Reading Christian Wiman’s recent essay in Harper’s, “The Tune of Things,” was one of those experiences that can be aptly described as completely overhauling the mental furniture. With an anticipated acumen, Wiman toys with the concept of consciousness as he raises the more foundational question of whether the unseen things of our world might be not just real, but primary. This profound question gets at the heart of our struggle and calling at Goldenwood.
We’ve lapsed into a habit of thinking that the seen material things of life are what is fundamental, and our consciousness arises from our interactions with it. What this functionally presupposes is that immaterial things like meaning, beauty, love, and God are either secondary or myths we have made up to make sense of our positivized world. Wiman then goes on to allow quantum physics, neuroscience, and mystical experience to do the heavy lift of destabilizing these common assumptions from multiple angles. What if, as he suggests, consciousness doesn’t emerge from matter but precedes it? What if “mind is common to all things”?
This isn’t mere philosophical wordplay as the way we answer these questions has the real life effect of shaping how we live. If consciousness is mere neurological brain activity, then meaning is something we manufacture in our isolated selves; however, if consciousness is fundamental to the universe and if, as Wiman suggests, the universe behaves less like a machine and more like music we learn to hear, then meaning is something we participate in communally, not produce as individuals.
The contemplative tradition has been insisting on this for centuries. Thomas Merton knew that the false self is precisely the self that believes it must generate its own significance through achievement and control in the absence of a loving God. Julian of Norwich received her visions not by grasping at them but by attending to what was already present. The mystics understood that spiritual formation isn’t about creating something from nothing but about learning to perceive what has always been there.
In our peculiar cultural moment, we’re paradoxically drowning in information while starving for meaning, not because meaning is absent but because we’ve lost the capacity to draw from the unseen realm where meaning lives.
In our peculiar cultural moment, we’re paradoxically drowning in information while starving for meaning, not because meaning is absent but because we’ve lost the capacity to draw from the unseen realm where meaning lives. Our deeper senses have become so atrophied that we trust only what can be viewed, measured, controlled, and is entertaining. The problem isn’t that we don’t know enough, but that we’ve forgotten how to be still and listen deeply.
In all aspects of our lives, the things that matter most are precisely the things we cannot quantify. You cannot measure love, though you definitely feel the pangs of its absence. You cannot strategize calling, though you can sense the frustration when your life is misaligned to it. As much as my 12-year old would like to photograph the presence of God, people have (to the puzzlement of many) organized their entire lives and society around it for millennia.
Wiman states that ninety-five percent of Nobel Prize-winning physicists in the twentieth century believed in God. These were people who spent their lives studying the material world at its most fundamental level, and what they found there didn’t lead them away from the divine but deeper into it. The more they understood about how reality works, the less it looked like a closed system of material causes and the more it looked like music we’re already inside.
I think about our artists in Red Vineyard, learning that their creative work isn’t about producing something impressive but attending to what wants to emerge. Or the folks in our Nautilus program, discovering that spiritual formation is less about self-improvement and more about a growing attentiveness to what God is already doing. What they’re all discovering is how reality actually works, once you start taking the unseen seriously.
The disciplines of this deeper attention that the Christian tradition has preserved like contemplative prayer, listening prayer, the Prayer of Examen, and lectio divina aren’t techniques for manufacturing religious experience or self-soothing. They’re practices for awakening ourselves to spiritual frequencies that are always broadcasting. They’re how we learn to live as if the unseen realm is not less real or important than the seen but more fundamental to it.
This is why for us formation always precedes productivity and why cultivating the inner life isn’t optional for the outer life but is its very ground. We cannot steward what we do not first perceive. If we do not see God’s unseen kingdom first, we will fall into the age-old trap of building our own fueled by dominating others instead of loving God.
The deeper problems that poison the soil of selves and society aren’t that we lack solutions but that we’ve become ignorant to unseen realities that underlie our world. We want problems we can solve rather than perceive realities we must learn to rightly inhabit. The good news is that consciousness, meaning, and love, are not abstract problems to be solved, but invitations to perceive with a deeper reality. When we encounter Christ, we come to a door (John 10:7-9) and a homecoming that opens up these transcendent realities. When we cross that threshold, we join those who throughout history have heard this primordial symphony and produced work that has invigorated and clarified our human calling.
Taking the unseen seriously means discovering ancient and new disciplines and modes of living that make perception possible. It means trusting that the most important things aren’t the most obvious and accessible to us. We are participants in a reality far larger and stranger and more beautiful than our reduction of it to manageable categories.
It is wonderfully liberating when we realize that the seen world doesn’t make sense on its own terms. Our work, when accompanied by this wisdom, is connecting this seen to its unseen life-source. When this interdependence is discovered, we laugh because we cannot contain the childlike joy of seeing the magic of this world as it actually is.