{continued from Jan 12, 2013}

When we practice the presence of God as Brother Lawrence advises, 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. 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. 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.

Pax ~ Dan