At our house we have one of those old analog televisions that would have stopped working by now except for the fact that we have cable. I spent some time recently, however, in a house that has high definition TV. The picture was beautiful, but I was bothered by one thing. When I turned from the sharp display in front of me to look around the room and out the window, I noticed that the real world was not nearly as high resolution as what I was seeing on the television.
Am I the only one who has had this experience? I wondered: Do my glasses need changing? No. Was the sharpness set too high on the television? I don’t think so.
I think the problem is that real life just doesn’t happen in high definition.
Part of the beauty of the world around us is that human faces do not reveal every flaw to the casual glance, and objects are not always distinct from each other.
Outside my window right now I see live oak branches covered with resurrection ferns and draped with Spanish moss. The whole effect is one of graceful softness, highlighted and sharpened here and there by splotches of sunlight that make leaves, fronds, and moss glow. In spots, the details are completely overwhelmed by the brilliance of light.
If every green frond were distinct from the other and from the branch, if each gray strand of moss in shadow appeared just as clearly defined as the ones in gentle sunlight, much of the beauty would be lost.
In our own lives as well, we move from day to day in a state of blessed blurriness, though we may often long for a higher resolution monitor, so to speak.
- The future is unknown in its details – though we know, through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, that there is a happy ending to the human story.
- In many cases, it is not even clear to us what our next step should be – we have to trust in the guidance and good will of God as we navigate the ambiguities of life.
- The deepest truths of human existence are in the form of paradox and mystery – and when we try to codify them in high-definition propositions, we may take pride in our certainty and forget the mystery inherent in what we were attempting to clarify.
I find this quotation from Gerald May helpful:
When we were children, most of us were good friends with mystery. The world was full of it and we loved it. Then as we grew older, we slowly accepted the indoctrination that mystery exists only to be solved. For many of us, mystery became an adversary; unknowing became a weakness. The contemplative spiritual life is an ongoing reversal of this adjustment. It is a slow and sometimes painful process of becoming “as little children” again, in which we first make friends with mystery and finally fall in love again with it. And in that love we find an ever increasing freedom to be who we really are in an identity that is continually emerging and never defined. We are freed to join the dance of life in fullness without having a clue about what the steps are.
Gerald G. May, M.D., The Dark Night of the Soul (New York: Harper, 2003), 132-3.
The obscurity is blessed, because we are indeed dwelling in divine Mystery, and that is where we are meant to be. It is there that we find goodness, love, mercy, and peace. It is there that we “join the dance of life in fullness without having a clue about what the steps are.”
Yooo great job with this post! LOL it did something for me.