"Everyday mystics"
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by campfires, piles of burning autumn leaves, and blazing logs in our home fireplace. I liked to watch the flames dance. Their colors were red, yellow, blue, and white. I found especially evocative when the fire had died down to a pile of embers and ash. All those little dots of brightness breaking through the piles of logs-now-turned-to-ash reminded me of the lights of a miniature city winking at me. They set my imagination on fire.
I was no pyromaniac, just a kid who had the capacity to be fascinated, to be curious enough to look at something for a long time, to enjoy puzzling out what I was seeing and why it was happening. I still am that kid, so curious about life and all of its mysteries. I think I was blessed with this boundless curiosity by my Dad who always was asking questions and found all of life endlessly fascinating. I am grateful for his example. And I am also ever so blessed that he introduced me to the joy of doing photography, including the excitement of processing film and photos in mysterious red-lighted darkrooms. I was fortunate, indeed. The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, one of the most insightful theologians of the 20th century, wrote about that very human sense we have that there is "something more," something "beyond" the horizon, something more even in what is visible. He said that inkling arose from the prompting of the Holy Spirit inviting us to wonder about life. God, he explained, is constantly communicating the gift of God's very Self with us, which is Absolute Mystery and ever remains mystery. Our human intuitions about that mystery, "the more," arise from and by God's own grace, of God's being Absolute Mystery who is ever intimately near. |
In Rahner's theology, "grace" is God's communication of God's Self. Grace is God's unconditional love, a love that is never ever withdrawn from even the most obstinate sinner. And God is so generous with that gift of God's very Self, Love, that God is constantly drenching us in grace.
We need only become receptive and open, attuned to the grace all around us, the grace that animates our very breath, the Love that surrounds us even when we feel otherwise abandoned in life. Rahner says that when we develop our "poetic capacity" through our making and contemplating art, we are practicing and becoming more and more attuned to God's Self communication in our ever-graced world. My Dad, seen praying here (above) in our home parish of St. Thomas the Apostle in Rochester, New York, was attuned to grace. He might not have thought about using that word or speaking in those theological categories, but he was ever open to wonder and awe in the simplest things in life. He may not have had a degree in theology, but he surely would have resonated with Karl Rahner's theology of grace::
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"The world is permeated by the grace of God....The world is constantly and ceaselessly possessed by grace from its innermost roots, from the innermost personal center of the spiritual subject. It is constantly and ceaselessly sustained and moved by God's self-bestowal even prior to the question (admittedly crucial) of how creaturely freedom reacts to this 'engracing' of the world...the question, in other words, of whether creaturely freedom [that's us!] accepts the grace....Whether the world gives the impression...of being imbued with grace in this way, or whether it constantly seems to give the lie to this state of being permeated by God's grace which it has, this in no sense alters the fact that it is so." [Karl Rahner, "Considerations on the Active Role of the Person in the Sacramental Event," Theological Investigations 14 (New York: Seabury, 1973), 166-177.] Rahner also wrote this about us, we who are the Christians of the 21st century: “the Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic,’ one who has experienced ‘something,’ or he will cease to be anything at all.” [Rahner, "Christian Living Formerly and Today," Theological Investigations 7 (New York: Seabury, 1977), 15.]
In the spiritual practice of receiving the light in the art-making act of photography, we can become photo-by-photo more and more "one who has experienced something." In the coming week as you do your photography, think about yourself and all that you see as being drenched with God's very Self, what we call grace. Who knows, you may come to discover you are already an everyday mystic! |