Awaken to the realization of togetherness
We were reading J.D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey,” and right there, on page 170, in a lightning bolt of clarity, I got it. Zooey is talking his college-age sister Franny through the debris of an emotional breakdown following her nonstop ramblings through the Prayer of the Pilgrim. Zooey points out that both Testaments are full of wise and prophetic figures.
“But who besides Jesus really knew which end was up? Not Moses … he kept in beautiful touch with his God … but that’s the point. He had to keep in touch. Jesus realized there is no separation.”
Twentieth-century Trappist monk Thomas Merton got it, too, in a flash of insight, as he stood on the corner of Fourth and Walnut in downtown Louisville, Ky. In the center of downtown, he writes, “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.”
Living a monastic life, Merton easily could have withdrawn from the world and called it good. But he understood that his monastic life was not his own; it belonged to these people. The quality of his solitude mattered greatly. In his solitude Merton understood that “they are not ‘they’ but my own self. There are no strangers.”
When the world’s chaos and pain knock at my door and invite themselves in for a long and unsettling visit, it’s tempting to pretend that I’m not home. When my neighbors to the right lose their jobs, when my neighbors to the left lose their homes, when neighbors at every intersection stand exposed in their need, my first instinct is to hunker down, hold on to what I have, and not leak away in charity — or justice or compassion — what I might need someday for myself.
My world today has been rudely awakened from its dream of separateness. Like Jesus, like Merton, like those dedicated to compassion for people who suffer, like those pressing for the common good, I too must emerge from my private world and connect with others in the public square. They may be people who look like me or don’t, who think like me or don’t, who value life the way I do, or don’t. But I know that they are not separate from me, and I am not separate from God, nor are they separate from God.
Oh, that we might let go that dream of separateness and be awakened to the dignity and worth at the heart of every one.
Mary Sharon Moore is an author and director of Awakening Vocations, and a member of St. Thomas More University Parish in Eugene. This column is coordinated by Lane Interfaith Alliance to offer inspiration, share spiritual experiences and bring a deeper understanding of faith perspectives with the intention of blessing our community and the world. For information, visit www.laneinterfaithalliance.org or call 541-344-0430.