The Gate of Heaven is everywhere

Thomas Merton had an epiphany on the corner of 4th and Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky, about March 18, 1958.

What especially struck me was the head of the gnome at the base of the plaque. How very Mertonesque!

I visited there once, but didn't have my camera. 

Two good friends, who were he in Honduras in December, just passed there and sent me a photo. I love it. Who cannot laugh seeing the gnome at this sacred spot. 

But there's even more. A woman passed by asking help for forty cents to pay for her bus fare.

"The Gate of Heaven is everywhere."

Here's the text of Merton's encounter in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, pp. 141-142

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 was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream.... 

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud.... It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.... 

There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.... There are no strangers! ... If only we could see each other [as we really are] all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.... I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.... 

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely. 

I have no program for this seeing. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.