Weekly Soul, Week 2 - Pausing
Today's meditation from Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living by Dr. Frederic Craigie.
-2-
Miracles… seem to
me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly
near to us from afar off but upon our own perception being made finer, so that
for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us
always.
Willa Cather
To behold the wondrous miracles of
everyday life you have to see.
Consider the miracle of moveable wall
sections. For tens of thousands of years of human history, people created
dwelling structures with portals for coming and going. They covered these
portals with weavings or bear hides, which gave them some visual privacy and
cut down the wind and cold, but were not particularly helpful in securing their
homes against intruding animals or marauding neighbors. Then, somewhere,
someone invented the hinge. With the hinge, everything changed. People could
now make their portals into doorways when they wished to come and go and make
their portals into walls when they wanted security. An object of wonder,
indeed.
I’m sure you can find countless examples
in the built environment and in the natural world, things that complete the
sentence, “When you really think about it, isn’t it incredible that…” Last
summer, I had FaceTime calls with my Oregon family from the UK, 4600 miles away,
instantaneous, rich in sound, and visual clarity. Skyscrapers are now 2000 feet
tall. People have flown to the moon. Flocks of birds somehow know to make
instantaneous turns together. Forests regenerate after devastating fires. People
are endowed with emotions that give them vital information about how to
navigate through the world.
It is in our ability to pause, to really
see these things that are “about us always,” that the ordinary becomes
miraculous.
How is it that our perception may be made
finer? It is a practice, a discipline. A spiritual practice. Stopping to
examine everything that we tend to take for granted wouldn’t leave much time
for living our lives, but a practice of pausing, sometimes, to really see and
hear opens our hearts to the wonder that is all around.
The spiritual practice of pausing can be
intentional. As you read this, pause to look around. Perhaps, think back over
your experiences in the last day or two. What do you notice that makes you
smile in wonder?
Or, the spiritual practice of pausing can
mean choosing to sit with the wonder in something that comes to you as a
surprise. Putting together Legos with children (a universal experience among
the parents and grandparents whom I know), it occurred to me that it is
miraculous how the company creates these little blocks with such precise
tolerances that they are easy for little hands to put together and pull apart yet hold securely once attached. This makes me smile, too.
Reflection
- Pause once or twice a day to
really see something ordinary and allow the miracle—the object of wonder—to
appear.
- Do this for a few days. What
do you notice about your sense of wonder? What difference does this make
for you?
Author
Willa
Cather (1873-1947)
was an American writer, poet and editor, who is best known for her novels of
the West in the early years of European settlement. She was born in Virginia
and moved with her family to the Nebraska frontier in 1883, being amazed and
unsettled by the vast and barren landscape she encountered. As she began to
write, her career took her to New York where she served for several years as
managing editor of McClure’s Magazine, whose authors included Joseph
Conrad and Henry James. The third volume of her Prairie Trilogy, One of Ours, was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize in 1922.
The quotation comes from her 1927 novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, the
story of a young Catholic bishop who is called to establish a diocese in the newly formed territory of New Mexico. It is spoken by the bishop to his friend
Joseph. The complete quotation is that “Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest…” This detail is appropriate to
the novel, but it seems to me that the idea is not limited to the Christian
tradition, and I have presented it in the form in which it is commonly cited.
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