"There is no separating 'my' pain, suffering, limitation, lostness, etc., from that of others. As long as a single person is lost, I am lost. To try to save myself by getting free from "the damned," and becoming good by myself, is to be both damned and absurd - as well as antichrist. Christ descended into hell to show that He willed to be lost with the lost, in a certain sense emptied so that they might be filled and saved, in the realization that now their lostness was not theirs but His. Hence the way one begins to make sense out of life is taking upon oneself the lostness of everyone - and then realizing not that one has done something or 'made sense,' but that one has simply entered into the stream of realization. The rest will work out by itself, and we do not know what that might mean."
Thomas Merton, 1966
Photo: A singed Ponderosa Pine, Fern Lake Burn; Rocky Mountain National Park, CO; December 21, 2012
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