Real silence (always recommended by the saints) allows us to escape our own conceptual frames and be open to the world as it is in God’s first book. The world repeats itself, as it has done and will do, a little differently each time, each time worth seeing and hearing differently.
Several years ago, in thinking about what makes Wyoming Catholic College so distinctive in the contemporary educational world, we began to speak of “immersion.” In the Protestant South, I grew up hearing about “total immersion” versus “sprinkling” as modes of baptism. By educational analogy, Wyoming Catholic College definitely goes for total immersion. The word implies a surface beneath which one plunges: call that surface the world of scripted emotions and predictably commodifiable behaviors. Starting with the 21-day outdoor trip that begins the career of every freshman, cell phones go away—in fact, all the mediating screens of the virtual world disappear for a time. Not only is the outdoors “immersive,” but so is the classroom. Our students learn Latin by speaking it; they learn to think for themselves by constantly taking the measure of their ideas in their seminars.
Words get worn from overuse, however, and now the adjective “immersive” is regularly employed to describe metaverses and augmented reality; it crops up in studiously casual TED talks. To be “immersive,” in this sense, is to find fault with the givenness of the world. Poor old reality needs to be juiced up. Who can be satisfied with whatever merely is?
I am reminded of Josef Pieper’s observation decades ago that “Man’s ability to see is in decline.” He does not mean “the physiological sensitivity of the human eye” but “the spiritual capacity to perceive the visible reality as it truly is.” Pieper recounts a voyage by sea from New York to Rotterdam when his fellow passengers mouthed “almost without exception rather generalized statements and pronouncements that are plainly the common fare of travel guides.” Pieper says that “at table, I had mentioned those magnificent fluorescent sea creatures whirled up to the surface by the hundreds in our ship’s bow wake.” No one else had seen them, and the next day, they reported that they had still seen nothing. Pieper wonders why and concludes that they had not allowed their eyes time to adjust to the darkness. “To repeat, then: man’s ability to see is in decline.”
Last week I mentioned that I was reading David McCullough’s history of the construction of Brooklyn Bridge, engineered by the renowned John Roebling. Writing about Roebling’s early life, McCullough quotes the great man’s journal of his voyage across the Atlantic a century earlier than Pieper. Roebling, too, appears to have been almost alone in noticing the phenomenon of phosphorescence in the waves at night:
Along the entire side of the ship the foam has turned into fiery streaks. The spots of foam in the ocean, distant from the ship, which arise from the dashing together of the waves, appear in the dark night to the astonished eye as just so many fiery masses. In front of the bowsprit, where the friction is greatest, the scintillation is often so bright that the entire fore part of the ship is illuminated by it.
A full-scale conqueror of nature, an unabashed modern man engaged in “the improvement of man’s estate,” he was nevertheless stilled and quieted by this beauty. No doubt the capacity to be astonished made him a better engineer.
The problem is not the quality of what is to be seen, but the attitude of the one doing the seeing. The words we use get stale, “decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,/Will not stay still,” as T.S. Eliot writes. That’s where poetry comes in, with its uncanny capacity to tease open the subtleties of emotional response—I think of James Wright’s wonderful poem, “A Blessing.” Sometimes, we need to get beyond words. Real silence (always recommended by the saints) allows us to escape our own conceptual frames and be open to the world as it is in God’s first book.
Watching the taut but exuberant flow of the water around the rocks in the Popo Agie River in Sinks Canyon or the random shopping of butterflies among the wildflowers in a meadow is a way of reading well, but also of hearing what cannot be said. As Christian Wiman writes, “if poetry has any reach into ultimate reality at all, it is the abstract element of music in which that connection is most deeply felt.” He means that we also need to recover the capacity to hear what the music in our language might imply. Wiman goes on to quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “In Christ all things are taken up, preserved, albeit in transfigured form, transparent, clear, liberated from the torment of self-serving demands”—a comment written “in the margin of a 16th-century musical score that Bonhoeffer had transcribed from memory.”
It’s high summer in Wyoming. The heat bears down in the midday and all humidity disappears (yesterday it hovered around 10%). All last weekend, big ranches had their combines working until dark or after dark, cutting the hay and leaving behind squared bales or huge rolls. Pastures spread out now smooth as lawns in the valleys beneath the red bluffs and the foothills of the Winds. Cows nurse their calves. The world repeats itself, as it has done and will do, a little differently each time, each time worth seeing and hearing differently.
May there be occasion this summer for poetry and for silence.
Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College‘s weekly newsletter.
This essay was first published here in July 2022.
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