Too Deep for Tuesday?

As part of my campaign to maintain sanity, I receive a weekly email from an organization that promotes the work of Thomas Merton, a contemplative monk.  Here is this week’s:

The Merton Reflection for the Week of October 9, 2006

“As long as we are on earth, the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because this love is the resetting of a Body of broken bones.  Even saints cannot live with saints on this earth without some anguish, without some pain at the differences that come between them.
There are two things which men can do about the pain of disunion with other men.  They can love or they can hate.
Hatred recoils from the sacrifice and the sorrow that are the price of this resetting of bones. It refuses the pain of reunion.”

From New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton.
(New York, New York: New Directions,1961) Page 72.

A Thought to Remember:
“We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.”
From Love and Living by Thomas Merton, edited by Naomi Burton Stone and Br. Patrick Hart,                 (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985) Page 27.

It struck me like lightning.  The resetting of a body of broken bones is an incredible image of  human communities. But the part that really stopped me in my tracks was the idea that pain and disconnection are a given and the choice I have to make is love or hate.  Hatred recoils, refusing the pain of reunion.

Well, it is worth contemplating.  The more we learn about how people learn, the more we find out that much of it is done through interaction with other humans.  And we live and work in communities.  I read this thing in the New York Times this weekend about elephants and their incredibly complex and deep and intimate relationships with the community (and of course how humans destroyed that before we understood it) and it has been really bothering me. (You can read it here). So I find my self thinking (too much?) today about how we are all a little broken, and that we really need to have strong communities around us, and that, instead of promising us no pain, it actually promises us a lifetime of pain.   But also laughs and accomplishments and good jokes and great music…