Sadly, Merton’s oft-quoted passage, is as timely, stinging, revealing, and indicting as when he penned it in 1960.

Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ comes uninvited. But because He cannot be at home in it,
because He is out of place in it, and yet He must be in it, His place is with the others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power, because they are regarded as weak,
those who are discredited, who are denied status of persons, who are tortured, bombed and exterminated. With those for whom there is no room,
Christ is present in this world. he is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst. For them, there is no escape even in imagination. They cannot identify with the power structure of a crowded humanity which seeks to project itself outward, anywhere, in a centrifugal flight into the void, to get out there where there is no God, no man, no identity, no weight, no obedient and infinitely expensive machine.

For those who are stubborn enough, devoted enough to power, there remains this last apocalyptic myth of machinery propagating its own kind in the eschatological wilderness of space—while on earth the bombs make room!

But the others< they remain imprisoned in other hopes, and in more pedestrian despairs, despairs and hopes which are held down to earth, down to street level, and to the pavement only; desire to be at least half-human, to taste a little human joy, to do a fairly decent job of productive work, to come home to the family . . . desires for which there is no room. It is in these that He hides Himself, for whom there is no room. (emphasis mine)

~ Thomas Merton, from “The Time of the End Is the Time of No Room,” in Raids on the Unspeakable 

ICON: Mother of God: Protectress of the Oppressed
by Kelly Latimore. SEE work here –> Kelly Latimore