As Long As a Single Person Is Lost, I Am Lost

As long as a single person is lost, I am lost. To try to save myself by getting free from the mass of the damned (Augustine’s massa damnata), 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...

--Thomas Merton