• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer
Luminary Quotes

Luminary Quotes

  • Share
  • Subscribe
  • Topics
  • Random
  • Favorite
Share this quote
Tweet
Share
Email
Tweet
Share
Email
previous

God is to be heard, not only on Sinai, not only in my own heart, but in the voice of the stranger... We must, then, see the truth in the stranger, and the truth we see must be a newly living truth...

Thomas Merton

next
  • Share
  • Subscribe
  • Topics
  • Random
  • Favorite

A Newly Living Truth

Topic: Interfaith Pathways

“God speaks, and God is to be heard, not only on Sinai, not only in my own heart, but in the voice of the stranger… We must, then, see the truth in the stranger, and the truth we see must be a newly living truth, not just a projection of a dead conventional idea of our own–a projection of our own self upon the stranger.”

Thomas Merton (1915-1968)
Christianity
Selected Essays

Merton, Thomas, and Patrick F. O'Connell. Thomas Merton: Selected Essays. Orbis Books, 2013.

Thomas Merton

Patrick O’Connell

The great sin of the West, [Thomas Merton] writes, has been its failure to perceive the divine image in every human being, its refusal to believe that “God speaks, and God is to be heard, not only on Sinai, not only in my own heart, but in the voice of the stranger.” … Merton calls for a respect for otherness, a recognition that the infinite God can and should be imaged in myriad ways: ” We must, then, see the truth in the stranger, and the truth we see must be a newly living truth, not just a projection of a dead conventional idea of our own— a projection of our own self upon the stranger.”

— Excerpt from Thomas Merton: Selected Essays [Edited by Patrick F. O’Connell (Associate professor of English and theology at Gannon University, Erie, Pennsylvania, served as the fifth president of the International Thomas Merton Society and has been editor of The Merton Seasonal since 1998].

Resources

  • Sojourners Magazine: Wisdom and Discontent
  • Thomas Merton: Selected Essays [Edited by Patrick F. O'Connell], Amazon website

Related Quotes

  • In That Same Path , Bhagavad Gita
  • Attend To Others - Huston Smith, The World's Religions
  • Through Synergy - Stephen R. Covey, The 3rd Alternative
  • The Genesis of Hope - Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference
  • A Deep Experience - The Dalai Lama, Toward a True Kinship of Faiths
  • This Empathy - Pope Francis,
  • The Truly Human - Richard Rohr, Living In Deep Time

Copyright © 2017 – 2023 LuminaryQuotes.com About Us