Others find it in art and music, others again in the
endless loveliness of nature, her seas and streams, her hills and
woods. Others again find it in visions of helping and raising
mankind out of base conditions, or in scientific investigation of
the miraculous constitution of nature. It has a hundred forms and
energies; but the one feature of it is the sense of some vast and
mysterious Power, which holds the world in its grasp--a Power which
can be dimly apprehended and even communicated with. Prayer is one
manifestation of this sense, though prayer is but a formulation of
one's desires for oneself and for the world.
But the essential and vital part of the mystery is not what the
soul asks of it, but the signals which it makes to the soul. And
here I am but recording my own experience when I say that the
lights and gleams of sunset, its golden inlets and cloud-ripples,
the dusky veil it weaves about the world, is for my own spirit the
solemnity which effects for me what I believe that the mass effects
for a devoted Catholic--the unfolding in hints and symbols of the
mysteries of God. An unbeliever may look on at a mass and see
nothing but the vesture and the rite, a drama of woven paces and
waving hands, when a believer may become aware of the very presence
of the divine. And the sunset has for me that same unveiling of the
beauty of God; it illumines and transfigures life; it shows me
visibly and sacredly that beauty pure and stainless runs from end
to end of the universe, and calls upon me to adore it, to prostrate
myself before its divine essence.
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