Prologue
“So God created man in His own image…” (Genesis 1.27)
On March 18, 1958, the Catholic monk Thomas Merton stood at the corner of Fourth and Walnut streets, in the center of the shopping district in Louisville, Kentucky. He was transfixed in awe and wonder. As people walked around him going about their daily lives, he had a vision. In his words: “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. ...I have the immense joy of being a man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. …Now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
From this beginning we will find the way to reach out to one another, to see and hear and to love one another again.