[Image: “Divine Commonplace (Railroad at Twilight, 2022),” by John E. Simpson]

We’re so inured these days to public self-disclosure of private lives; when we “know” someone online who zealously, and rightly, hides themselves online for the sake of the unfiltered virtues of what they do post there, it seems not just an anomaly, but a sacred one — a privacy we come to treasure just as much as the privacy of any real friend who keeps themselves to themselves. I hadn’t seen anything from whiskey river in days, which was very, very unusual… so was relieved when they simply mentioned, in an off-handed post early this week, that they’ve been sick: “…caught a virus. Not the famous one. Just an ordinary, everyday, common influenza virus.”

In the meantime, I went rummaging about in their archive, referred to as whiskey river’s commonplace book. When you visit the “commonplace book’s” home page, you’ll find a sort of topical index; it’s not organized chronologically, or by the name of the quotations’ authors, or in any other conventional way. A good way to browse this list is not to worry too much about what the chapter headings “mean”; instead, just look away from the screen and randomly, blindly tap on one of them.

That’s how I found myself in the chapter called “ordinary life” — which includes the following (in slightly different form):

For [Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav], the way of the heart was the surest path to exalted states of consciousness. “Always be joyful, no matter what you are,” he taught. “With happiness, you can give a person life.” Every day, he further stressed, we must deliberately induce in ourselves a buoyant, exuberant attitude toward life; in this manner, we will gradually become receptive to the subtle mysteries around us. And, if no inspired moments seem to come, we should act as though we have them anyway, he advised. “If you have no enthusiasm, put on a front. Act enthusiastic and the feeling will become genuine.”

(Edward Hoffman [source])

…and also this:

When we go to a medicine person or a healer because we are feeling disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, he or she might ask questions like,

“When did you stop singing?”

“When did you stop dancing?”

“When did you stop being enchanted by stories?”

“When did you begin finding discomfort in the sweet territory of silence?”

(Angeles Arrien [source])

…and also this:

Life is this simple: We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and [the Divine] is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or fable. It is true.

(Thomas Merton [source])

This was a week during which it helped to be reminded of everyday divinity. It started with the cacaphonic final clatter of US midterm-election news and panic notes, eased into the midweek “How come it wasn’t a disaster?” second thoughts, and wrapping up today with the always somber annual lookback at the consequences of war, called Veterans’ Day.

My dad — whom I did not then know, of course — apparently faced the prospect of going overseas in 1943-44 with a grin. (That’s him over at the right, in khakis as he wrapped up his basic training on the campus of Texas A&M University. (He was a mechanic in the armored corps — responsible for repairing tanks and halftracks and such.)

I always wondered about that grin in this and other photos from the time. I mean, I saw it often enough over the decades after I finally did make an appearance in the early 1950s. It came so easily to him. There’s other evidence that he didn’t sweat the prospect of overseas battle; maybe it wasn’t anything remotely like excitement, just simple relief not to be — as his brother Bob was — bound to play a role in the infantry.

He wrote occasional letters home, like the one whose opening is shown below — “A Young Draftee;s Lament about his first hair-cut”:

Nearly always, these letters had this sort of jocular tone… I recognize the tone because I see it in my own email reports to my family, say, about our recent months on the cross-country road. It’s a tone which discloses nothing beyond the good-natured superficial, the equivalent of his grin in the photo (traces of which I also see in the mirror) — making, as I imagine, deeper jitters about what lies ahead…

…and then I think about how often I saw it when I was growing up, how usual that attitude seemed. Perhaps (and perhaps not!) it masked a commonplace darkness, something Dad just preferred to keep to himself. But maybe it also doesn’t matter — because now, looking back on such photos and memories, I can in fact see the divine revealing itself in the cocky grin. I may have to attend to it out of the corner of my eye, so to speak, but it’s there, damn it.

And if the divine is so obviously, insistently real, then what does that say to me about the incorporeality — the inconsequentiality — of the commonplace?

[Best wishes to whiskey river for a speedy recovery!]