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8 Sparks: The Transcendent in the Everyday ELIGIONS glory in celebrating their cycle of sacred moments even as individuals rejoice in the great transitions in their lives. Mystics extend this capacity for greeting the Sacred by their genius for making the exceptional the stuff of everyday, the most dedicated among them seeking to live in communion with the Holy-what the kabbalists called devekut, clinging. Most of us, however, have no special spiritual talent and we spend our lives in routines punctuated by sporadic bursts of creativity and indiViduality. Knowing this, religions institutionalize, seeking by the rites they devise to help us to a steadier awareness of the Numinous. The Lurianic mystics had a metaphor for this process so compelling that many of us, who do not share the myth that they took as fact, still find it evocative. They spoke about the divine sparks that remained embedded in nature after the creation and they envisioned daily religiosity as the mystic elevation of these sparks to their proper, redemptive unity with God. In our time the sociologist Peter Berger has given this old intuition new and appealing form. Berger, a devout Lutheran layman, employs his academic expertise to expose a curious aspect of modernity. It is common for us to strike a posture of suspicion for the sake of sophistication, habitually censoring from consciousness any sense of ultimacy that may arise in daily experience. While the attitude reflects the values of only a small group in our society, many others adopt it because they think it culturally advanced. In contrast, Berger points to five ordinary experiences in which we can detect what, utilizing a medieval Christian phrase, he charmingly calls "a rumor of angels.If In the face of life's confusion we assert that there is order; despite our seriousness, particularly as regards time, we insist on play; against life's continual disappointments and tragedy, we hope; in the face of the utterly despicable-here Eichmann is the chief example-we insist upon damnation; and in the most demanding circumstances, some people manage to manifest a sense of humor. There is nothing particularly spiritual, one might think, about these attitudes. Yet they make sense only as testimony to a reality that transcends the 108 8 Sparks: The Transcendent in the Everyday ELIGIONS glory in celebrating their cycle of sacred moments even as individuals rejoice in the great transitions in their lives. Mystics extend this capacity for greeting the Sacred by their genius for making the exceptional the stuff of everyday, the most dedicated among them seeking to live in communion with the Holy-what the kabbalists called devekut, clinging. Most of us, however, have no special spiritual talent and we spend our lives in routines punctuated by sporadic bursts of creativity and indiViduality. Knowing this, religions institutionalize, seeking by the rites they devise to help us to a steadier awareness of the Numinous. The Lurianic mystics had a metaphor for this process so compelling that many of us, who do not share the myth that they took as fact, still find it evocative. They spoke about the divine sparks that remained embedded in nature after the creation and they envisioned daily religiosity as the mystic elevation of these sparks to their proper, redemptive unity with God. In our time the sociologist Peter Berger has given this old intuition new and appealing form. Berger, a devout Lutheran layman, employs his academic expertise to expose a curious aspect of modernity. It is common for us to strike a posture of suspicion for the sake of sophistication, habitually censoring from consciousness any sense of ultimacy that may arise in daily experience. While the attitude reflects the values of only a small group in our society, many others adopt it because they think it culturally advanced. In contrast, Berger points to five ordinary experiences in which we can detect what, utilizing a medieval Christian phrase, he charmingly calls "a rumor of angels.If In the face of life's confusion we assert that there is order; despite our seriousness, particularly as regards time, we insist on play; against life's continual disappointments and tragedy, we hope; in the face of the utterly despicable-here Eichmann is the chief example-we insist upon damnation; and in the most demanding circumstances, some people manage to manifest a sense of humor. There is nothing particularly spiritual, one might think, about these attitudes. Yet they make sense only as testimony to a reality that transcends the 108...

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