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| Damsel fly |
On the surface people are different. But the deeper you go inside people, the more we are all the same. (See, e.g., my ontological polarities.)
People who live on the surface of life and never allow God to go deep in them dwell on differences. People who allow God to search them out in the deep waters of their heart (Prov. 20:5) emphasize sameness.
Surface people have a message for no one but their own selves; depth people have a message for all people.
Everyone, for example, is mortal. All face death. 125 years from now everyone now alive will be dead, replaced by an entirely new population of people. Our mortality is an ontological condition that is universal. While it's true that teens tend to have immortality complexes, even the immortality complex is a way of dealing with the ontology of death.
People who allow God to search them out are brought face to face with cross-cultural, cross-gender, cross-ethnic, and cross-temporal realities like death. In Raids on the Unspeakable Thomas Merton writes: "The contemplative must assume the universal anguish and the inescapable condition of mnortal man. The solitary, far from enclosing himself in himself, becomes every man. He dwells in the solitude, the poverty, the indigence of every man." (18)
Here the Christian contemplative, like Merton was, becomes a voice for all humanity.
