Living Sacramentally

It is said that only in love does one see things as they really are.  Robert Spaemann, "The Paradoxes of Love", at 19 ("Love is the becoming real of the other for me." [quoting Valentin Tomberg].)  If God is love, then to see reality is to see things and experience life in the dimension of love, the Godly dimension.  Ubi amor, ibi oculus.  Ibid, 17. ("Love lets the beloved appear in a glow that nobody else perceives.  When this glow slowly fades into the ordinariness of everyday life, then this does not mean that now, slowly, reality appears as it is, but rather the opposite.  The lover will retain the memory of the one-perceived glow as the apostles retained the memory of the transfiguration of Christ; and he will know that then true reality was shown to him, the 'thing in itself,' which, as Kant says, is the thing as it appears to an intellectus archetypus.")

I had an experience of this sort while running last Friday in Fremont, Ohio.  We stopped at a Day's Inn on our way east.  I got up and jogged in the crisp early morning along a country road, noticing:  cows gazing at me with blank, sad eyes; rows of green sprigs of winter wheat in a field I jogged through; a UPS truck traveling along the ribbon of road perpendicular to my path to an unknown destination; ice glazed on a puddle of water next to my feet; a small factory with a parking lot full of cars, no one in sight; two flowers in a picture frame in my motel room; a statue of an angel on the front lawn of a farm house.

I could go on; I felt pleased to "see" these things.  It was lovely to do so.  They spoke to me. Not as sacred in themselves, but as icons of the creation, God's gift, in love, to the world.

At the Wheaton College Christmas concert a week ago Saturday, a performer recited a poem by Richard Wilbur, "A Christmas Hymn."  It also depicts how things in the world can "speak" in the aura created by Christ's love.

A Christmas Hymn

And as he rode along, they spread their cloaks on the road. As he was drawing near—already on the way down the Mount of Olives—the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”  Luke XIX. 39-

A stable-lamp is lighted
Whose glow shall wake the sky;
The stars shall bend their voices,
And every stone shall cry,
And every stone shall cry,
And straw like gold shall shine;
A barn shall harbor heaven,
A stall become a shrine.

This child through David's city
Shall ride in triumph by;
The palm shall strew its branches,
And every stone shall cry,
And every stone shall cry,
Though heavy, dull, and dumb,
And like within the roadway
To pave his kingdom come.

Yet he shall be forsaken,
And yielded up to die;
The sky shall groan and darken,
And every stone shall cry,
And every stone shall cry
For stony hearts of men:
God's blood upon the spearhead,
God's love refused again.

But now, as at the ending,
The low is lifted high;
The stars shall bend their voices,
And every stone shall cry,
And every stone shall cry
In praise of the child
By whose descent among us
The worlds are reconciled.

- Richard Wilbur

In love the very stones will speak, will cry out, as nature did to me, in joy, last Friday.  I think of Ps. 19:3 where "day after day pours forth speech. . . "  My prayer is, "Speak, Lord, your servant is listening."