Mind Matters

by Rev. Robert H. Tucker

Number 331
February 1, 1999

The Extraordinary Ordinary

Stunning photographs of empty rain-drenched steps, unlit matches, and fishnets drying on a concrete sidewalk hang on the walls of the local art museum in a special exhibit of the photographer Brassaï:

I do not search out the exceptional, I avoid it. I think that everyday life and what happens is the real life. My greatest ambition is to make something new and striking out of the banal and ordinary, to show everyday life in such a way as to make it seem as though it is seen by the spectator for the first time.

The ordinary becoming the extraordinary, the common blossoming into the absolutely awesome, and worn, wet stairs shimmering with beauty is, for me, the core of my religious vision. I need no 'finger poking' into our world bringing miracles of stunning amazement and healing. The amazement and beauty that is already present when my senses are open and alert is enough:

• the awesome wonder of a small child placing words together to talk about something happening in another room and out of sight.
  
• the dormant wonder in the power of 280 horses coming to life with the turn of a key,
  
• the wonder of trust in handing over a $20,000 automobile on the basis of a plastic card and a signature,
  
• the wonder of forgiveness in one person welcoming another after the other has betrayed a promise or violated a confidence,
  
• the financial wonder of money contributed and ending up as a blanket given to a homeless earthquake victim in Turkey,
  
• the wonder of the printed word conveying, after centuries and centuries, people's recollections of the thoughts of Plato and Jesus,
  
• the wonder of life giving life through blood and organ donation,
  
• the wonder of a youth, born of parents' genes and maturing in the parents' home, emerging with quite different thoughts and morals,
  
• the resurrection wonder when individuals, finding their lives coming to an end through a loved-one's death, captured by an addiction, becoming physically incapacitated, or finding a personal dream evaporating, survive and continue to affirm life.

Not only Moses hears the divine call before the burning bush in the Sinai, but each of us finds the same reality present. For as Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God.

Moses is commanded to take off his shoes to experience this amazing reality. Our shoes are the attitudes of familiarity and boredom which are discarded as we scrub our eyes and ears and other senses each day, each moment. Again and again, we find the common afire with God.

--Robert H. Tucker
1 February 1999

© Robert H. Tucker, 1999.

 

 

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