Missing the Thing we Came to See
I spent my freshman year in college utterly failing in my attempt to be an architecture major. I am totally incapable of doing math, which I was dismayed to find makes up a big part of architecture studies. I didn’t know it at the time, because I’d never taken a test, but I was and am somewhat colorblind. This meant that I completely failed every aspect of color theory classes and design classes.
The one thing I found valuable in that whole wasted year was a comment made by the professor in a watercolor and drawing class. He was a landscape painter, and he said he’d go to a beautiful overlook somewhere and park early in the morning. He’d bring food and drink and supplies, and he’d sit and just spend an hour or two looking at the scene before he ever picked up a pencil to begin sketching. He’d spend the whole day there, looking, working on the canvas, stopping, looking some more, and going back to the canvas. He said that it takes active observation and a meditative mind to begin to really see a landscape, and that it is this active seeing which gives real life to the painting. He said that all day long, cars would pull up, people would pile out, snap a photo, and drive off again. What they were doing, he maintained, was missing the very thing they’d come to see.
This really spoke to me and unlocked for me something that had lain dormant since I was in high school and I had visited the National Gallery of Art on the Mall in DC. I had seen a Japanese painting called, “Old Man Enjoying a Magnolia”. It was really a line painting, black brush lines on white paper, in that very sparse Japanese style that is to painting what haiku is to poetry. It was just what the title described: an old man sitting on a stool in front of a tree, looking at it intently the way we would look at a TV.
The idea that we could actively see into the depths of created things and come to know them in a way beyond casual observation lit a spark in me that has never gone out. It is a commonplace in Zen practice, but the Eastern Fathers speak of it a lot, and in their way of speaking, Christ the Logos of God, the primary agent of creation, holds all things in being and gives each created thing a small-L logos of its own, which is its rationale and deepest meaning. The Holy Spirit gives insight to the logos of created things when we live prayerfully.
The cool thing about all of this is that it means that we can truly learn to discern God’s presence and many of his attributes by a close observation of the created order. It shouldn’t be surprising, since St. Paul makes this very point at the beginning of his epistle to the Romans:
“For the invisible things of [God] from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead…” (Rom. 1:20)
And the Psalmist says much the same thing:
“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge.” (Ps. 19:1-2)
Our cultural religion of science tells us that there is nothing in the physical world but physical things. It tells us that while things may play some utilitarian role in an evolutionary scheme, that role and that scheme are not anything but another way of talking about blind chance. The heavens do not declare anything.
It’s a pretty dismal way of thinking, and it probably explains why poll after poll finds that younger people are more and more distressed, anxious, and depressed. Of course, even if younger people were disposed to look for meaning anywhere beyond a screen, polls also show that fewer and fewer of them are spending any real time outdoors. One recent poll conducted by the tourism board of British Columbia, found that Gen Z (born between 1997-2012) spends about 46 minutes a day outside, a great change from previous generations. Richard Luov, in The Last Child in the Woods and its sequel, makes a compelling case for “nature deficit disorder”, which may be wreaking havoc especially among children and youth.
We have, by cutting ourselves off from the created order around us, cut ourselves off from one of the primary channels God uses to communicate to human beings. If this channel is open to pagans and to other non-believers, as asserted by St. Paul, then it is especially fruitful for Christians. The created order is designed to speak to us about God, and the Holy Spirit frequently uses that order and its wonder and even its fearful aspects to give insights into the workings of God “behind the scenes”.
“There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” wrote the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, pointing to the revelatory capacity of nature. But this revelation so frequently falls on blind eyes and deaf ears: the speech and knowledge which the Psalmist finds in the overarching sky are not usually heard or received by the distracted victims of our culture, and we are all impoverished by this.
Hopkins detailed this impoverishment when he wrote:
“Alas for man! day after day may rise,
Night may shade his thankless head,
He sees no God in the bright, morning skies
He sings no praises from his guarded bed.”
This is the reversal of the Psalmist’s experience. But note the description of man’s “thankless head”. One of the great catastrophes of our lack of serious spiritual engagement with the created order is a neglect of thankfulness.
Scientists shake their heads at the wonder of a random, godless universe creating the exact (and very rare and improbable) conditions for life on earth. That we have this miraculous home should be cause for thanksgiving. Even more should be the fact that God has, as it were, hidden himself within his creation, but hidden himself exactly so that he can be found by those who seek him.
In fact, we have been made by God and are held in being by God mainly so that we can find him and return to him. It’s no wonder that Hopkins, who was later ordained to the priesthood, tied so much of God’s revelation of himself, both in nature and in Scripture, to the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Just as God can be discerned in the elements of the world, and in wheat and grapes, in bread and wine, so he can be discerned most clearly in the place where he hides to reveal himself most clearly: in the Eucharist.
The Eucharist is the great Thanksgiving from which all of our thanksgiving flows, and toward which it always tends. You can allow the life which comes to you at Mass to reveal itself to you more generally in the world around you, but you have to stop and look. You have to observe quietly and prayerfully. And you have to be patient. We don’t want to miss the things we were put here to see.
God doesn’t usually work in us dramatically (though the experience of God certainly can lend awe and wonder to seemingly-ordinary things); he usually works in us quietly, and leaves traces of himself for us to follow. When we center our search for God in the created order in the reception of God in the Eucharist, we tie all things together and will find a well of thanksgiving bubbling up in all of our circumstances.
