Practicing the Presence (continued)

And what are we called to be present to? Well, to everything and to everyone. I should say to each thing and to each one in its own unique, precious particularity. The poet David Ignatow describes the importance of this capacity to be present to the particular and the immediate in his poem, “Each Stone.”

Each stone its shape
each shape its weight
each weight its value
in my garden as I dig them up
for Spring planting,
and I say, lifting one at a time,
There is joy here
in being able to handle
so many meaningful
differences.

To understand contemplation as “a long, loving look at the real,” to borrow William McNamara’s definition, is to suggest that before experiencing things as allusions to the divine, we must first simply experience and appreciate them as they are. The “divinity of just what is” as James Finley refers to it in his exigesis of a seminal passage of Thomas Merton in New Seeds of Contemplation. This is why Pablo Neruda wrote odes to his socks and to the lemon and to a chestnut on the ground as well as to sadness. This is why the poet William Carlos Williams maintains that

so much depends 
upon
a red wheel
barrow 
glazed with rain 
water
beside the white 
chickens

because chickens and rain water and socks and sadness, as well as God, are real. And prayer and holiness and presence are a sham if they are divorced from the real.

To the contemplative, as well as to the poet, nothing is incidental. It is after this that the practice of beholding, appreciating, and being moved by “so many meaningful differences” —a memory or a birdsong or a stranger’s sad eyes— becomes indirectly a way of being present to God, for all things are held within the being and presence of God.

The incarnation— God’s active, loving, and saving presence embodied and made available to us in Jesus, is an invitation to be similarly embodied and present in our own living. To practice the presence of God is both to be conscious, alive and responsive to the living presence of God, and to be present to life, the natural world, others, and ourselves in the way that God is present to us. For Christian’s, the way God is present to us is most fully embodied in Jesus of Nazareth who is Real Presence and who saw, called forth, and celebrated with joy the singular uniqueness of each person, place, or thing and reveled in all the meaningful differences.

Jesus, and all genuine mystics, knew the relationship between EACH and ALL. Seeing, engaging with, and appreciating the uniqueness of each person, creature, or thing inevitably connects us to everything and reveals to us the intimate, dynamic connection between all life – between loving a person and loving a rock, a cloud, a tree.

PRACTICE:

Today, be especially aware and appreciative of all the meaningful differences in your midst.

NB! I use the terms mystic/contemplative and mystical/contemplative interchangeably.