All Kinds of Everything

There are, I suggest, two ways to experience the world.  The first is that of the materialist:  the world is all that exists.  The physical world that we see and experience has no real or intrinsic meaning; it just is.  We can, if we like, endow it with meaning from our own heads, but such meaning would be entirely subjective.  Religion or philosophy, they say, might imagine that meaning can be discerned in world, but this is an illusion.  One thinks of the lovely poem written by e. e. cummings (who delighted in the lower case, even for his own name):  in his poem O sweet spontaneous, he asked “O sweet spontaneous earth…how often have religions taken thee upon their scraggy knees squeezing and buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive gods, but true to the incomparable couch of death…thou answerest them only with spring”.  (Scientists don’t get off much easier than theologians: Cummings also lamented that “the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty”.)

       Others admit that the world in itself reveals no meaning but assert that there is another world beyond the physical one, a spiritual realm from which we derive meaning, beliefs, and purpose.  Reality is thus two-tiered, consisting of the physical things we can see and analyze and a spiritual reality that remains beyond the grasp of Science and scientists.  They believe in visible things such as human beings, animals, flora, and rocks, and also in an invisible world containing God and souls and angels.   

Such people are walking down the same road as the previous group—on the other side of the road perhaps, but still going down the same path as far as this physical world is concerned.  Both agree that the physical reality we see around us and can put into test-tubes and under microscopes, has no meaning in itself.  For the second group, the believers in a two-tiered universe, the physical world only has meaning because the spiritual world endows it with such. 

And then there is a second group which is radically different from the first group with its two sub-groups.  This second group asserts that the physical world we see around us is suffused with meaning.  Reality is not two-tiered, but single-tiered, and the material world is suffused with meaning and divine light.  In experiencing the physical world—i.e. when we eat and drink and breathe and move and reproduce—we are in touch with God.  This is not pantheism, with its assertion that everything is divine, but “pan-en-theism”—God is in everything.

This is how we were created to experience the world; it was how we were intended to live.  In this world, all water is Holy Water, all bread is blessed bread.  To quote Fr. Alexander Schmemann (from his book For the Life of the World, originally entitled The World as Sacrament):  “The whole world is presented as one all-embracing banquet table for man…The world of which he must partake in order to live is given to him by God and it is given as communion with God.  The world as man’s food is not something ‘material’ and limited to material functions, thus being different from and opposed to the specifically ‘spiritual’ functions by which man is related to God.  All that exists is God’s gift to man and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God”.

Note:  everything in the world was intended to bring us to God so that by experiencing and partaking of the physical world we experienced communion with God.

This is, of course, why the Orthodox bless Holy Water—not to make magic water, but to reveal the capacity and calling of all physical things to become Spirit-bearing, instruments of our communion with God.  All water is life and this life comes from God.  In Christ the original calling of creation is restored and fulfilled.

And not just water, but everything in life.  This is why thanksgiving is the essential matter of Christian living (and the essence of our worship, which is why our self-constitutive act whereby we become ourselves is called “the Eucharist”—“the Thanksgiving”).  Christians recognize that God is the source of all our life and that every breath we draw, every cup of coffee we drink, every glass of wine we sip, every morsel of food we chew comes as His gift.  The Psalter’s exhortation “let everything that breathes praise the Lord” (Psalm 150:6) is justly sometimes rendered, “let every breath praise the Lord”, for every breath in our lungs and mouth are from Him.

The long poem in the Septuagint of Daniel 3 (known sometimes as “the Benedicite”) expresses this well.  In this poem, put into the mouth of the three holy youths in the fiery Babylonian furnace, the author celebrates this sacred universality.  Verse after verse brings to the fore all the elements of creation, from the heavenly temple of God above sky to the showers and dew descending from heaven to the earth to the mountains and hills and green things that grow in the soil.  All alike are bidden to “bless the Lord, praise and exalt Him above all forever”.  All things come from Him and are His gift to the children of men, the light in which we can see Him, a source of communion with the Lord.

Everything therefore comes from God and reminds us of Him and leads us to Him.  It is in this way that I listen to the old and lovely song All Kinds of Everything first made an international hit by the young Irish singer Dana (aka Dana Rosemary Brown) in 1970.  In its original context it was of course a romantic song in which the beloved sings about her lover:  everything reminded her of him—snowdrops and daffodils, butterflies and bees, sailboats and fishermen, wishing-wells and wedding bells and the early morning dew.  His face was everywhere and she saw him wherever she looked.  The last line of every verse said it well:  “All kinds of everything remind me of you.”

Transposed into another and higher setting (as the Song of Solomon has long been transposed) it is the voice of creation recognizing its lord, the voice of the bride of Christ recognizing the Bridegroom.  It is our true voice finding our true vocation.  All that exists, all kinds of everything, makes our life communion with God.  In the pure and crystalline voice of young Dana we may find our voice as well.