Sacramento Homeless blog

In Thomas Merton's 1961 book The New Man , the Trappist monk delves into the reasons and meaning of Adam’s fall from grace. For Merton, Adam’s (and Eve’s) fall is, in the final analysis, his allowing “unreality” to become a part of his worldview. Adam, you see, wanted to know “evil” or “bad.” He wanted to experience what wasn’t: A lie. Merton tells us, Even the natural and healthy self-love by which Adam’s nature rejoiced in its own full realization could gain nothing by adding unreality to the real. On the contrary, he could only become less himself by being other than what he already was. All this can be summed up in the one word: pride. For pride is a stubborn insistence on being what we are not and never were intended to be. Pride is a deep, insatiable need for unreality, an exorbitant demand that others believe the lie we have made ourselves believe about ourselves. It infects at once man’s person and the whole society he lives in. It has infected all men in the orig...

This common image that suggests that man directly evolved from the monkeys and apes that are exactly like those that exist today is misinformative.   Recently, a friend of mine from the mission tried to press a point that I couldn’t understand. He said that he just didn’t see how we evolved from monkeys. He felt that the very idea was absurd. We are God’s complex creatures, uniquely made in His image , he said. The fact of our being here, on earth, is proof of God and proof of Creationism. As we discussed the issue, I came to understand how he understood the late steps in the evolution of man: that homo sapien had emerged from what were, essentially, modern monkeys, becoming man as we know us, today. Thus, in how he envisioned things, monkeys were static, and, somehow, we are to believe that humans emerged out of that. A vast silliness , he thought. Well, that’s not how our evolution is understood to have happened. Here’s the matter, pithily explained, quoting from t...