{"id":18310,"date":"2019-09-26T09:30:37","date_gmt":"2019-09-26T13:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=18310"},"modified":"2019-09-26T09:30:37","modified_gmt":"2019-09-26T13:30:37","slug":"we-are-already-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=18310","title":{"rendered":"We Are Already One"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Oneness<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/cac.org\/we-are-already-one-2019-09-26\/\"><strong>We Are Already One<\/strong><\/a><br>\n<strong>Thursday, September 26, 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/UEzCQBwQkdA\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n<p><em>Thomas Merton (1915\u20131968) helped many within and beyond Christianity imagine the oneness at the heart of reality. Catherine Nerney, SSJ, director of the Institute for Forgiveness and Reconciliation at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia, shares insights she\u2019s gathered from Merton\u2019s writings:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>God\u2019s compassion knows no withholding. This God lives in all and all live in God. We belong together; we belong to one another. My personal identification with [Thomas] Merton\u2019s journey to radical oneness is more than a little autobiographical. . . . As a Sister of St. Joseph, the vision of \u201cliving and working that all may be one\u201d is in our DNA; it is our mission, the reason we exist.&nbsp; Something inside me urges me to sniff out this call to unifying love wherever it can be found. In Merton, the scent of the search for oneness is everywhere. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Thomas Merton\u2019s reflective life of contemplation and action found expression in the written word, particularly in his intimate journals, which . . . open up such needed pathways to life in communion, where all are welcomed into God\u2019s compassionate heart, no exceptions, no exclusion. This vision of \u201cthe Oneness we already are\u201d was given to Merton, rather than discovered by him. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Many of us have pondered the powerful lines from Merton\u2019s <em>Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, <\/em>where he shares his experience . . . on a crowded street corner in the midst of an ordinary day: . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In Louisville, at the corner of 4<sup>th<\/sup> [now Muhammad Ali Blvd.] and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. . . . This changes nothing in the sense and value of my solitude, for it is, in fact, the function of solitude to make one realize such things with a clarity that would be impossible to one completely immersed in other cares. . . . My solitude, however, is not my own. It is because I am one with them that I owe it to them to be alone, and when I am alone, they are not \u201cthey\u201d but my own self. There are no strangers. . . . If only we could see each other that way all the time. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and \u201cunderstood\u201d by a peculiar gift. . . . [1]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By the early 1960s, a spiritually mature Merton knew by a contemplative, intuitive grasp that oneness is less a goal toward which life is pressing, as it is a return to the truth in which we have always been held. In October of 1968, just minutes before his death, Merton told a large audience of Asian monks at a Calcutta conference: \u201cMy dear brothers, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. What we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.\u201d [2]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oneness We Are Already One Thursday, September 26, 2019 Thomas Merton (1915\u20131968) helped many within and beyond Christianity imagine the oneness at the heart of reality. Catherine Nerney, SSJ, director of the Institute for Forgiveness and Reconciliation at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia, shares insights she\u2019s gathered from Merton\u2019s writings: God\u2019s compassion knows no withholding. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18310"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18310"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18311,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18310\/revisions\/18311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}