Many of us are familiar with a famous passage in Thomas Merton within which he describes a revelation he had one day while standing on the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville. Among complete strangers in the middle of a shopping district on a very ordinary day, Merton had the sense that his eyes, ears, and tongue were all at once attached to a bigger soul:
I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all of 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.
… Then it was as if 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 we could all see each other that way all the time! There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. I suppose that the big problem would be that we would all fall down and worship each other...
What exactly does that mean, to pray affectively? In essence, what Robert Michel, OMI told us might be summarized this way: “You must try to pray so that, in your prayer, you open yourself in such a way that sometime—perhaps not today, but sometime—you are able to hear God say to you: ‘I love you!’ These words, addressed to you by God, are the most important words you will ever hear because, before you hear them, nothing is ever completely right with you, but, after you hear them, something will be right in your life at a very deep level.”...
(Resources listed here reference more than one reading and are normally shorter than the resources listed under the individual texts above. If you are looking to link the readings, check these resources.)
(Resources listed here reference more than one reading and are normally shorter than the resources listed under the individual texts above. If you are looking to link the readings, check these resources.)
(Resources listed here reference more than one reading and are normally shorter than the resources listed under the individual texts above. If you are looking to link the readings, check these resources.)
(Resources listed here reference more than one reading and are normally shorter than the resources listed under the individual texts above. If you are looking to link the readings, check these resources.)
(Resources listed here reference more than one reading and are normally shorter than the resources listed under the individual texts above. If you are looking to link the readings, check these resources.)
