Article:

Transcendence of the Ordinary
(Taken from the Journal of Contemplative Reflection, Vol. 2, Issue 1, June 1999)

Life hints at what lies behind and within itself. There is a quality, a presence, in life which we sense, but cannot define. Life is a manifestation of Something. The architect, Christopher Alexander, speaks of a "quality without a name" in his book The Timeless Way of Building. He points out the limitations of words such as alive, whole, freedom, exact, egoless, and eternal when they are used to describe the inside of life, particularly as it relates to buildings. "All things and people and places which have the quality without a name, reach into the realm of the eternal." Perhaps this is what Jesus of Nazareth meant when he said, "The realm of God is within you."

Alexander is convinced that we go back and forth in our awareness of this quality without a name to a lesser state "where inner contradictions rule." When a person, place, or thing is free from inner contradictions, it takes its place among "the order of things which stand outside of time." Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he said, "If your eye is single, your whole body will be filled with light" or the psalmist, when he proclaimed, "the heavens declare the glory of God...without a word being spoken."

What gives something or someone a religious or numinous quality? What makes something lead us beyond itself and become a mutual seeing? When these happen it hints at what lies within which is without a name. This makes it seem, from our point of view, to be mysterious. Yet Alexander believes, "It is not mysterious. It is, above all, ordinary. What makes it eternal is its ordinariness. The word eternal cannot capture that." Is this what Jesus meant when he said, "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father"? Was St. Paul experiencing this when he said, "It is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives within me."?

From its very beginning, Christianity has been a path, a way. The One toward whom the path leads is also embodied in the path, itself. The earliest followers of the Way were gathered by their common experience of God's presence in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. Their boldest proclamation was that God was present in an ordinary human life and that this divine presence continues to be manifest in ordinary human lives. This contradicts some conventional perceptions that the realms of the divine and the human, the material world, are separate. The Christian experience of incarnation declares that "the quality without a name," which we call and try to define as "God," is present in the ordinary and natural, created world. Perhaps our inability to perceive God's presence in the ordinary, and our resistance to believe that this is so, are based on what Alexander calls "inner contradictions." Our desire to define and control the world around us, including our personal egos, contradicts the freedom of God's presence in us and our world. We contradicts the ordinariness of the divine in the ordinary by declaring our separateness. We create a false world and call it "the natural world." We convince ourselves that it is "unnatural" for God to be present in human life, in other living beings, places, and things.

Alexander reminds us that, "We have a habit of thinking that the deepest insights, the most mystical, and spiritual insights, are somehow less ordinary than most thingsContemplative experience takes place whenever we are "struck to the core." Yet in today's society we value many things and activities which distract us from the "the quality without a name." We seem to prefer the place where "inner contradictions rule." In the midst of our necessary activities and responsibilities we all need times and places where we can be beyond the words and boundaries of our self-created world. This can happen in serendipitous moments and in times we set apart for quiet reflection. Our society is so full of noise we are forgetting how to listen. We are so active we are losing sight of where we are going. Yet...we are surrounded by hints of the presence of the One who is without a name.

David Keller