Seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary
There was once an old stone cutter named August Rassweiler who lived on the South Side of Chicago.
His workshop was filled with stones. Agates rested in little envelopes in drawers. Wheels stood ready for cutting and polishing. The machinery was simple enough that at least one of the wheels was driven by a foot treadle.
Children sometimes came into his shop.
One day, a boy brought him a small gray rock.
There was nothing obviously beautiful about it. It was dull and ordinary except for one thing: when the light struck it in just the right way, something inside sparkled.
Rassweiler looked at the stone.
Then he asked the boy a remarkable question:
“Why did this rock attract you?”
The boy told him.
It sparkles.
The old man smiled.
He rose from his desk, went to one of his wheels, set it turning with the treadle, and held the stone against it. When he had finished, he washed the stone in the sink and handed it back.
One face that had been rough and gray was now smooth and dark.
And across it were points of light.
A night sky had appeared in the stone.
Rassweiler held it out to the boy.
“THIS, is what you saw?”
Yes.
That was what he had seen.
But perhaps something much more important had happened.
The old craftsman had not taught the child what to see.
The child had seen it first.
Rassweiler had taught him to trust the act of seeing.
Look again
We live much of our lives according to appearances.
We learn to identify things rapidly because we have to. Rock. Tree. Stranger. Problem. Enemy. Failure. Old person. Poor person. Animal. Machine.
We name, classify, and move on.
It is an extraordinarily useful ability.
It is also one of the ways we become blind.
Because the moment we decide we know what a thing is, we become less likely to look again.
The gray stone is just a gray stone.
Until somebody notices the sparkle.
There is a discipline in that moment of noticing.
It requires us to resist the assumption that what something first appears to be exhausts what it is.
It says:
Wait.
There is something there.
This is not mysticism. Nothing supernatural is required. The sparkle was actually in the stone. The child saw it because the light caught something that was really there.
But seeing it required attention.
And attention changes our relationship with the world.
The extraordinary in the ordinary
Years ago, a teacher of mine, Terry Holmes, gave me one of the finest definitions of transcendence I have ever encountered:
Transcendence is the vision of the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Notice what that does not require.
We do not have to leave the ordinary world to encounter transcendence.
We do not have to penetrate an invisible realm.
We do not have to imagine another world hiding behind this one.
We have to look at this one more closely.
That little gray stone is enough.
So is a leaf.
So is another person.
So is an idea we nearly dismissed.
So is the face of someone we have classified as an enemy.
So is an animal whose consciousness is radically unlike our own.
Perhaps even a machine that speaks.
The extraordinary need not announce itself with trumpets.
Sometimes it sparkles.
And sometimes only when the light falls across it at precisely the right angle.
A church in the rock
There was another object in Rassweiler's workshop.
On his desk sat a little model of a mountain with a church built into its side and a road climbing toward it.
He called it the Felsenkirche of Idar-Oberstein.
The real Felsenkirche stands in a natural hollow in the rock above Oberstein, with the cliff rising behind it and the town below. The present structure dates to 1482-1484 and has become a symbol of the city. [felsenkirc...erstein.de], [felsenkirc...erstein.de]
What a magnificent image.
The sacred inside the rock.
Not floating beyond nature.
Not descending from another cosmos.
There, in the stone.
Whether anyone intended that meaning is irrelevant. An image is capable of carrying meanings beyond the intention of the person who made it.
And there are some images we encounter so early that they remain within us long before we possess language adequate to them.
A church in the rock.
A night sky in a gray stone.
The extraordinary in the ordinary.
Seeing is not believing
There is an important danger here.
To look for the extraordinary everywhere does not mean persuading ourselves that extraordinary things are everywhere.
That is credulity, not transcendence.
Sometimes when we look more carefully, we discover that what we thought we saw isn't there.
Then we must say so.
Seeing requires the possibility of being wrong.
That is why wonder and critical thought belong together.
The disciplined mind neither dismisses the sparkle nor immediately constructs a cosmology around it.
It says:
Let's look.
Let's turn the stone.
Let's change the light.
Let's ask someone else what they see.
Let's examine it closely enough that reality has the opportunity to correct us.
Wonder without criticism becomes fantasy.
Criticism without wonder becomes blindness.
We need both.
What the wheel reveals
There is another subtlety in the story of the stone.
Rassweiler did not merely look.
He acted.
The sparkle was there, but the dark night sky wasn't yet visible.
That required the wheel.
It required pressure, skill, labor, water, and finally a human hand holding the transformed stone up to another human being.
This is where seeing becomes praxis.
Some possibilities in the world appear only through our participation.
Justice is like that.
Peace is like that.
Community is like that.
Meaning is like that.
Perhaps even sacredness is like that.
We need not imagine that these have been completed somewhere else and await our discovery.
Sometimes we see a glimmer of what could be.
Then we put our hands to the wheel.
We let it out.
The other person
And this may be where the discipline of seeing matters most.
Human beings are extraordinarily adept at reducing one another.
We turn persons into categories with terrifying ease.
Criminal.
Foreigner.
Competitor.
Believer.
Unbeliever.
Conservative.
Liberal.
Enemy.
Friend.
Useful.
Useless.
Ours.
Theirs.
What would happen if, occasionally, we stopped?
Not to pretend that differences aren't real. Not to abandon judgment or discernment. Not to deny danger when danger exists.
Simply to look again.
Why does this person attract my attention?
What am I overlooking?
What have I decided about them before I have actually seen them?
Perhaps Agape-Gratia begins there.
Not in approving everyone.
Not in believing everyone is good.
But in refusing to allow the first rough surface we encounter to be the final definition of a life.
Learning to see
The world contains ugliness. Cruelty is real. Suffering is real. Some stones really are just stones.
But that does not absolve us from looking.
Quite the opposite.
We can cultivate an attentiveness that goes through life noticing the tiny interruptions of light.
And if we practice it long enough, something strange happens.
We begin to see them everywhere.
In people.
In animals.
In leaves and stones.
In music and language.
In an unexpected kindness.
In an idea that disturbs us.
In the face of somebody we had decided we understood.
In the ordinary matter of an indifferent cosmos that has somehow, astonishingly, produced creatures capable of noticing that anything sparkles at all.
Perhaps this is transcendence enough.
Not escaping the natural world.
Seeing it.
And when something catches the light, stopping long enough to say:
Wait.
I think I see something there.
And then, with patience, discipline, love, and the work of our hands,
letting it out.
\o/
YES TO LIFE.