A moment out of time: I-IT/I-THOU; A Moment of Grace
My body has acquired a new touch of misery: I have a “wound vac” attached to my right foot, with a long cord for the machine that does the pumping or pulling, as the case may be, and a stiff plastic hose that sucks up the nastiness that seeps from the wounded heel and lets it empty into the plastic canister attached to the machine. I can watch the nastiness defy gravity and travel up the hose to the machine where it is turned into some kind of jell-like crystal, and since the canister is an opaque gray plastic, I can even make out the crystals. The Vac is part of my new “exciting” day to day reality, part of my “everydayness,” as Walker Percy might say. However, something different entered my realm of the everyday world several hours ago that completely transformed reality for a truly exciting moment.
Apparently I had fallen asleep in my lift chair for a short while when I suddenly woke up and saw the magnolia tree outside the front window. This seeing was completely different from any other that I have ever had for there was a complete unity focused on the tree. It was as if everything that was had coalesced into that one beautiful thing: the dark green of the leaves with the sunlight glinting off some of them here and there as it filtered through the towering maple tree in front of and over the magnolia. The image is difficult to remember and capture as time moves on past that moment, and the vision was only for an instant. One of the advantages of having a mind packed with literary references is that there are a number of images to draw on for help. My experience reminded me of one the images from a seventeenth century poet, Richard Crashaw perhaps, who saw the universe in a grain of sand. Rationally, I understood what he said but I never really saw it myself until that metaphysical moment when the entire universe coalesced into that tree. Unfortunately that’s the best I can do. Now, looking out the window, I see dark green leaves blowing back and forth in the wind with sunlight getting through on the right side of the tree. Then, for an instant, I saw the tree. In a sense the difference was between seeing the oneness of everything for an instant and seeing the many. Our/my usual way of seeing is “the many.” Trees are made up of leaves and limbs. But underlying that, as Buber might say, usual “I-It” way of seeing is the “I-Thou” vision of unity. This moment was certainly different from any other that I remember having.
Another aspect of the experience that happened a bit later is that I opened my iPad to try to write down the experience, but the iPad opened to my kindle where I was reading Pope Benedict XVI’s A School of Prayer. The last thing I had read was this quote: “We too, dear brothers and sisters, must be able to ponder the events of our daily life in prayer, in order to seek their deep meaning in prayer. And like the first Christian community, let us too let ourselves be illuminated by the word of God, so that, through meditation on Sacred Scripture, we can learn to see that God is present in our life, present also and especially in difficult moments, and that all things—even those that are incomprehensible—are part of a superior plan of love, in which the final victory over evil, over sin, and over death is truly that of goodness, of grace, of life, and of God.”
My window with the magnolia tree on the far right overshadowed by the two maple trees, both of which grew in the yard from seedlings (circa 1972). The sunlit tree on the far left close to the house is a variegated dogwood. The magnolia had one lovely blossom blooming when I took the photo, though it looks as though the blossom is not attached to anything in the picture.