Beautiful Strangers
I’ve read this story (below) a few times and often think of the moment Merton describes. Have you had moments like this?
It happens to me every so often. I might be on an airplane waiting to take off and suddenly be reminded that all these people are beloved of God. Or in church I’ll look around as we’re singing and see kids, middle-aged adults, grandmas, and grandpas singing together and it brings tears to my eyes. Or I see a quick revelation of one person caring for another—a tall young woman bending her ear to the elderly lady holding her arm, a mom taking a baby out of a car seat, a dad telling his kid, “Good job!” All at once, they’re beautiful—beautiful strangers indeed.
Beautiful Strangers
THOMAS MERTON
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.… 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. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. 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.