Tags
An Immense World, books, Frank Wilczek, Frederick Buechner, Fundamentals, life, mystery, reality, Science, Ten Keys to Reality, The Man Who Found His Inner Depths
Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and the gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. —Frederick Buechner
I never heard of Frederick Buechner before reading The Man Who Found His Inner Depths by David Brooks in the New York Times. He was a novelist with a “religious slant” who died last week at the age of 96. This quote struck me as “true” in an existential way—this need for each of us to listen to our life, our own particular life, as well as to Life in the more expansive sense. To touch “the holy at the heart of it”. And to realize that “all moments are key moments.”
I’ve been doing a lot of that “listening” lately, and looking back at key moments of my life, as well as those that fall in between. Perhaps because I’m of a certain age when there are more years on Earth behind me than before, or because at this stage I have the time and leisure to contemplate such things. And with the contemplation of life, alas, comes also that of its twin, death.
Buechner had some interesting things to say on this subject as well: “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”
Interestingly, that aligns with something a scientist said, when explaining how abundance is a fundamental truth of Reality.
[A] full human lifetime contains far more moments of consciousness than universal history contains human lifespans. We are gifted with an abundance of inner time.—from Fundamentals, Ten Keys to Reality by Frank Wilczek, Nobel Prize winner in physics
This “abundance of inner time,” of time without end, seems fundamental to my own experience of “time” these days. Even as my own timespan here on Earth would appear to be narrowing, it feels like a widening, an opening up into something larger. Timeless, you might say.
Which brings me to something else Buechner said. When imagining a conversation with his late aunt, he asks: “You’ve already set sail. What can you tell me about it?” To which she replies that it’s misleading to think of people as having passed away. “It is the world that passes away.”
Is it we or the world that passes away? Perhaps its only this limited way of perceiving the world that passes away. Perhaps we simply slip from one perceptual experience—one sliver of reality—-to another that is just as real, just as holy. Another hidden heart to explore. This idea too may have a hidden scientific corollary in what the newer sciences are telling us about the nature of reality and its fundamental truths.
“We like to think that we humans, with our five marvelous senses, are in full receipt of what this world has to offer in all its glory. But in reality, like all creatures, we tap into but a tiny slice of its vast fullness.”
So I wrote in Slivers of Reality in a More-Than-Human World, after reading Ed Yong’s An Immense World about how animal senses reveal hidden realms around us. Breakthroughs in science and technology are showing us more about the vast reality that lies outside our physical ability to perceive it. And who’s to say there aren’t hidden realms outside our physical bodies to experience beyond this world? As we do in our dreams when we see and touch and feel things that have no physical form. Or as people who have had near-death experiences claim. Experiences that scientists are beginning to study seriously. And those who have are questioning whether the brain is truly the source of consciousness or merely a temporary conduit through which it passes, operating in reaches far beyond that.
Who were you before your parents were born?
This is an old Zen koan, whose study is meant to break students out of their limited way of thinking about themselves or experiencing reality. It’s another way of saying the fundamental key to reality lies within.
Listen to your life. Experience for yourself the “fathomless mystery” of Life’s “hidden heart.”
Deborah J. Brasket 
I haven’t done much inner reflection in the last few years. Maybe it’s time to touch my holy heart again. Thanks Deborah.
I hear you Brad! With so much going on in the world, it’s easy to get distracted, or even to feel let down. I have to push against that. I’m always happy when I do.
Really love that painting. Didn’t know this artist. It captures the deep mood of inner reflection wonderfully.
Thank you! I didn’t know the artist either before I found this on Pinterest. Apparently she’s a French painter who lived in China and Vietnam. Her work is beautiful, capturing so many scenes from that part of the world, many with women deep in thought as this one is.
I have never heard the expression, “Listen to your life”. Yes, listen to what life is saying via a myriad of ways, but **my** specific life? And yet, lately, I’ve been realizing certain threads that recur throughout *my* life…so, I’m gonna integrate this expression with my own re-genesis. Thanks, flower sister!
You are so welcome! I’ve read more about what Buechner meant by that in an article about him in the Washington Post op-ed:
“If indeed there is a God,” he explained, “which most of the time I believe there is, and if indeed he is concerned with the world, which the Christian faith is saying … one of the ways he speaks to us, and maybe one of the most powerful ways, is through what happens to us.”
“Pay attention to moments,” he said, when “unexpected tears come to your eyes and what may trigger them.” He was talking about those sudden upwellings of emotion we get from the sublimity of nature or art, when we see a whale breaching, or are emotionally ambushed by a line in a film or poem. We are led toward truth and beauty by a lump in the throat.
I tend to agree with this, that those lump in the throat moments tell us a lot about who we are, what we find meaningful, and gives us an insight into some underlying “truth” of our slice of reality.
Oh, you’re not going to believe this (or maybe you will!) – I savor those Lumpy Moments (a little levity), I immerse myself in them, I allow myself to fully feel them and I take note of whatever precipitated such a response…but.
I never thought they might offer something to tell me about me!
I’ll leave it at that…but want to thank you for this oddly illuminating conversation.
hugs
I do believe it, and am not surprised at all to hear this. It has been an illuminating conversation. I love the way this all comes together, the the author of New York Times article, the one from the Washington Post, Buechner, me, you—a flow of consciousness all streaming in unison somehow, informing, awakening each other to matters of the heart.
So much in this post is thought provoking that I find myself in two main places: 1). Your title which really speaks to me and makes me want to “come closer,” despite that my mind and days still feel too busy for deeper reflection, I have such an attraction and affinity to your title. 2). That last Koan… “who was I before my parents were born?” I can spin off into a few directions because your post is very thought-provoking, which I love. For now, I will pause and say thank you, Deborah, for sharing.