A Newly Living Truth

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].