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Every so often, something happens to jolt me back into the full sense of presence in the world. More recently, while walking back from class with a harried mind, it was the soft crunching sound of leaves underneath my shoes. That comforting sound drew me into recognizing the sunlight, the slight breeze and all the other factors conspiring to create a beautiful day.
Times like these make me aware of the miracle of being on Earth. I’m not a particularly religious person – I’m always confusing God with beauty and vice versa. Perhaps I have some religion in me, hiding under a cloak of skepticism. To me, the fact that a squirrel is so perfectly designed to hold an acorn only verifies the stunning fact that they have honed themselves, over millions of years, to get that way. I don’t think it takes away from any sense of awe that I might have over the phenomenon.
Across religions, there have been a fair share of mystics hiding behind the curtains saying things I can agree with. You have the story of a Buddhist monk being beaten and yelling to his attackers that one day, they will all be Buddha, so that he would never lose sight of them as human beings caught up in delusions. In Islam, the Sufis tell us that a sense of love is within you, not from outside; that you can carry this love around like a suitcase in your heart.
Meister Eckhart, a Christian mystic, tells us “You may call God love, you may call God goodness. But the best name for God is compassion.”
With all this being said about compassion, gratitude, empathy and understanding, it is dumbfounding to see the tension which exists between the religious and the non-religious, particularly those with faith and those without. I admittedly live a spiritual life stripped of all bling: free from the tangled webs of religious complexity and dogma, I rarely spend time mulling over theories of the afterlife, or karma, or resurrection. To me, it seems impossible to actually fight about the source of my own happiness, and yet it seems to be something mankind is especially interested in doing.
Whether someone wants to believe the day is beautiful because God has made it that way or attribute it to the simple fact that it is so, we can both agree on the beauty of the day. We can all agree that birds are awesome; we could argue about why for the rest of our lives. Secularists and fundamentalists with a militant stripe might even begin shooting each other over it, declaring particular birds superior and praise mandatory.
Herein lies the problem: when compassion takes a back seat to ideology, we argue about stamping a particular brand name on our sense of wonder. It is sold to us – the idea that we have to name our beliefs, to declare our appreciation for life under one kind of banner. We can lead a spiritual life as long as we are open to the cultivation of empathy; this does not put anyone at odds with any variety of faith.
Perhaps something as universal as joy requires people to compartmentalize it in order to understand it. In the act of reducing this perfection to the name of a single God – or science – we lose what makes it our own, stumbling around for the language we need to describe it. Western civilization has only ever talked about these matters through faith. Perhaps it is time for a new language to describe our individual moments of awe: We might simply say the leaves are crunching beneath our feet, and we are happy to be alive.
Eryk Salvaggio worships orioles and thinks your love of ice cream sundaes is blasphemous.
