Like it or not, we are drawn to the form of fellow or stranger we need. Most of us pursue that impulse as a hobby, never taking the risk to make completeness our vocation. So an insurance man who skydives on weekends is searching for the fellow, which in him takes the form of the need to fall with no control and the need at the last second to save himself with one sure gesture. Yet, it is not the feeding of that need that will save his life, but the search for where that need begins. For acting out the need will often destroy us, while uncovering its source will often preserve us.

Consider the alcoholic who seeks his strange messenger in a bottle, always trying to fill an ever-growing thirst. Here, acting out the need often leads to death, for the source of the thirst is a spiritual emptiness, which drink does not satisfy but deadens. The reason Alcoholics Anonymous has been so astonishing in its success is that it provides painfully empty spirits with the search for the fellow—the other in themselves and in those around them, a search that can join them to the Whole. AA offers people who are broken open a bridge of well-being to God and to each other.

The alcoholic is not alone. We all need a bridge to an otherness that will enliven us. The mechanic, who feeds his family by fixing what others break, takes up scuba diving, the fellow in him needing to breathe beneath the surface. And some search at daybreak watching quietly for rare birds, secretly wanting the simplicity of beak and wing and branch, while others inhabit their solitude, searching the edge of who they are for the threshold of all they are not.

Our search for Wholeness is both inward and outward, into the core of our own existence and into the life of others—be they breathing others, panting others, or flowering others. All in search of a way to join with all of life.

This need to uncover what we have in common with all life constitutes a different form of salvation, not a removal from the earthly as monasticism or asceticism would offer and not an absolution from mistakes as Christianity would have it, but salvation as the self-actualization that removes whatever exists between our daily life and the pulse of being that is the Heartbeat of the Universe.

Thomas Merton describes our search for the unknown other who might complete us in this life as

the full discovery of who (we) really (are) . . . the fulfillment of (our) own God-given powers . . . (and) the discovery that (we) cannot find (ourselves) in (ourselves) alone, but that (we) must find (ourselves) in and through others.