Spirituality as Common Sense by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

“Where did I for one split second know that I belonged, and know it in my bones, that I was one with all, and all was one with me?”

[Continued from page 1] Think about a moment of greatest aliveness in your life, a moment of real mindfulness rooted in the body, a moment in which you were in touch with reality. Those are the degrees to which we are alive and spiritual in this world, the degrees of being in touch with reality.

T. S. Eliot said, “Humankind can not stand very much reality.” But we can stand reality in varying degrees, and the most alive ones of us have managed to bear more reality than the others. And what we want to do is become able to be in touch with reality, all of reality, and not to have to block out certain aspects.

The fuller our mindfulness becomes, and the greater we become alive, the more we realize how inadequate language is. So we have to do something, if we want to talk about it, that heightens language. And what is heightened language? The heightened possibility of language is poetry, and so I would like to share with you a poem by William Butler Yeats which hints at one of those moments. It sets religious experience in a context where you would not expect it. Most of us have our real religious experiences when and where we least expect them; and in environments where we expect them, we are usually disappointed. This is an autobiographical poem (“Vacillation, IV”), and it happens to Yeats in a London coffee shop. This is how he describes it:

  My fiftieth year had come and gone,
  I sat, a solitary man,
  In a crowded London shop,
  An open book and empty cup
  On the marble table-top.
  While on the shop and street I gazed
  My body of a sudden blazed;
  And twenty minutes more or less
  It seemed, so great my happiness,
  That I was blessed and could bless.

So what happens? He doesn’t even say anything about his mind or his thoughts; he probably didn’t think a thing at that moment. His body blazed with this vibrant aliveness of mindfulness, which is so much more than thinking. His body blazed! And we have all experienced that, or something similar. He says, “It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless.” That he receives something that he calls blessed – significantly a religious term – and passes on. So something flows through him, and that is that spirit that flows through him.

T. S. Eliot says in “The Four Quartets,” also speaking about a peak experience: “music heard so deeply that it isn’t heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts.” You are the music. That means you vibrate with that music, and even though you might just be thinking of some flute music or piano music that you listen to, it’s the music of the universe that you are vibrating to. It’s the music to which this whole cosmic dance dances, and that flows through you – and that’s your religious moment. And in that moment you know that you are one with all. You are the music while the music lasts, simply that.

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