Transfigured on a Corner Downtown
The Rev. George Adamik reflects on Thomas Merton’s transformative experience on a street corner in Louisville, the transfiguration of Jesus (Matthew 17:1-9), and other stories of transfiguration in our lives.
The Rev. George Adamik reflects on Thomas Merton’s transformative experience on a street corner in Louisville, the transfiguration of Jesus (Matthew 17:1-9), and other stories of transfiguration in our lives.
Father George quotes the following passage from Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966):
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. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. […] This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. […] If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.