If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, 
since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.”

~ Annie Dillard

It was the works of Rabbi Abraham Heschel that first dredged up what was previously a subterranean truth I knew but had never articulated: that to be human is to be moved.

To be moved is to be undone, affected, parabled, broken open just a bit or enough or completely, either for a brief moment of vulnerability or for an extended period of time or sometimes for the rest of your life.

When I lived in a sub-rural community billed as the “Gateway to Mt. Rainier” in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, instead of driving the five minutes straight home after work I sometimes would go for long serpentining drives on the back roads beneath Pike’s Peak or out on the plateau alongside the sod and dairy farms of Enumclaw. It gave me a scenery to match two songs that I would turn up loud and listen to on a loop: “Grand Solace” by Magical Strings and “Luz Brillante” by Donna Peña, one an instrumental piece that evokes comfort for sorrow, the other a yearning love song between the human and the Divine. And inexplicably, almost every time, the songs would make me weep. I never knew why exactly. It wasn’t the words. As i said, the first song had no lyrics and half the words on the Peña song I didn’t even understand, my Spanish being basically non-existent.

Who knows why what moves us when. Today I listened to both songs several times. Neither brought me to tears. The closest I could ever get to the source of my tears back then was that the particular alchemy of the music and the moment exposed me more intimately and more clearly somehow to the sheer beauty and steep pain of being alive, the mirth and melancholy of it all, this whole cosmic gig with its taken-for-granted intricacies and the quotidian ecstasies planted in each day: the plaintive cry of the animal in the night, the agony when a child “goes missing,” the diminishment aging brings. Or the enchantment and awe that there is anything at all, let alone love or loss, smiles that start in the eyes and end on the cheeks, blackberries and sunflowers and three-year-olds and hoot owls and the tender tangle of lovers and the sacrament of soup and good conversation, “the leaping greenly spirits of trees/ and” as Cummings says it, “a blue true dream of sky;and . . . everything/ which is natural which is infinite which is yes.”1

In those moments it always felt a bit like I was climbing the steps to the porch of mystery, and in hindsight like the only natural or appropriate thing to do was to cry or, like Moses, take my shoes off, go barefoot. But I was driving. As for the tears, I didn’t do anything to bring them on. They just came on their own, rising from some deep well within me that served as a sanctuary for the pathos the song dislodged.

This is what Rabbi Heschel was on to when he wrote “It is so embarrassing to live” and how “only one response can maintain us: gratefulness for witnessing the wonder, for the gift of our unearned right to serve, to adore, and to fulfill.” But we live in a time too often typified by the shrug of the shoulders and its accompanying refrain “Whatever.” Each of us at some time or another is susceptible, on the one hand, to acting entitled or even cheated or like we are asleep, or on the other hand, to being so fortified, indifferent, or callous that nothing or no one gets in, nothing moves us—neither the wounded man in the ditch as we cross the street to get to our appointment on time or the marvel of the bees’ comb or the salmon in flight or the “red wheel/ barrow/ glazed with rain/ water.”2

Of such a moment one author wrote, “you took a mystery and measured it.” Eventually, I became wise enough not to analyze or measure the tears. What was it that undid me, not once, but repetitively back then? It was something in the music that unraveled the blindfold or the ties that bind, something in the “fragile sequence” of the notes when played that unveiled some ineffable truth that grasped my heart and dropped it down into that deep placeless place where intuition and the really real and our inherent, God-given wisdom meet. The most important truths are knowable but almost always unsayable. The truths alluded to by music, a painting or sculpture or a dance, a poem, dreams, lovemaking, conversation with a friend or a total stranger, nature, mourning and praise, and simple, earthy, elegant ritual which have the capacity and generosity to get us into the neighborhood of mystery and close enough to point us in the direction of home.

What is for us to remember is that whereas we can’t script being moved, we can counter the ignorance and arrogance of a dispassionate macho defendedness by intentionally cultivating a spirit of contemplative susceptibility that makes us more open to being acted upon by that which rightly evokes radical amazement or deep sympathy, enchantment and awe or compassion and mercy, “the duty of delight” as Dorothy Day called it or the duty of justice as spelled out by the Hebrew prophets. Annie Dillard refers to this deliberate way of being in the world as cultivating a healthy poverty and simplicity so that we can see that “the world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand.” For those with eyes to see, let them see. “Prayer,” Heschel proffers, “is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.

I suspect in the end the one great grief, the one regret of those unprepared to die is always discrepancy: the gap between the sheer gift of it all and the paucity of our gratitude, between our opportunity to give ourselves to what matters most and the hours we invested in that which served no deep earthly or ultimate end, between the sudden awareness of “the divinity of what just is” and our anemic response, our lack of humility, appreciation, and joy.

Like the mystic let us be undefended and open enough to be moved to wonder and delight. Like the prophet let us feel deeply what God feels and be moved to deep sympathy and compassionate action.

♦

1 E.E. Cummings, I Thank You God for Most This Amazing
2 William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheel Barrow” in Selected Poems
Heschel quotes are from Man’s Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism. The Dillard quotes are from chapter 2 in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

To listen to “Grand Solace” by Magical Strings click here.

To listen to Donna Peña’s “In Your Meadow, Luz Brillante” click here.