The Cistercian monk and writer Thomas Merton entered the Kentucky Abbey of Gethsemane in 1941.  On March 18, 1958, in a rare departure from the cloister, Merton had a profound revelation.  He writes,
“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 fake self-isolation in a special world… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being a human person, a member of a race in which God became incarnate.  As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are.  And if only everybody could realize this!  But it cannot be explained.  There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”  Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 1966.
Merton was running from the world when he retreated into the private cloister of a monastery.  He was disgusted with the busyness of people “frantically living lives of self-degradation and destruction.”  But the monastic life allowed Merton to grow, and through meditation and contemplation, he came to realize that it is not possible to leave the world in any real sense.  
Can this time of social distancing, of restricted living and self-isolation become a monastic grace for us?  Might we wake from our “dream of separateness?”  How long have we bought into “the illusion” that we are all different?  What if, like Merton, we could suddenly see the secret beauty of people’s hearts, the “core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes?”