The physical and spiritual

I have for a long time believed that reality is often not intuitive. Like the fact that from a nuclear physicists point of view, the solid world that we inhabit – the one where we bump into walls and jump up and down on hard floors – is mostly empty space. That is to say, the atomic and molecular material that makes up our solid world is mostly the space between particles. Not intuitive.

So it was that I was breathless with delight last week with an image that came to me courtesy of Krista Tippet and the late Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue. I was fairly old – into my teens – before I actually saw an ocean beach. I had seen the Great Lakes – but that's not the same thing. We know of the spiritual power of the ocean. Our bishop has talked about it the past few years. I have known for years of poets and story tellers who found their inspiration sitting on the ocean's shore. So much is common place. Mr. O'Donohue gave me a startling image, pulling together the "material" and the "spiritual" world. We so easily think of the "spiritual" realities somehow inhabited the physical, material world. Like we think of the soul inhabiting the body of a person.

Mr. O'Donohue said that he believes that something almost like the opposite is true. The material world we see and touch and smell is like a splashed up manifestation of the spiritual realities which are much vaster and deeper. As if what was going on at the ocean's shore was the vastness of God's spiritual reality being splashed up in a fleeting material presence.

I'm not sure I can say what I experienced when I heard the image. What I do know is that it sounded correct to me, in a deep-down kind of way. Mr. O'Donohue sets the stage for that kind of thinking in the opening paragraph from his web site:

Humans have an uncanny ability to domesticate everything they touch. Eventually, even the strangest things become absorbed into the routine of the daily mind with its steady geographies of endurance, anxiety and contentment. Only seldom does the haze lift, and we glimpse for a second, the amazing plenitude of being here. Sometimes, unfortunately, it is suffering or threat that awakens us. It could happen that one evening, you are busy with many things, netted into your role and the phone rings. Someone you love is suddenly in the grip of an illness that could end their life within hours. It only takes a few seconds to receive that news. Yet, when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world. All you know has just been rendered unsure and dangerous. You realise that the ground has turned into quicksand. Now it seems to you that even mountains are suspended on strings. (John O'Donohue)

Thank you.