In celebration of Thomas Merton's epiphany experience on the corner of 4th and Walnut Streets in Louisville, Kentucky, The Merton Institute invites individuals to share their personal epiphany stories. The personal stories share intimate, transformational stories. For more information or to share your epiphany story, please contact Vanessa at The Merton Institute.
Read the 2012 epiphany stories by following the links on this page to five chapters.
On March 18, 1958, on the corner of Fourth and Walnut, now Fourth and Muhammad Ali in Louisville, Kentucky, Thomas Merton had a vision of oneness with all people. He called this vision an "epiphany."
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth 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. It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race ... there is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
Paradoxically, Merton experienced this transformation when he was out of his everyday monastic life and was immersed in the hustle and bustle of our shopping district - now Fourth Street Live. Merton said of his experience:
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 they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all of the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed...
(Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, New York: Doubleday, 1996)
