Bridges, Paths, and Waters; Dirt, Sky, and Mountains. N. Thomas Johnson-Medland
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same with dirt, and sky, and mountains. Their silence harbors testimony to the mysteries of creation and the beauty of created and dappled things. They own a deepness that may not be named, but may clearly be felt.
I have often pondered beside these features in our world; and pondered about them. I have sat for hours on end staring at them and surrounding their essence with my “self”; and surrounding my “self” with them. I have put my feeling into them and pulled them back into me. I have reached out to feel what it is to be a bridge, a path, water, dirt, sky, or a mountain. I have imagined their place in my life—in our lives.
There is an overarching depth to their individual presence. There is an abysmal stillness to them that calls us out of ourselves into the open. Hidden in the apparent motionlessness of each is the ability to move things. Whether carrying things on her back, along her banks, like a river or the enabling of simple passage—one side to another—one place to another like a path or bridge, the object that seems so sure and immovable facilitates movement.
Things that appear to be still like this are in constant motion. It may only be the motion of slow and steady growth, or of the terrestrial turning on an axis, but things that appear still are moving. T.S. Eliot writes about it as a still point that exists at the center of things that are turning. Though this appears to be the other side of the conversation about all things moving, it brings us around full circle. There is stillness in motion and motion in stillness.
This conundrum drawls out my interest. These images elicit my adoration and awe. A place of such motion is a place of utter stillness. It is odd; stillness and motion being in the same place at once. As with other conundrums—such as an echoing silence or a grand humility—time and space are spanned with little care for resolution and closure.
With dirt, sky, and mountain the riddle is no different. Each appears to be stoically still and immovable, but the changes of weather and time move them all about. The seasons move across and through them and alter their shape and place—removing any true sense of stillness. Time and space converge and transport all things beyond what they merely appear to be. That is the depth all things have. Perhaps one of the mysteries of creation itself is that things are more than they appear.
There is another sense that draws me out. It is the sense that these things mirror or image deeper more majestic truths in us. They speak to us about who we are. Paths and waters start at a point far away; a place we cannot see. They move away from that unseen place and move closer to us—to our seen place.
Moving from the invisible to the visible is a pattern I notice in my interior life and the lives of those I know. Feelings and responses emerge from within us and we are not able to trace their winding banks to discover their origins—not at first. As time goes on and we trace their path we may find out just where they come from and what gives them birth.
The dirt, sky, and mountains are no different. They exhibit this characteristic depth. They mirror our lives in some way. When we look at these wonders of God, a line is drawn out from our eyes to a point of observation in one of these—our sisters of creation. We connect with things outside of ourselves. We sense an “us-ness” to creation and at the same time a “not-usness”. It is at once familiar yet unknown.
The process is not complete. Somehow, something in these sisters of creation undauntingly elicits a spark of awe, wonder, and radical amazement. Somehow, in the relationship of discovery we find a familiarity and a respect. The beauty of these objects of nature triggers a line to be drawn back to us. This one goes right into our heart and causes us to shudder meeting our soul on the way. How did that start? Who parented that notion? What is the abode of that thought? Like Job, we stand aghast. Not only do we connect with things, but also we somehow bring them consumptively back into ourselves.
All this talk of where things came from reminds me of our notions about the origins of space and time. Our best guesses and our most ancient myths try to piece together how we have come out of the unseen; how things emerge out of nothingness. It is the “mysterium tremendum” of Rudolf Otto, a great mystery wrapped up in numinous dread, awe, and awe-fullness—something immense coming out of the darkness.
This great mystery is our depths crying out to the depths of all we experience in an attempt to gain some insight from the echoes of our crying. We yearn and long into space and time. We weave tales we imagine to be true from what we think we sense. We desire for meaning and answers in every step and every moment. Nature plays the role of the great object in the of echolocation of being. Perhaps nature looks to us for the same.
We create stories about immense views of beauty and vistas of glory. We try to make sense out of the rapture we feel when in the presence of mystery. All of that “making sense” is of lesser value than the moment of wonder itself. It dilutes wonder. We want to know what we have to offer each other in this relationship called life. We try to put this into words and then unpack the words for slogans we can repeat, small little morsels we can hold onto.
This great mystery begs the questions wrapped around the big bang or the point of creation as an idea. This mystery of things moving out and away from their point of origin, moving toward us and becoming more visible, more solid, creates the question, “If we go back, do we eventually see all things merging into one? Behind that, is the VOID at this place?” Is their a place from which God uttered all things into being, a still small place hidden in time? Is there an alpha point, an omega point?
What if we go back to the moment before the WORD is uttered at creation. Before anything emerges from the darkness, would we see a pre-eternal oneness of all that is? Is there a visible, conjoined something? Or, is the very question ridiculous because there would be no matter created to be visible and so there could be no seeing?
These are the sorts of begging our heart does in the face of grandeur and beauty and silence. When we stand before a mountain, our soul cries out “Tell me about how things are”. As we stand in quiet stillness observing the view, everything in us is in motion for an answer. Everything within is reaching out from us. We call this dense mass of paralyzing feeling “awe”.
Awe is a unique creature. It has sisters. Abraham Joshua Heschel has named her sisters “wonder”, and “radical amazement” (Man is Not Alone—Farrar, Strauss, Giroux). Matthew the Poor called this territory “ecstasy”—from the Greek Fathers’ teachings on “ekstasis” (Orthodox Prayer Life—Saint Vladimir’s Press). However we call it, it is that overwhelming feeling in the heart, that immense presence in the soul that makes us feel so infinitesimally small (dwarfed by the view of the Grand Canyon or the Pleiades) that we feel immense (somehow at one with the Spirit, or all creation). Here is another riddle. Called into smallness, we become grand.
This conundrum of being tiny enough to be everything is exactly what makes awe such a transforming gift of the Spirit. The poems of Rumi are full of this “noticing” of awe that pushes people into union with the Creative Father. Someone may be sitting at a table drinking tea and the note of a flute hits them and awakens them to some hidden mystery. Someone walking down a path may see a rose and all of the sudden—in an instant—everything they have been living “makes sense” for just a second. These flashes of understanding are wrapped-up in awe and they are “Gifts of the Spirit” and they call us into union with the Divine Father.
Nature too lures us into this divine trap. As an instrument of the Spirit, creation beseeches us to look and interact. We start to ponder and to surmise, the next thing we know we are overwhelmed by the depth of creation and snared by the idea that we stand as nothingness against the grand scheme. Mystery subsides and a sense of union and connectedness arises. We feel at one with all God has done. We are lulled into this place against all reason. We are often brought into our heart against our mind’s wishes to figure it all out.
The lives of the mystics were really lives of learning to cope with this awe. The scent of a flower on the wind took our brother Francis of Assisi to great heights of ecstasy in the Merciful One. The sight of a sunrise moved our sister Theresa to feel connected with the Creator. The sound of the rushing falls—over the rocks and into the pools—lured Hildegard into being lost in the great ground of our being.
Awe, ecstasy, wonder, and amazement make us small enough that