Author: Nick Hilton

Grace Emily Page was born on January 17, 2025. Catherine and Sam’s third child. Ain’t she the cutest thing?

Our seventh grandchild, Gracie has a quality of happy serenity about her that seems rare to me. Possibly her quiet bliss is something I’m noticing more as my search for it has a greater urgency and a bit sharper focus now. Maybe she is teaching me. She is quietly content in a way that I would emulate. She has about her a “peace that passeth understanding.”

Being born we come from a place of no conditions, no unmet needs and no preferences into a world of opposites, of uncomfortable diapers and motivating hunger, of dark danger and our parents’ blessed reassurance. Our living experience exposes us to distractions through our senses and our developing minds. We must learn to understand, to form language, to achieve things from crawling to imagining. So doing we crowd out pure consciousness and fill our minds instead with thoughts, some necessary, some superfluous. We are indeed fortunate if our parents and siblings provide happy and peaceful examples of what we can be; the Page family is blessed with this ability. For some of us a return to the tranquility of the womb can be a necessary exercise.

Meditation is this return, a decision, an attempt to experience pure consciousness, without conditions or preferences, past or future. We can do this for a daily period of dedicated time by enclosing our experience and our distracting thoughts behind an imaginary door, so we may experience only our breathing, entering into and remaining in a state of Grace.

I am so grateful for this tiny girl’s example.

Big news in the religion world, God is working on a new image for us. This is to be the third release, newly updated. He’s getting help from new members of the old gang, in response to comments from the audience amid alarming downward trends in the ratings.

Science has kind of lost its luster, presenting a new opportunity, but still competition is tough. So many things are different now. Here in the 21st century, where conventions of thought and systems of belief are not limited to countries, continents or cultures, it was hard for Him to sell the masterful, dominant he-man persona He was scripted with way back in Moses’s day. The Big Shot In The Sky role isn’t working. Gender is a touchy subject. Plus, all the classic descriptives, scary things, like revenge, playing favorites among societies and sects, eternal damnation and after-life in general aren’t popular anymore. People who still want to practice religion have to sort of look the other way, excusing Mr. God for his stubborn, antiquated attributes, like they would for a nice old grandpa whose apparent senility they excuse and yet whom they love, pardoning His youthful excesses.

There is a special subcommittee working on the problem of how to explain miracles and the ever-presence of Grace, but praying works well and that’s a big selling point.

These new branding consultants, the late Pope Francis’s among them, are proposing this change, stressing the popularity of Francis of Assisi, for example, who was all about peace and selfless service, the kind of ideal, kind Father that Jesus suggested we call Abba. Their advice is for God to drop the he-man image to become a blend of heroic wisdom, feminine mercy and unconditional love. They say this is how God will get the respect God deserves, and how to dethrone science, the later Lucifer. Wasn’t this what Jesus came to tell us in the first place?

Maybe folks will realize war is stupid, that there is no superior race, that science is just one of God’s gifts, that our purpose in life is to make the world better. The world needs a peaceful God. We can work on omnipotent and omniscient once we get the basics down.

Truth is an eternal, infinite principle, an attribute of a thing or a concept. “True” is a descriptive that implies this principle: not arbitrary, not an argument of reason, not subject to conditions. Two plus two equals four is a statement of eternal truth. Amor omnia vincit is another, which the soul always recognizes while the mind may not.

Truth is not situational, not dependent on circumstance or corroboration. By definition it is incontrovertible. Like liquid-ness, or blue-ness, a thought or statement is true because it is a manifestation of this eternal property. Whatever is true has the spirit of truth about it, often not apparent to the intellect but immediately perceived by an open heart.

Pilate’s words echo down through the ages because they exemplify the insecurity of the secular mind, the limited ability of reason. Persuaded by the crowd to see Jesus as a criminal, unable to see the truth, he was relying on his mind rather than persuaded by his heart. We may all identify. We do not find Truth through the exercise of reason.

There is Truth, and our daily decision to seek it is the doorway to meaningful life.

I belong to the choir at The Catholic Community of St. Charles Borromeo here, and this is Holy Week: final rehearsal was Wednesday, Maundy Thursday Mass yesterday evening, Good Friday service this afternoon and then Easter Vigil Mass on Saturday evening. Singing in the group, especially this time of year, is the most “religious” thing I’ve ever done, and the most intensely spiritual.

It’s not that I’m a good singer. I can’t read music. I have to hear it. I can sing with some energy when I get the tune and it’s helpful if the other basses lead me. I just love the experience. The combination of our voices and the orchestra, the harmony, the verses, the feeling, the energy of devotion, makes it a whole-body prayer.

Tim Keyes, our excellent choir master, put some excerpts from Ezekiel to music. The refrain is, “I will give you a new heart/Put a new spirit within you…” When we sing these words my eyes close and my gut tenses with an urgent sense of universal Love. Every time we sing this I am transported to a place where God is, a place I always am, just in that moment, really There!

It is praying for real, from my heart.

Since ancient Greece a lot of philosophy has been devoted to the discussion of what is real, elaborations on the question of whether, when a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it happen, does it make any noise? They want to know what is “the thing in itself.” Is it your idea of the thing, the sum of your perceptions, or does it exist independently of perception? Philosophers have spent their lives considering this, arguing, trying to explain the nature of reality. What good has it done, actually?

I see that as a frivolous puzzle. I am, and that’s that. The sound of my alarm clock, the water I wash my face with, the coffee I drink, all that is real. Philosophy, love of knowledge, is valuable if it guides me in my thinking and my behavior. Truly valuable ideas and insights influence how we think and live, the way we treat each other, how to find and fulfill our purpose in life. The rest is mind games.

Believing does not require the suspension of logic or purposeful ignorance of reality. Believing takes place in a separate area of the mind, where the “reality” of a thing – a miracle, a resurrection, an ascension – is not subject to the human test of logic or practicality. Believing has no issue with what happened, it is the presence of an influence on our attitude, a means of adjusting our views and actions, a song of the heart that echoes within us, reminding us of the inconceivable.

The stubborn ego resists this notion, seeking proof. Good luck with that.

In an essay called “Hamlet and His Problems,” T.S. Eliot asserts that successful writing communicates not through the meaning of the words alone, but more completely through the feeling that the writing conveys. That is to say that successful writing evokes the emotional response, not just the image or idea, the author seeks to communicate. This done by the writer’s composing an “objective correlative;” the thing in words that evokes the feeling the author seeks to convey.

Compare the London fog in this passage from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House,

“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river… Fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city…”

with Eliot’s description of fog in “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock:”

“The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening…”

In its original meaning, from the Greek, the word “aesthetic” was a description of feeling. (Consider its opposite: anesthetic, the elimination of feeling.) Over time, the word has come to signify simply the appreciation of beauty, a description of anything to do with any form of art, regardless of human response. Perhaps it is another example of the mechanistic nature of modern thinking that equates spiritual interest with superstition. “Aesthetics” should signify the transmission of sentiments, of emotions, not simply data. The objects we write should correlate to a universal sentiment. Somehow we have forgotten that our experience of truth or beauty should be a combination of mental and emotional responses.

Last night I read “The House That Nobody Lives In,” by Joyce Kilmer in an anthology of poetry for children. I’m pretty sure Kilmer does not rank high among 20th century poets in academic circles, but his poem powerfully communicates something about the human condition that more complicated, “great” poets have never communicated, to me anyway. This poem has feeling:

“… a house that has done what a house should do, a house that has sheltered life…
A house that has echoed a baby’s laugh and held up his stumbling feet,
Is the saddest sight, when it’s left alone, that ever your eyes could meet.”

Give me writing that moves me, that makes me laugh or cry, worry, or celebrate. Don’t tell me how to feel, show me. Don’t give me art that is intellectual, that moves the “frontiers” of art, that shows me how smart you are. I don’t care about any of that. Aim for my heart and I will feel you, brother.

Full meaning is expressed simply by the choice of words. The objective things you read in my writing will, when the words are properly chosen, convey to you the sentiment I seek to communicate. The feeling (the aesthetic) will be communicated, the way a well-composed lullaby induces sleep or a painting is said to have meaning, as Hemingway is to have said, If I work vey hard and I am very, very lucky.”

As far as subjects go, this is The Big One, bigger and more complex than what I can express to you or even to myself, but it’s worth a try.

Being or existence precedes everything, Self-created, eternal and infinite. As these qualities are beyond human comprehension we’ve made up stories and theories that we can relate to that explain it, interesting but far from certain. Existence preceded any Big Bang or any Creation event, real or mythological, that tries to explain it. We are curious. We want answers, so we make them up. They may be comforting, but they’re just stories.

Existence is not the opposite of non-existence, it is the opposite of the inconceivable emptiness: nothing. Being itself is the original miracle, the inexplicable and wonderful is-ness of everything. It has always been and always will be. The stuff that fills up the universe, all the things like space and time, light and air, all is recent by comparison, no matter how it came into being. What precedes it, what we adore, what we consider Sanctified, is the fact that it is.

The word for this is God, as there is no other way in common usage to express it. The Vedic notion of The Self, or Atman, the Judaic expression YHWH, the Native American notion of universal blessedness are place-holders, expressions of understanding something that cannot be understood. Jesus called it Father (Abba) suggesting qualities of a loving, nurturing parent. Following Christ means attributing these qualities to Life.

As a Christian, I believe in God, the origin and provider of life, which indicates a moral nature, an inherent goodness, a way. Some call it Tao. We cannot conceive of God, really, but we can recognize Its attributes and strive to follow them in our behavior, our sentiments and our devotion.