The Scandal of the Particular

A pair of high-heeled shoes, slightly worn, sitting at the center of a makeshift altar. Tiny pieces of a life. You stand there looking at those shoes for a long time. Suddenly you reach out to touch them. You remember the last time she wore them, walking with you along Broadway on the way to the theatre, her hair blowing in the wind, her brown eyes flashing, the sharp click-click-click of her heels on the sidewalk. She loved the theatre. You remember that now. You touch the slender strap of her shoe and remember.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, while rescue crews were digging furiously through the rubble in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania, when the horror of that event was still so raw and overwhelming, a series of photographs appeared in one of our national newspapers. These were photographs not of ground zero or the Pentagon or the crash site in Pennsylvania, but of ordinary things that people had left behind. A wheelchair (a spare one it turns out) once used by a man who worked on the 87^th floor of the world trade center. A set of golf clubs belonging to a man who was a passenger on one of the downed airliners--he had just recently begun teaching his wife and daughter to play. A small collection of watercolors, one of them not quite finished, created by a woman who was on her way home to Los Angeles after having visited her family in Boston.

I remember being struck at the time by the eerie silence and stillness surrounding these images, as if the spirit that had infused these objects only a few short days before had now disappeared completely. And yet that was not quite true. Gazing at these photographs, I felt the uncanny power of these things, and behind or within them, the spirit of those whose lives had been so suddenly and tragically cut short.

The early Christian community spoke of the scandal of the particular--the God of the universe revealed in flesh and blood. They felt the strange, incongruous power of this idea. They felt too the awful strangeness of beholding the very image of God in a human being broken and beaten and hanging on a cross. The scandalous, revelatory power of the particular. It has a special claim on the Christian imagination. It shapes and refracts what we find significant, how we live, against what powers we struggle.

In this issue of Spiritus, we are invited to pay close attention to the revelatory power of the particular, to the demands it places upon us, to the questions it raises--in the particular way Sophia, the Wisdom of God, courses through Henry Suso's fecund imagination; in the image of a man bound and dragged behind a pickup truck until he breathes no more--one expression of racism's harsh, dehumanizing power; in a distinct practice that informs spiritual experience, alters it, brings to our awareness new questions, new horizons of understanding; in the challenge and opportunity presented to the teacher who finds herself considering the meaning of a classic spiritual text with this particular group of students and no other; in the flickering image in a darkened theatre, capturing in a flash a moment of decision that will change a life forever; in the immense hope and longing poured into a tiny hazelnut; in those makeshift altars--covered with rum bottles, candles, small faded photographs--places where all that has been lost can be held and remembered and cherished.

To pay attention, to reflect on the significance of the particulars that come to us is a hard, demanding work, an exacting spiritual discipline. It is so easy to overlook them, to underestimate their significance, to allow them to remain dormant, mute, empty of meaning. But a large and diverse chorus of voices from our tradition urges us to resist this impulse, to look for...