It is my belief, that we should not be too sure of having found Christ in ourselves until we have found him also in that part of humanity that is most remote from our own.
Interpretation
True self-awareness and spirituality involve recognizing the divine in all of humanity, not just in oneself.
Thomas Merton emphasizes that genuine faith and belief in Christ should extend beyond self-reflection to encompass empathy and understanding for all of humanity, particularly those who are different or distant from us. It suggests that real spirituality requires us to seek Christ in everyone, no matter how different they may be from us, pushing us beyond personal comfort and into the realm of universal compassion.
In practice
In a sermon about compassion, one might use this quote to illustrate the importance of seeing Christ in everyone.
The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything.
Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny....To work out our identity in God.
Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
You are made in the image of what you desire.
But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for.
I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that 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.
...the more a person becomes spiritually minded or advances towards God, the more tolerant he becomes and the less differentiation he sees.
One pretends to do something, or copy someone or some teacher, until it can be done confidently and easily in what becomes one's own style
To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!
The only freedom is the freedom from the known.
Please... tell me who you are and what you want. And if you think those are simple questions, keep in mind that most people live their entire lives without arriving at an answer.
What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language.
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