated manuscripts of The Book of Kells are believed to have begun to be written at the end of the 8th century. Iona is considered an exceptionally “thin” space where the membrane between the spiritual and the secular is extremely thin. This was our experience as well. You walk a lot, eat good food, worship outdoors and in the ancient abbey and a decaying nunnery, listen to the wind and waves, study high crosses, wear warm clothing, and watch the sea change the color of the abundant million-year-old rocks by the shoreline.

I often meet with spiritual friends who describe Celtic Spirituality when they have no name for it. This seems a sign of the universality of this type of spirituality. The sacred presence of God in each of us is a start.

Again, further reading might include Philip Newell’s Celtic Benediction, and John Miriam Jones, With an Eagle’s Eye, Esther de Waal”s Celtic Way of Prayer, John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara.

Joanna    https://www.joannaseibert.com/

 

 

 

 

 

Living in the Present Moment

   Richard Rohr, Poe: Seeing and Living in the Present Moment

  “Most people do not see things as they are because they see things as they are!” Which is not to see at all. Their many self-created filters keep them from seeing with any clear vision.”—Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation, daily Rohr Meditation.

Edgar Allan Poe also gives us more clues about having a clearer vision in “The Purloined Letter.” The Paris police chief asks a famous amateur detective, C. Auguste Dupin, to help him find a letter stolen from the boudoir of an unnamed woman by an unscrupulous minister who is blackmailing his victim.

The chief of police and his detectives have combed the hotel where the minister lives, behind the wallpaper, under the carpets, examining tables and chairs with microscopes, probing cushions with needles, and found no sign of the letter. Dupin gets a detailed description of the letter and visits the minister at his hotel. Complaining of weak eyes and wearing green spectacles, he disguises his eyes as he searches for the note. Finally, he sees it in plain sight, in a cheap card rack hanging from a dirty ribbon. He leaves a snuff box behind as an excuse to return the next day and switches out the letter for a duplicate.

Rohr is calling us to put on a new pair of glasses, perhaps 3-D glasses, to see the depth of what is in plain sight immediately around us in the present moment.

Guides and friends in our community remind us to meet God in the present moment. They remind us to listen to this call from God to live in the present moment, especially in the stories of the Epiphany season in our Sunday Bible readings.

Epiphany means an illuminating realization.

 The season of Epiphany calls us to see more clearly, living in the present moment.