We wait, starving for moments of high magic to inspire us, but life is full of common enchantment waiting for our alchemist’s eyes to notice. — Jacob Nordby
I like to think that Paul the apostle was a man who knew how to enjoy the little things. I know he was a content person; he says so in one of his letters. That contentment, however, had nothing to do with little or big things. It had to do with trajectory. His life was pointed in a single direction: serving God and seeing Him glorified.
Even so, I think he must have understood small joys. How else to explain his delight in hearing from people he’d introduced to Jesus? His desire to see them once more? Then there’s his tent making. He explains why he does the work, but he must have found satisfaction in it. Working with his hands perhaps brought him closer to the One who had also used His hands. The small act of working became a way of worshipping.
All fiction, of course, but Paul’s eyes were irreversibly changed by the encounter on the road to Damascus. The world looked different afterward. He looked different. Nothing was ever the same. He’d had a face-to-face meeting with the King, and it gave him alchemist’s eyes.
C.S. Lewis is another man who had the same kind of eyes. He never saw just surface realities. Everything ran deeper. The secular and the spiritual were inseparable. Mind, body, and spirit—they interplayed. There was no division between them. He saw that, and it made the world magical.
Others see the world in a similar fashion. Eugene Peterson speaks of beauty being a way to meet the sacred, the ordinary become extraordinary if one will but look. Jewish people don’t sever the mind, body, and spirit, either; the three are one. The everyday act of preparing a meal turns sacred in the Jewish tradition–it’s alchemical. Lia Purpura, too, speaks to the magic of looking and finding the glory in little things.
All these people…there must be something to it, so every day, I wait for a little thing. I rejoice when it arrives, unbidden, mysterious, and altogether wonderful.
Image: T.Kiya (Creative Commons)
[…] and all stages of life. It creates excitement and allows a person to laugh with delight at the smallest of things. It causes people to try new things and to spend time learning about a […]