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Journey Toward Wholeness
By Frederick Buechner

"All his life long, wherever Jesus looked he saw the world not in terms simply of its brokenness-a patchwork of light and dark calling forth in us now our light, now our dark-but in term of the ultimate mystery of God's presence buried in it like a treasure buried in a field... To be whole, I believe, is to see the world like that. To see the world like that, as Jesus saw it, is to be whole. And sometimes I believe that even people like you and me see it like that. Sometimes even in the midst of our confused and broken relationships with ourselves, with each other, with God, we catch glimpses of that holiness and wholeness that is not ours by a long shot and yet is part of who we are. "

I have decided to write about wholeness, and that is a tall order because, like the majority of humankind, I don't know much about it first hand. Wholeness is something which, at most, like Abraham and Sarah and Moses and the rest of them, I have every once in a while seen and greeted from afar, as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it, but that is about the extent of it. I've spent most of my life hoping that something like wholeness is what, in a disorganized way, I am journeying toward, but the most I have to show for my pains is an occasional glimpse of it. For instance, from time to time over the years I have run into certain people who seemed to me to be something like whole, and I've glimpsed it in them. They had their clay feet more or less like the rest of us, those people, but they struck me as being, at least, a great deal wholer than I have ever managed to be myself. I think the first one I glimpsed wholeness in, and the one I loved the most, was my maternal grandmother whom as a child, for some forgotten reason, I named Naya. So let me start talking about what I think wholeness is by talking first about her.

I

Naya was born in Washington, D.C. two years after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln there and lived well into her nineties. Like everybody else, she had her happy times and her sad times, her

Frederick Buechner is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including A Long Day's Dying (1950), Love Feast(1974), Brendan (1987), Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC(1973), The Sacred Journe (1982) and Telling Secrets(1991). A collection of his writings on faith and fiction, The Clown in the Belfry(1992), has just been published.

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weaknesses and her strengths, her good luck and her bad luck, but what makes her so rare in my experience is that, no matter what happened to her, she seemed always to remain remarkably and invincibly herself. Even when her life was shattered by the deaths of people she loved and other kinds of loss or failure, she seemed to remain so serene and intact that it was as if she lived out of some deep center within herself that was beyond the reach of circumstance. I picture her in a white linen dress, sitting on a terrace among the Blue Ridge mountains in Tryon, North Carolina, reading a yellow-backed French novel and smoking a Chesterfield in a white paper cigarette holder. My grandfather had lost most of his money by then, and they had had to move away from the place where they had lived for many years, leaving all their old friends and their old life behind them, but as far as I could see it didn't cause her to turn a hair. She found new friends and a new life and made do on what money they still had, saying only that she wished she'd spent more of it on herself because then she would have had something left to show for it. She was entirely Naya still, as much the same person she had always been as the mountains around her were always the same mountains, and when she was already an old lady and I was still a little boy, we drew up a list of a lot of the people we knew, which we entitled "Tryon Crackpots, amiable and otherwise, by two of their number." We didn't for one moment believe that we were crackpots ourselves, but added that part in hopes that, if the list ever fell into the wrong hands, a note of humility might save us.

I picture her again some twenty years later, lying in her bed in a nursing home within a few months of her death in 1961, by which time she was in her ninety-fourth year and too old and frail with a broken hip to live anywhere else, although in just about every other way the same person I had always known. My wife, Judy, and I had driven down from New Hampshire to see her there with our two year old daughter Katherine in tow, and I picture her writing a letter to thank us. Her handwriting had gone loose and spidery by then, but with effort it is still possible to read it. "Dear children," she wrote, "it was a noble deed to make the long journey down here, and the joy of seeing you and your bewitching little fairy daughter more than compensated me for the ignominy of substituting an old crone in a dark little room for the Naya of legend. Tell Katherine not to forget my dimple [Katherine had the same little star-shaped mark on her hand that Naya did] and how is Dinah's German accent [we had left our middle daughter Dinah in the care of a German au pair girl]? Many thanks and much love, Naya." It was the last letter we ever had from her.

She was indeed an old crone in a dark little room, as she said, but, because she knew she was, because she could see clearly and without either bitterness or complaint that that was what the years had reduced her to, because there was something in her that was half amused at the sight and to that extent untouched by it, she was of course a good deal

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more than that, too. There was a room inside her that was neither dark nor little, and in that room she remained-how to put words to it without tarnishing it?-beautiful and at peace and full of wit and eloquence to the end. It is a glimpse of at least some important aspect of wholeness that I carry with me to this day, a bit of bannister to hold on to as 1, myself, prepare to climb the dark stair.

Naya saw herself clearly in the nursing home, but she saw my wife and me and our small blonde child clearly, too. I think that was another part of her wholeness. She knew as well as I did that, in all likelihood, it was the last time we would ever see each other, as indeed it turned out to be, but there was no sentimentality in her at that final meeting. I don't think I have ever known anybody as unsentimental. She was never a hugging, kissing kind of grandmother, and I don't remember ever seeing her cry. One Christmas, I gave her a tattered copy of a long out-of-print novel by Jean Ingelow, which she had loved as a young woman and hadn't seen since, and when she opened the package and discovered what it was, the sheer surprise of it made her voice falter for a moment and tears come to her eyes, but that is the only time I ever saw her come close to it. When we sentimentalize about things, we see not so much the things themselves, I think, as we see the flood of feeling, of sentiment, that the things occasion in us, with the result that sentimentality becomes a form of blocking out the world. But my grandmother did not block out the world. It was not the flood of her own feeling that she saw that day. Instead, it was my wife and our daughter she saw, and when she wrote of the "joy" of the occasion, I don't think she was altogether exaggerating. I think that the sight of youth and life in the dark little room rejoiced her spirit in a way that was undimmed by the fact, which she also saw, that she was, herself, old and close to her life's end. She did not lose sight of us by focusing on her own predicament, as I am quite sure that, in her place, I would have done. Instead, it would be more accurate to say that she lost sight of her own predicament by focusing on us, and I believe that the capacity for doing that is another mark of the wholeness that in many ways was hers.

To be whole, I think, means, among other things, that you see the world whole. She wrote of the ignominy of having become an old woman in a nursing home instead of the Naya of legend, but precisely because she was able not only to identify the ignominy but also not to be overwhelmed by it, she revealed herself as still the Naya of legend, even so. At the same time, she identified what she called the joy of seeing us without being overwhelmed by that either, that is, by the sense of losing track of the joy in the realization that she was never going to experience it again. In other words she was "all there," as we say. She saw both the light and the dark of what the world was offering her and was not split in two by them. She was whole in herself, and she saw the world whole, too.

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II

The world floods in on all of us. The world can be kind, and it can be cruel. It can be beautiful, and it can be appalling. It can give us good reason to hope and good reason to give up all hope. It can strengthen our faith in a loving God, and it can decimate our faith. In our lives in the world, the temptation is always to go where the world takes us, to drift with whatever current happens to be running strongest. When good things happen, we are in heaven; when bad things happen, we are in hell. When the world strikes out at us, we strike back, and when one way or another the world blesses us, our spirits soar. I know this of no one as well as I know it of myself. I know how just the weather can affect my whole state of mind for good or ill, how just getting stuck in a traffic jam can ruin an afternoon that in every other way is so beautiful it dazzles the heart. In other words, we are in constant danger of being, not actors in the drama of our own lives, but reactors. The fragmentary nature of our experience shatters us into fragments. Instead of being whole, most of the time we are in pieces, and we see the world in pieces, full of darkness at one moment and full of light the next.

It is in Jesus, of course, and in the people whose lives have been deeply touched by Jesus, as well as in ourselves at those moments when we also are deeply touched by him, that we see another way of being human in this world, which is the way of wholeness. When we glimpse that wholeness in others, we recognize it immediately for what it is, and the reason we recognize it, I believe, is that, no matter how much the world shatters us to pieces, we carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home and that beckons to us. It is what the Book of Genesis means, I think, by saying that we are made in the image of God. It is what Saint Paul means, I think, by saying that the deepest undercurrent of all creation is the current that seeks to move us toward what he calls mature humanhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

I picture Jesus at the Last Supper when he had every reason to believe that the end was upon him-not an old crone in a dark little room saying goodbye to her family but a young man in a dark little room saying goodbye to life itself and everything he had lived for and was prepared to die for. I picture him looking around at the twelve friends and making an unforgettable utterance. "Peace I leave with you," he says, when you would have thought he had no peace at all anywhere. "My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid" (John 14:27).

The kind of peace that the world gives is the peace we experience when for a little time the world happens to be peaceful. It is a peace that lasts for only as long as the peaceful time lasts, because as soon as the peaceful time ends, the peace ends with it. The peace that Jesus offers, on the other hand, has nothing to do with the things that are

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going on at the moment when he offers to give it, which are for the most part tragic and terrible things. It is, instead, a peace beyond the reach of the tragic and terrible. It is a profound and inward peace that sees with unflinching clarity the tragic and terrible things that are happening and yet is not shattered by them. It is a peace that looks out at the friends, whom he loves enough to be concerned more for their frightened and troubled hearts than he is for his own, and yet his love for his friends is no more where his peace comes from than his impending torture and death are where his peace will be destroyed. The place that his peace comes from is not the world but something whole and holy within himself, which sees the world also as whole and holy because deep beneath all the broken and unholy things that are happening in it, even as he speaks, Jesus sees what he calls the kingdom of God.

All his life long, wherever Jesus looked he saw the world not in terms simply of its brokenness-a patchwork of light and dark calling forth in us now our light, now our dark-but in terms of the ultimate mystery of God's presence buried in it like a treasure buried in a field. It is not just that the Kingdom is like a pearl of great price, a mustard seed, leaven. It is indeed like them in ways that Jesus suggests in his parables, but it is also within them, as it is also within us. Pearls, seeds, fields, leaven, the human heart, all of them carry within them something of the holiness of their origin. It is the wholest and realest part of their reality and of ours. Sinners are made in the image of God no less than saints, Even a sparrow fallen dead by the roadside is transparent to holiness. To be whole, I believe, is to see the world like that. To see the world like that, as Jesus saw it, is to be whole. And sometimes I believe that even people like you and me see it like that. Sometimes even in the midst of our confused and broken relationships with ourselves, with each other, with God, we catch glimpses of that holiness and wholeness that is not ours by a long shot and yet is part of who we are.

Two examples occur to me, one of them very small and a little foolish, although I think not really foolish. Early last summer, I had to go to Pennsylvania on a speaking engagement. It was a beautiful day, and I wanted to make the most of the long drive by myself, wanted to be a as fully present in it as I could without letting my mind go off on the thousand tangents that introspective people like me are always getting tangled up in to the point that I am apt to pay attention to almost anything except what is actually going on. Hard as I tried to center myself, however, it didn't work very well. My mind kept running off in countless directions, jerking me now this way, now that way, like a dog on a leash. I thought about the past. I thought about the future. I thought about other places, other times, about the group of people I was driving to Pennsylvania to talk to and what I was going to say to them when I got there. And then, suddenly, I started noticing the trees.

They were in full summer foliage. They were greener than I think I have ever seen trees before. The sun was in them. The air was stirring

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them. They rose noble and plumed against the sky. The branches were heavy with leaves. As I drove by, they waved at me. They beckoned. They reached out. It was the wind, of course, that made them wave. It was the air whipped up by my car streaking by at sixty-five miles per hour. But no matter. They waved in the only way trees have of waving and caught my attention so completely that all other thoughts vanished from my head, including my thoughts about them. I didn't think about them. I just saw them. I didn't put words to what was happening. I just let it happen. I just happened with it. It was a rare and precious drive for as much longer as it lasted, and it was only when I got where I was going that I found myself putting words to it at last.

The trees are always so glad to see us-those were the words I put to it. I'd never noticed that before. They waved their branches like flags in a parade, hailing me as I passed by as though I were some mighty spirit. They looked as if they had lined up for miles along the New York Thruway to greet me, and, at the risk of seeming hopelessly eccentric, I confess that, after a while, I found myself waving back at them every once and a while, as if they, too, were mighty spirits and I was greeting them. At the risk of seeming even more eccentric still, I confess that I believe this was not just a fantasy of mine. I believe that for a little while I saw those trees as so real that I was myself made real by them. It was the whole of me that waved at the whole of them. There was no part of me left over to be anywhere other than where I was or to do anything other than what I was doing. And likewise with the trees. The holiness that we shared-what it was that we were hailing and honoring in each other-was that it was Almighty God who had formed and given life to us both, that trees and humans together bear within them as the truest and least fantastic part of their being the indivisible wholeness and holiness of proceeding from the hand of Holiness itself. Maybe the least eccentric thing I ever did in my life was for a few moments on that long drive not just to glimpse that truth but to act on it. The trees waved their holy branches at my holiness. I waved my holy hand at theirs.

The other example of exactly the same truth is a very different one. In the Ken Burns series on the Civil War that public television put on not long ago there were a number of scenes of the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1913. The old men came back one summer day, Confederate and Union veterans both, to commemorate the occasion, and there were many ancient movies of them as they moved around jerkily through the grainy, lightstruck film, eating, listening to speeches, talking over old times and swapping stories. The most moving part of it to me was the reenactment of Pickett's Charge. There were no pictures of it as far as I can remember, but the sound track described it in the words of somebody who had actually been there at the time it was reenacted. The old Union soldiers took their places among the rocks on Seminary Ridge, the old Confederate soldiers took theirs on the farmland below, and after a while the

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Confederates started to move forward across the broad, flat field where half a century earlier so many of them had died. "We could see not rifles and bayonets," the eyewitness account said, "but canes and crutches" as they made their slow advance toward the ridge with the more able-bodied ones helping the disabled ones to maintain their place in the ranks. As the Confederate troops got near the Union line, they broke into one long, defiant rebel yell, and then something remarkable took place. "A moan, a sigh, a gigantic gasp of disbelief rose from the men on Seminary Ridge" is the way the eyewitness described it. Then at that point, unable to restrain themselves, the Yankees burst from behind the stone wall and flung themselves upon their former enemies. Only this time, unlike fifty years earlier, they did not do battle with them. Instead they threw their arms around them. Some in blue uniforms and some in grey, the old men embraced one another and wept.

If only the old men had seen in 1863 what, for a moment, they glimpsed in 1913. Half a century later, they saw that the great battle had been a great madness. The men who were advancing toward them across the field of Gettysburg were not enemies. They were human beings like themselves, with the same dreams, needs, hopes, the same wives and children waiting for them to come home, if they were lucky enough to come home at all. What they saw was that, beneath all the fear and hostility and misunderstanding that divide human beings in this broken world, all humankind is one. What they saw was that we were, all of us, created not to do battle with each other but to love each other, and it was not just a truth they saw. For a few moments, it was a truth they lived. It was a truth they became.

III

You and I live in a broken world-a world shattered by wars, famine, political upheaval. We are citizens of a nation that in all its history has perhaps never been so dramatically confronted as it is now by its brokenness, a nation whose leaders more often than not seem to believe in absolutely nothing but their own political survival and are willing to sacrifice everything, including the national good, to ensure it, a nation whose city streets are littered by the bodies of the homeless and a fifth of whose children go to bed hungry at night if they are lucky enough to have beds, a nation that continues to spend billions on defense against the enemy without, when it becomes more apparent everyday that all the real enemies are within-poverty, illiteracy, the despair that breeds crime and addiction. As for the church of Christ, no one knows better than the church itself all the ways it, too, is broken, just as no one knows better than you and I know it the brokenness of our own individual lives, both within ourselves and in our relationships with each other. In other words, it is easy enough to see the world as a horror show, but that is not the way the old men on the ridge saw it when they suddenly recognized that the advancing men

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were not enemies but brothers. It is not the way the old crone in the dark little room saw it when she recognized beneath the darkness what she wrote of as the joy. For all its horrors, the world is not ultimately a horror show because, as Jesus tell us, the world has the kingdom buried in it like a treasure buried in a field, like leaven working in dough, like a seed germinating in the earth, like whatever it was in the heart of the Prodigal Son that finally brought him home. The question is, How is it possible for us not just to glimpse that buried kingdom but to unbury and become it?. How is it possible in a broken world to become whole? Is wholeness something that we reach by taking pains, taking thought? Is it something that is given to us by grace alone? Is wholeness a human possibility at all?

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky tries to answer that question in terms of a story, which is how, one way or another, we answer it as we live out the story of our own lives. Father Zossima, the holy old Russian elder and monk, tells about something that happened to him once when he was a young officer in the Tsar's army. He had been in love with a young woman, and then, during a time when he was away for a few months, the young woman married another man. When Zossima came back and found out what had happened, he challenged the other man to a duel. Many years later, he describes the event like this:

It was the end of June, and our meeting was to take place at seven o'clock the next day on the outskirts of town-and then something happened that in very truth was the turning-point of my life. In the evening, returning home in a savage and brutal humor, I flew into a rage with my orderly Afanasy, and gave him two blows in the face with all my might, so that it was covered with blood. He had not long been in my service and I had struck him before, but never with such ferocious cruelty. And, believe me, though it's forty years ago, I recall it now with shame and pain. I went to bed and slept for about three hours; when I waked up the day was breaking. I got up-I did not want to sleep any more-I went to the window-opened it, it looked out upon the garden; I saw the sun rising; it was warm and beautiful, the birds were singing.

What's the meaning of it, I thought. I feel in my heart as it were something vile and shameful. Is it because I am going to shed blood? No, I thought, I feel it's not that. Can it be that I'm afraid of death, afraid of being killed? No, that's not it, that's not it at all.... And all at once I knew what it was; it was because I had beaten Afanasy the evening before. It all rose in my mind, it all was as it were repeated over again; he stood before me and I was beating him straight on the face and he was holding his arms stiffly down, his head erect, his eyes fixed upon me as though on parade. He staggered at every blow and did not even dare to raise his hands to protect himself. That is what a man has been brought to, and that was a man beating a fellow creature! What a crime! It was as though a sharp dagger had pierced me right through, I stood as if I were struck dumb, while the sun was shining, the leaves were rejoicing and the birds were trilling the praise of God.... I hid my face in my hands, fell on my bed and broke into a storm of tears.... Suddenly my second, the ensign, came in with the pistols to fetch me.

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"Ah," said he, "it's a good thing you are up already, it's time we were off, come along!"

I did not know what to do and hurried to and fro undecided; we went out to the carriage however.

"Wait here a minute," I said to him. "I'll be back directly. I have forgotten my purse."

And I ran back alone, straight to Afanasy's little room.

"Afanasy," I said, "I gave you two blows on the face yesterday. Forgive me," I said.

He started as though he were frightened, and looked at me, and I saw that it was not enough, and on the spot, in my full officer's uniform, I dropped at his feet and bowed my head to the ground.

"Forgive me," I said.

Then he was completely aghast.

"Your honor. . . sir, what are you doing? Am I worth it?"

And he burst out crying as I had done before, hid his face in his hands, turned to the window and shook all over with his sobs. I flew out to my comrade and jumped into the carriage.

"Ready," I cried. "Have you ever seen a conqueror?" I asked him. "Here is one before you."

"Well, brother, you are a plucky fellow. You'll keep up the honour of the uniform, I can see."

So we reached the place and found them there, waiting for us. We were placed twelve paces apart; he had the first shot. I stood gaily, looking him full in the face; I did not twitch an eyelash. I looked lovingly at him, for I knew what I would do. His shot just grazed my cheek and ear.

"Thank God," I cried, "no man had been killed," and I seized my pistol, turned back and flung it far away into the wood.

"That's the place for you," I cried.

I turned to my adversary.

"Forgive me, young fool that I am, sir," I said, "for my unprovoked insult to you and for forcing you to fire at me. I am ten times worse than you and more, maybe. Tell that to the person whom you hold dearest in the world."

I had no sooner said this than they all three shouted at me.

"Upon my word," cried my adversary, annoyed, "if you did not want to fight why did you not let me alone?"

"Yesterday I was a fool, today I know better," I answered him gaily.

"As to yesterday, I believe you, but as for today, it is difficult to agree with your opinion," said he.

"Bravo," I cried, clapping my hands. "I agree with you there too. I have deserved it."

"Will you shoot, sir, or not?"

"No, I won't," I said. "If you like, fire at me again, but it would be better for you not to fire."

The seconds, especially mine, were shouting too: "Can you disgrace the regiment like this, facing your antagonist and begging his forgiveness! If I'd only known this!"

I stood facing them all, not laughing now.

"Gentlemen," I said, "is it really so wonderful in these days to find a man who can repent of his stupidity and publicly confess his wrongdoing?"

"But not in a duel," cried my second again.

"That's what's so strange," I said. "For I ought to have owned my fault as soon as I got here, before he had fired a shot, before leading him into a great and deadly sin; but we have made our life so grotesque, that to act in that way would have been almost impossible, for only after I had faced his

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shot at the distance of twelve paces could my words have any significance for him, and if I had spoken before, he would have said, 'He is a coward, the sight of the pistols have frightened him, no use to listen to him'. Gentlemen," I cried suddenly, speaking straight from my heart, "look around you at the gifts of God, the clear sky, the pure air, the tender grass, the birds. Nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, only we, are sinful and foolish, and we don't understand that life is heaven, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty. We shall embrace each other and weep."

I would have said more, but I could not; my voice broke with the sweetness and youthful gladness of it, and there was such bliss in my heart as I had never known before in my life.

Insofar as wholeness can be ours at all, is it ours by working for it or is it ours by grace? The answer, Dostoyevsky suggests, is that it is both, that wholeness involves the same mysterious partnership of the human and the divine that Saint Paul points to when he writes to the Ephesians, "By grace you have been saved, through faith" (Ephesians 2:8). The grace of it, the divine part of it, is, of course, the beautiful day that Zossima wakes up to-the sun rising and the birds singing, not unlike the trees waving along the New York Thruway. The view from his window both blesses him with its beauty and at the same time, and no less graciously, opens his eyes to his own inner unbeauty, the agonizing shame he feels at having brutalized his orderly the night before. It is not so much that he is judged by the beauty he sees as that he is brought up short by it the way the old men on Seminary Ridge were brought up short by the sight of the other old men in the field moving toward them on their canes and crutches. The beauty he sees strips the scales from his eyes and calls him somehow to become beautiful himself. It is a call that rises out of the holiest part of who he is.

To that call is the human part of it, the part that Zossima. himself must play. It is by no means a painless part. He begs Afanasy for forgiveness-an extraordinary act of self-abasement at any time, let alone among the rigid class distinctions of Tsarist Russia-and when Afanasy stands there stammering with disbelief, Zossima actually bows his head to the ground before him to make sure he understands. In the duel itself, then, he refuses to fire a shot when his turn comes, with the result that all the other officers, including the rival whose life he has spared, are aghast at such a breach of decorum and tell him that he has disgraced the regiment and must be either a fool or a madman.

The part he has to play, in other words, is not to kill his enemy but to kill everything that is broken and old in himself, so that something whole and new can be born. Then, as that newness starts coming to birth, he sees that the distinctions he has always made between enemies and friends, like the distinction between officers like him and peasants like Afanasy, are as absurd as everything he has always believed about honor and pride and the military code. "Nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, only we, are sinful and foolish and don't

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understand that life is heaven," he cries out. "We have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, and we shall embrace one another and weep."

Zossima does not become a whole human being all in an instant, as the narrative goes on to show in later chapters. There is a long journey ahead of him still, as there is a long journey ahead of all of us still. But the grace of God, which reaches him through his vision of the beautiful day, opens not just his eyes to see that life is heaven but also opens his heart, where heaven has dwelled all along. The world thinks he has gone mad when he flings his pistol into the woods without firing a shot, but he finds himself filled with a peace that the catcalls of the world can no more take away than the applause of the world can give. He has a long way still to go, but he sets forth armed with the truth that only years later he puts into words. "Fathers and teachers, I ponder, What is hell? I maintain that hell is the suffering of being unable to love." What Dostoyevsky seems to be saying is that the journey toward wholeness for Zossima and for all of us is, above all else, a journey toward that capacity to love called compassion.

Zossima saying that we have only to see that life is heaven and we will all embrace one another and weep and the old veterans of Gettysburg doing exactly that. Naya writing with wit and grace, in a hand so shaky that she can barely hold her pen, about joy. The summer trees bowing and beckoning and reaching out to us as you and I, if we dare, can reach out in turn to them. There is treasure buried in the field of every one of our days, even the bleakest or dullest, and it is our business, as we journey, to keep our eyes peeled for it.

Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote:

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods
with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

It is our business, as we journey, to keep our hearts open to that, to the bright-winged presence of the Holy Ghost within us and the Kingdom of God among us, until, little by little, compassionate love begins to change from a moral exercise, from a matter of gritting our teeth and doing our good deed for the day, into a joyous, spontaneous, self-forgetting response to the most real aspect of all reality, which is that the world is holy because God made it and so is every one of us as well. To deny that reality is to exist as a stranger in a world of strangers. To live out of and toward that reality is, little by little, to become whole.