Merton's "Unreal City"

Oh stop the world!   Have you seen the commercial where life comes at you fast?  I felt that way today.  So many major issues internationally, nationally, and local, that affect us all.  No, I don't want to talk about it here. I do want to share something so profound by Thomas Merton.  When you get a chance, read his writings. Although he died in 1968 this particular piece, titled "Unreal City,"  is so appropriate now.

"We are living in the greatest revolution in history- a huge spontaneous upheaval of the entire human race: not the revolution planned and carried out by any particular party, race, or nation, but a deep elemental boiling over of all the inner contradictions that have ever been in man, a revelation of the chaotic forces inside everybody.  This is not something we have chosen, nor is something we are freed to avoid.

This revolution is a profound spiritual crisis of the whole world, manifested largely in desperation, cynicism, violence, conflict, self-contradiction, ambivalence, fear and hope, doubt and belief, creation and destructiveness, progress and regression, obsessive attachments to images, idols, slogans, programs that only dull the general anguish for a moment until it bursts out everywhere in a still more acute and terrifying form.  We do not know if we are building a fabulously wonderful world or destroying all that we have ever had, all that we have achieved!  All the inner force of man is boiling and bursting out, the good together with the evil, the good poisoned by evil and fighting it, the evil pretending to be good and revealing itself in the most dreadful crimes, justified and rationalized by the purest and most innocent intentions."

'Nuff said. type to you later.