The Antibody Network ·The Clearing
Reading 3 of 5 The Veil Thins

The moment in Louisville

Thomas Merton, twentieth-century Trappist, has a glimpse on a downtown street corner and writes it down.

The reading — Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966)

The Point Vierge — Louisville Vision

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.

There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes.

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, from which God disposes of our lives. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us.

The framing

Merton has been in the monastery for sixteen years when he steps off a curb in Louisville, looks at the people around him, and is overwhelmed by the recognition that he loves them, that he is one of them, that the distinction between world and cloister has been a kind of useful fiction.

There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. Read Merton’s passage with the previous two in mind. He is reporting, in modern American English, what Luke and Thomas were reporting in Greek and Coptic. The kingdom is here. The light is in everyone. The veil thinned for him on Fourth and Walnut.

Carry with you
When have you had your own version of the Fourth and Walnut moment?