This essay is the second of three talks I recently gave to retreat groups. You’ll find the first, “on stability,” last week. Next week I’ll post the final talk, “on joy.”
I had a friend in seminary who was, you might say, quite a character. His enthusiasm for his latest interest—animal, vegetable, or philosophical—carried him on in a tsunami of breathlessness. He was so changeable and so delighted by his own flightiness that we, his friends, found it easy to dismiss whatever latest craze or opinion had caught his fancy.
His favorite mantra whenever he became caught up in a new enthusiasm was “it conveyed me to myself.” He applied this phrase as equally to a meal at the new ramen place on the corner as to a painting he’d seen at a recent show. It conveyed me to myself.
Much as we all laughed at this friend’s use of superlatives and exclamations, this phrase worked itself into me. I have never forgotten it, and it has come to me in very profound and very ordinary moments. Such, I think, is the heart of any mystical experience or apocalypse, in which the veil that normally lies between our eyes and the divine radiance all around us is lifted, for a fraction of a second, and we know all to be love and to be held in love. Such moments convey us to ourselves. Something outside, something of profound intelligence and otherness, looks us in the eyes, actually sees us, and in that mutual gazing, we are known.
Continue reading “on beauty”