Thomas Merton said that, “Most people never become great saints for the same reason they never become great poets . . . they never get around to being the kind of person that is called for by the times in which they live.” That is, most of us are so busy doing what is in front of us, that we never notice what is happening around us. We are time-conscious, yet oblivious to the times. Historian Arnold Toynbee likens us to someone with his nose pressed against a mirror, trying to see his whole body. We just do not have the right vantage. We need to step away, occasionally, and study the whole picture. What is needed, says Merton, is for us to understand our times and to be called into our circumstances the way that our peers are called into their interests. When we are called, by our times more than by our interests, we will dream and risk and sometimes suffer in extraordinary ways because our charge to keep is “to serve the present age.”
