This post was written by Mabel Court, a Humanities Center student fellow.
Two summers ago, on a hike near Provo’s Khyv Peak, my friend turned to me and asked if I thought we would be able to see the Taj Mahal during the Millennium—if our exalted bodies could instantaneously transport us to see sites of wonder across the world. As I stumbled down the grassy trail, pines on all sides, I considered: would mortal wonders even compare to the splendor of heaven that would have crashed open by then? Would brick and mortar pale against the holy fervor?
As I reflected, I found that the question itself became irrelevant to me. I glanced at the palms of foot-flattened ferns that lined the path and realized that I expect resurrection to be less a process of acceleration and more a slow awakening to greater awareness of the world—slow enough to consider each granule of dirt, to see the eternities contained in shivering dew-drops, to find that “a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars” (Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”). I yearn less to zip past far-flung structures and more to have my daily walk around my Provo neighborhood cracked open and turned inside-out so that I might have eyes to see the holiness that my mortal coil conceals.
I think I can see it, sometimes—when I see light brilliantly cluttered in the still-green leaves of trees, or watch children play, or feel heart-staggered in the face of a mountain washed in gold. When I bike down Center Street, Y Mountain towering over me, I remember the supplication of poet Derek Walcott: Never get used to this.
I first encountered Walcott in a seminar on the humanities and the environment. His work centers on place—his lines are drenched in the imagery of St. Lucia’s 238 square miles, where the poet spent much of his life. Although the island’s towering hills and electric palm trees may seem exotic poem-fodder to us desert-dwellers, the knowledge that Walcott would have been saturated by these sights day after day makes his commitment to immortalizing them in verse more significant. An untitled poem from his book The Bounty has stuck with me since I first read it two years ago. Its beating heart is one repeated plea: “Never get used to this,” which Walcott scatters among undulating descriptions of St. Lucia’s “feathery, swaying casuarinas” and “the morning silent light” imploring his readers to remain aware of the divinity in the everyday.
Taking on this heightened awareness and living in the attitude of never getting used to the world around us is how we become like God, that lofty goal that colors daily interactions—even the aims of this university—with a celestial glimmer. I hope that becoming like God can sharpen and refine my awareness of the world around me because I believe that They are perfectly, incomprehensibly, tenderly aware of it. Scripture assures us that God pinches the fluttering heartbeat of every sparrow between two gentle fingers, feels the snap of every hair that falls from a head, and winces with all the heart-pangs that needle the vast spinning Earth. Awareness is godliness, and so is empathy—God is not only infinitely aware of all the world’s events (down to the minutia and mundane), but is pierced by them deeply, even from every pore. It is with this divine union of awareness and empathy—with an attitude of never getting used to the world, in other words—that we must tread the crooked path toward God.
We often think that becoming like God will be a predominantly joyful transformation. I’ve imagined being cosmically catapulted into a realm of golden liquid light, becoming endowed with wisdom like the rolling sea. Even the increased awareness I have described, while perhaps more mundane, is still beautiful, a call to awaken to the splendor of the world. However, I’ve wondered lately if becoming like God might be a more painful process than we might initially expect. Godly awareness cannot come without the piercing pain of Divine empathy. We are called to have our bowels filled with charity for all people, which is no small charge. Becoming keenly aware of the suffering that surrounds us is not comfortable. When Enoch peered down at the anguished Earth on the right hand of the Father, he “wept and stretched forth his arms, and his heart swelled wide as eternity; and his bowels yearned; and all eternity shook” (Moses 7:41).
Unlike Enoch, we have not been translated. Eternity is too large for our mortal hearts to swell. Interestingly, the digital age has offered us our own form of Enoch’s sky-high survey of the restless earth—more than at any other time in history, we are made near-constantly aware of the gamut of human suffering. Snatches of pain too big to fit your arms around are delivered to us, bite-sized, via YouTube advertisements, Instagram reels, and news articles. However, as we swallow this short-form suffering, we are left stranded in a landmine of aborted empathy—awakened to the suffering of the world, but without the ability to change it, and deficient of the divine capacity for infinite understanding. We have a form of godliness, but we lack the power thereof. Self-preservation and sheer logistics demand that we avert our eyes, lest our hearts swell to bursting. In other words, we let ourselves get used to it.
I simultaneously understand the necessity of this aversion and find myself convicted by it. I’m not sure what I believe about sin these days—God looks upon the heart, and I don’t know anyone who desires evil things. But I do feel sinful when I turn away from the world and its suffering. I want to answer Walcott’s call to never get used to this, to both the beauty and pain of our frail existence, but I am often overwhelmed by the suffering of the world and my own inadequacy in the face of it—inadequacy both to enact meaningful change and to probe the depth of empathy that such suffering demands.
I considered this crisis of awareness in a course on medieval European women writers. In Revelations of Divine Love, the mystic, anchoress, and theologian Julian of Norwich writes about a vision in which she saw a round “little thing” in the palm of her hand, about the size and shape of a hazelnut. When she asked God what the object was, she was answered: “It is all that is made.” Julian marvels at how the hazelnut has persisted, for she thought “it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little[ness],” but God speaks to her again, assuring her that “it lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it” (Julian 6).
The idea of Julian’s hazelnut has lodged in my mind since I first read about it. In this “little thing,” I see my little life—my neighborhood walks, my glimpses of sun-soaked leaves, my rippling troubles. My sphere of influence seems “naught for its little[ness]” compared to the scope of human experience that I encounter online, like a hazelnut on the expanse of a forest floor, but when I hold it in my palm, I find that it simultaneously contains “all that is made.” Because I am able to know my surroundings deeply, I am able to love them fully, accessing the kind of awareness and empathy that inspires action and change, rather than paralysis and despair. Thus, the people and places around me “lasteth, and ever shall last for that God [and I] love [them].”
It’s not a neat resolution. I’m reminded of something Mary Oliver wrote: “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. / I do know how to pay attention” (Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”). I don’t know exactly how to metabolize the suffering we glimpse from digital vantage points, but I do know that if we pay attention, and maintain awareness even when it is painful, we can struggle toward a greater embrace of Divine empathy. Though we may now echo Enoch’s repeated plea—“When shall the Earth rest?”—we know that the Rock of Heaven, “which is broad as eternity,” holds all that is made in the palm of Their hands (Moses 7:53). Until the day the earth shall rest, may we answer the call to never get used to this life in all its aching, brilliant beauty.
