Between two worlds

Any person of faith realizes that human beings live in two worlds at once -- the natural world and the spiritual world. And all human beings experience this in various life experiences.

Friends of ours, looking over the Grand Canyon for the first time, realized that they were suddenly talking with one another in hushed whispers and didn't know why. All they knew was that they were suddenly in wordless awe and were conducting themselves accordingly.

Sometimes nature does it to us -- an unexpected spot of beauty around a turn in the road that takes our breath away, a bird song that for some reason seems to stir a wonder in us that is so far beyond what a few trilled notes merit, a sunset that so stirs us we have to call our spouse to come share it with us and we stand together saying nothing but sharing everything.

Our children can do it to us. We look at them sleeping one night and, unlike other nights, are inexplicably filled with wonder and gratitude and peace all at the same time. We share an ordinary moment of play with them or a walk or a time of teaching them to do something and suddenly that moment is filled with a depth of something we can't put into words but that fills our hearts to overflowing so that the moment is no longer an ordinary moment, but a deeply spiritual one.

Moments of accomplishment and moments of pain, moments of friendship and moments of friction, at weddings and at funeral, at work, at play, at almost any ordinary moment in our life we can suddenly be aware of something that transcends our ordinary moment and transports us to somewhere and touches the depths of our heart with something not of this world. Something beyond. Something bigger and better. Something that nevertheless somehow comes out of the moment and out of our own heart but is so much more than either.

That is when we all know that we live in two worlds at the same time. One of those worlds -- the natural -- we are very familiar with. The other -- the spiritual world -- we are usually not so familiar with. Even people of faith would admit that. But when we touch that other world, we realize it is so much better, so much purer, so much more fulfilling than anything in our natural world. And so some of us ask ... can we have more of those moments? Can we live more out of the spiritual at the same time as we live in the natural?