Listening to the Excitement (continued)

I don’t know Who — or what — put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone –or Something –and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal. ~ Dag Hammarskjold

We live in a time and a society in which excitement is manufactured as an answer to boredom. This is no solution. In fact, it perpetuates superficial living. Listening to our lives for echoes of excitement is not an antidote but a complementary practice to listening to our lives for resonances of boredom, as listening to gladness and pain respectively give our life balance and integrity. In an integral spirituality, all moments are key moments because each and every moment is cradled in grace.

What might it mean to listen to excitement? Just as we reframed a contemporary ailment as an important opportunity– from being bored to death to being bored to life– excitement also needs to be rescued from its one dimensional associations and shallow connotations. In the way I intend it (and I think the way Buechner means it), excitement does not merely refer to titillating gratifications, extreme activities, or thrill-seeking entertainment. As a counterbalance to listening to boredom, excitement is that first stir of feeling we experience when something external affects us internally. To be excited is to give way to the intuitive wisdom of the body which, aroused to righteous anger, grief, awe, joy, tenderness, pleasure, fear, sadness, or compassion, hopes to revive us for our good and the good of all the earth.

Literally, and perhaps most significantly, excitement means to be called out and has to do with being moved. The inference is being stirred to action. The origin of the word is thought to come from a reference to a falcon shaking its feathers as if awakening and then readying itself for flight. To be excited is to be awakened, to move as a result of being moved. Many things can move us: a V-formation of Canadian geese flying overhead, a soaring pole vaulter, the sight of a panhandler, a baby being born, the fanned plumage of a peacock, the taste of a good wine, a delicious piece of cheesecake, the sound of a person breathing their last breath, an orphaned infant seen on the evening news in a Rwandan hospital crying to be held, a piece of music, the smell of beach wood burning, or soup on the stove.

Taking Delight

To be human involves a healthy capacity to be moved. To be fully alive is to be moved toward those actions which ennoble ourselves, benefit others, honor the earth, and/or glorify God. In the context of complementing listening to the boredom and the pain, listening to or for excitement in our lives suggests enjoyment, the capacity and openness to feel pleasure and to appreciate it for what it is without reducing or exaggerating it to what it is not: either an occasion for guilt or a replacement for God.

To listen to what has excited us throughout our lives is to trace the memory’s vibrations back to, among other things, occasions of delight, to moments when the world opened up — or was it only our hearts — so wide we almost drowned, deluged with what — love, beauty, mystery, communion, awe, peace, joy — for a split second or a timeless minute, maybe an hour if we were lucky, and on rare occasions extended over a day, a week, or a magical season. Sometimes these moments are numinous, at once real and allusive, disorienting and life altering, awakening the person involved to a sudden sense or a gradual awareness of the ineffable source and summit of delight.

The word numinous comes from the Latin word numen referring not only to a divine power or presence but also to a nod of the head in assent. To listen back on one’s life or one’s day in prayerful attentiveness or to listen deeply to the present moment is to become aware of the various times and ways that life tilts toward us in superfluous benediction or simple affirmation. It is to feel the infinite, eternal “yes” in the face of the finite, to detect the mystery in the material and to sense the meaning behind the mystery. It is to awaken to the revelry of nature as a sacrament of divine presence, and to feel the incarnation of God’s “yes” in both the glorious and sorrowful mysteries of daily life. And then there is this: as we experience the “yes” of life we are moved from that deepest place within us to add our own reverent nod to the numinous, our own at times silent at other times unrestrained “yes” to the festival that is life and to the life that is liturgy.

e..e. cummings conveys this experience in words about as well as anyone has:

i thank you God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

In this sense, to be excited is to know, as I think Frederick Buechner came to know, that the world is enchanted, bedazzled, vivified, visited by angels, sustained by the Holy Breath, and “charged with the grandeur of God.”

What’s more, every moment of natural delight, no matter how brief or seemingly inconsequential, is a participation in the divine jubilation experienced when God first dreamed the universe into being. Delight itself can be described as an experience of double-agreement in which some simple or exquisite situation, moment, encounter, or event awakens us to the nod of God and simultaneously calls forth from us a spontaneous bow of the heart and a awe-filled Amen. When the Priestly author of the first creation story in Genesis employed the now all-too-familiar refrain, “And God saw that it was good,” it was to convey the spontaneously exuberant dance, the tour en l’air of the divine heart at the sheer, radiant goodness of creation, at the amazingly sublime sound and sight of the natural world in all its original, dazzling, and living glory. As a result, to take delight in is a fundamentally re-creative act by which humans participate in and perpetuate the ongoing nature of creation and the continual divine desire to make all things new.

PRACTICE:

Advent is a season of waiting and watching. It is also a time of wonder. Today, be susceptible to life. Allow yourselves to be moved – especially TO DELIGHT.