Our contemporary life is beset with many a challenge. Some thinkers and psychologists believe that one of the major challenges of today is perhaps the despair of the successful. In our relentless and restless search for the lofty, the glamorous, and the spectacular, we miss the miracle of the ordinary around us. It often happens in life that the intensities of the present destroy the wonderfulness of our ordinary life and the simple beauties of the world in which we live. Under the influence of scientific theorizing, persons fail to experience the mystery of things. When matter and spirit are split asunder, everydayness is no longer a vessel of mystery; it is a source of ennui, discouragement, boredom. We become victims of a kind of air-conditioned unhappiness and personal uneasiness. This personal uneasiness is a symptom, which perhaps reflects a more widespread cultural discomfort. Such tedium and restlessness reflect the limits of scientific materialism, its inability to find mystery, transcendence, or presence within our existential context. This makes a life of the spirit almost impossible. However, individual scientists like Albert Einstein acknowledge that awareness of the beauty and mystery of the universe is an important element in their scientific discoveries. Thus, even in terms of science, we need to continue to live in an age of awe and wonder, where mystery is a dimension of all knowing. When the stuff of daily life ceases to point beyond itself, we have lost the occasion for the only encounter with the sacred possible to humankind.
Our faith can be a tremendous means to sustain us in conditions of such apparent hopelessness and restlessness. When faith is seen primarily as the knowing of abstract truths rather than the readiness to see and hear God in the concrete, we may know some things about God, and yet never know God. The challenge of today’s spirituality is to live our present existence with this kind of appreciation of the unique and individual gifts of creation. We have to realize that the particulars of life are vessels of grace and the entire order of things is sacred. No wonder, Thomas Merton could declare with rock-like conviction: “The gate of heaven is everywhere.” Fragments of truth and beauty lie in every path and fill every horizon. To the mystics, the eternal, fathomless mystery of creation spoke from the very heart of creation. The Romantics had the capacity to be stirred by nature, to feel one with the vibrations of wonder. The poet William Blake could perceive and proclaim with a burning zeal: “To see a world in a grain of sand” is to “hold infinity in the palm of your hand.”
The renowned theologian Karl Rahner states that in such a vision, “the very commonness of everyday things harbors the eternal marvel and silent mystery of God and his grace.” We first experience beauty usually in the things that surround us. Sometimes in sensible things, other times in the transparency of a look or a glance that reveals a soul full of light. Whenever we encounter the beautiful, our hearts awaken, stir, quicken, thrill because there is an extraordinary magic power in the least thing: a tiny plant burgeoning in spring, the dawn melting away the darkness, a shade of the sky at a given moment of the day, a snow-capped mountain, the reassuring coolness of the dusk, a disarming smile of a child, the distant, blue, dreamy outline of the hills in dialogue with the sky – a beauty beyond the artistry of the mortals - the sunsets matchless in their far flung colours, a calm, cold night brilliant with star shine – all such things can ravish the heart and bid us to succumb to the dancing symphony and rhythm that envelop us from every corner. They are a small taste of Paradise lost on earth where so many things are torn and tearing. They are little oases in the vast wasteland of the world.
The divine is the mystery, which pervades and encompasses human existence, the grace and foundation of our life. Such a vision is a gift which sustains a radical trust that this life, with all of its tears and laughter, its joys and sorrows, its loves and hates, its war and peace, is really worth living; and this world, with all its sham, drudgery, the noisy confusion and broken dreams, is still a beautiful world. At times we experience this transcendence simply as the aura of mystery or a contact with inexpressible depths, as when we are part of a magnificent musical production or hear a moving piece of poetry. However, such experiences point to the One who is found in the depths and limits of our life. In faith we encounter the Mystery, the Transcendent, the Unknown within ordinary events. Karl Rahner describes this capacity of the ordinary to reveal the universal mystery. According to him, faith reveals that these ordinary things “have unutterable depths, that they are indeed heralds of eternity, always vastly greater than they seem, like drops of water that mirror the immense vault of heaven.” Contemplation of the visible can put us in touch with the invisible, the divine depth in all created things. This is also the vision of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins who passionately sought the living God in all things. He found Him in the miraculous singularity and uniqueness of all things. The particularity of each thing in creation fascinated Hopkins, beyond the veil of appearance. He saw all life as sacramental.
Evelyn Underhill passionately pleads for a “sympathetic eye for simple beauty.” Authentic life is endangered if we withdraw from the things of the earth into a Platonic world of ideas and forms; it is also jeopardized if we see only the finite realities themselves, living our lives on the surface of Mystery. In such a situation, a child can be a teacher of humanity. John Henry Newman relates that as a child he imagined that behind every flower there was an angel who made it grow and blossom. Later in life he wrote, “The reality is more profound. It is God Himself who can be discovered in the beauty of visible things.” A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. Rachel Carson considers this sense of wonder as a unique gift that should be sustained as an indestructible one; she deems it as an “unfailing antidote” against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupations with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.
In an age of rampant mechanization and unbridled material pursuits, it is perhaps high time that we learn to nourish and nurture that common thread within the human fabric that responds to beauty and wonder. We need to cultivate a feeling for the ordinary, a heart that is attuned to the vibrations of the miracle of the ordinary, the harmonies of being, and strive for a transformation of the heart – a transplantation of the heart – and begin a newness of life, like little children, at the very beginning.
Fr. T. C. Joseph Sdb
Salesian College, Dimapur
