In the spring of 2020, when the hush of halted activity descended on even a place as bustling as Washington, DC, I believe I experienced what it means to see the world for the first time. With such a surplus of free time, I worked my way through Josef Pieper’s Leisure: the Basis of Culture and made up my mind to heed his call—to view the world with the receptivity that would allow creation to reveal itself to me, rather than me pulling meaning out of it by force. While this may sound irrelevant to daily life, its effects were enduring.
On a sunny day, I made my way to the campus of Catholic University, sat outside the Student Union, and gazed at a singular tree for an extended period, allowing its inner form and intricacy to wash over me while I did my best to keep my own thoughts at bay. I did not walk away with any great new insights but the deepened realization that the beauty of this world was addressed to me. The result was an enduring peace that was too subtle to describe in words.
In the following years, a thirst for this way of seeing the world grew in tandem with a thirst for the fruitful silence that I have realized is the key to gratitude. Interior silence temporarily puts a stop to our tendency to see the things in the world in terms of how they fit our own agendas and how we can use them. It cultivates a perception that engenders gratitude rather than utility. In other words, the silent mind allows us to receive the world as a gift rather than to grasp for it out of desire. Only by laying aside my own internal commentaries on the world around me could I learn to see the stark contrast of trees with bare limbs against the pallid sky and think that they, too, like us, feel the need to raise their arms toward Heaven.
When the waters of interior silence consistently run deep (a matter of practice, to be sure!), then this silence gives way to the experience of the presence of God that underlies every other experience we have. Only after some time did I come to understand that this silence is not a vacuum into which God should pour His presence. Silence is not an empty stage waiting for communion with God; silence is communion. To reflect on it in the moment is already to break that stillness. It is a moment of union that must be endured rather than examined. From this interior place, which T.S. Eliot calls “the still point of the turning world,” we can emerge to see the world again, as if for the first time.
Those who know me know that I have a flair for the poetic, and so I have chosen to include a poem I wrote shortly after the experience I described on campus in 2020:
Green Pastures
Where are the green pastures of which the Psalmist sings?
Surely these are not they, whose hues sunlit and brilliant
Raise my spirit and lighten my eyes,
Yet cannot lift the weight of my longing
To glimpse that grazing ground wherein I shall not want.
Even so my soul is bathed in beauty,
As by the Father’s hand my eyes are brushed
With tones so soothing, that,
Were I not driven on in search of true rest,
I would fain lie down and cease the search.
But, aching amid contentment, I journey on
And know that this is but the pledge,
The surety of glory, veiled,
Brighter and more real
Than ever these fields can contain.
My spirit fills with song, a spring welling up
From the hint, the guess, the visiting thought
That, for the moment,
I may have glimpsed the meaning of gift.
Mr. Matthew Trovato, OSFS
Oblate seminarian
