My wife and I take our small children to a local zoo once or twice a year. The animals at the zoo live in a naturalized habitat, so it’s often difficult to see them. We normally just walk along until we come to a wooden sign that alerts us to the presence of an animal. We then tell the children what to look for.
It dawned on me one day that it seems possible that an illiterate and ignorant person could walk through the zoo and not even know it, especially on a hot day when the animals sleep in the shade, away from the viewing area. If a person doesn’t know there are animals, he could conceivably walk through the entire zoo, head down or looking straight ahead, and not see any.
I suspect it’s this way with spiritual things. If a person rejects (is ignorant of) the spiritual, he’s likely to walk through life and not even know he’s walking in a world consisting of the material and the spiritual. He would see the material things, but be oblivious to the spiritual: the grace of God acting in his heart, the presence of God in all things, divine intervention, miracles. He would be like a toddler in the zoo who’s fascinated with the benches, food, and shrubbery, but never notices the animals themselves.
This analogy has a serious shortcoming because spiritual things aren’t nearly as easy to see as animals in a zoo, even to people who believe they exist. A person can’t merely believe in the spiritual and occasionally read the Bible like a person can stroll through a zoo and read the exhibit signs. If he engages in such a haphazard effort, he’s likely to miss the real things of the spirit, or, worse, mistake material things — like a burst of adrenaline or true coincidences — for grace and acts of God, like a toddler who’s told that he’s going to see animals and runs up to the lion statue in front of the park and points excitedly in confirmation of his expectations.
In order to see the spiritual animals, a person needs to develop his “spiritual senses,” like a wine taster must develop refined senses for wine. The idea of spiritual senses goes all the way back to Origen (third century). The term has been used differently, but basically the doctrine of spiritual senses says that, as we mature spiritually, we develop faculties analogous to the sense organs of the body, and these faculties perceive and discern the things of God.
My favorite description of active spiritual senses comes from the modern Greek Orthodox writer Kallistos Ware, who wrote that the person with strong spiritual senses “recognizes that the place where he is standing is holy ground.” Such a person is
aware of the dimensions of sacred space and sacred time. This material object, this person to whom I am talking, this moment of time — each is holy, each is in its own way unrepeatable and so of infinite value, each can serve as a window into eternity…. All things are permeated and maintained in being by the uncreated energies of God, and so all things are a theophany that mediates His presence.
The person with spiritual senses sees God in the things of creation and in the events of history.
The spiritual senses aren’t something we can suddenly decide to use; we can’t turn them on like we can open an eye. To borrow William Blake’s phrase, the “doors of our perception” must first be cleaned. A level of purity is needed before the spiritual senses can begin to operate. Our sensual passions and inordinate interest in earthly pursuits must be quelled, usually through renunciation and ascetic practices like fasting, tithing, and charity work.
This makes sense, of course, because renunciation involves self-denial, and self-denial entails shrinking the ego. The ego is full of self-interest — earthly ambitions, desires, opinions. When everything we see is first refracted through our ego and its passions, things tend to get distorted (consider, for instance, the perceptual disabilities of a man in full rage — blind rage). Such refraction is especially damaging to the spiritual senses because self-interest is wrapped in the worldly and consequently has the potent ability of blocking out the spiritual altogether. Renunciation prepares the way for the spiritual senses by clearing the path of excessive worldly interests.
In the zoo analogy, the renunciatory effort is like driving to the zoo, paying for the ticket, and walking to the exhibit areas. Only after these things are done, can we begin to look for the animals with any possibility of seeing them.
The effort is no doubt worth it. Sure, we can enjoy the zoo’s plants and pleasant walkways, but the real attraction is the animals. Likewise, we can see the bodily appearance of things and those are nice, but the best stuff is in the spirit. Grace, holiness, love, truth, and goodness — transcendental things that can’t be seen without a spiritual eye — that’s where the action is, and those are things that can only be truly appreciated once our spiritual senses start to work.
© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the Editor of The Daily Eudemon, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.
