Small and Insignificant, Mighty and Glorious

Across the street from the elementary school I attended in the late 1940's stood a very small grocery store maintained by an elderly man and his wife. Each wore identical, long, white aprons with bibs and string ties that circled their waists and knotted over their abundant stomachs. The store had a worn, wooden floor that creaked in a welcoming way when anyone entered. Didn't all small, family-owned grocery stores of the '40's have such floors? I remember them that way. The light inside the store was dim, but not so dim that I and my friends couldn't clearly see the various penny candies displayed inside their glass case. The store smelled of strawberry and banana taffy. Sometimes I had a nickel to spend after lunch. That was heavenly.

Every spring a young man would appear, as if dropped from the sky, on the porch of this store. He was a slight man with a darker skin than mine, from Manila, so we were told, and he wore a colorful, tropical shirt, nothing like the shirts my dad wore. This intriguing man sold yo-yos, and he was a genuine expert with the toy. Up and down his yo-yo would wheel, spinning fast, between his legs and over his head and, spinning still, roll along on the sidewalk in a trick called "walking the dog" until it was jerked back up its string to be caught perfectly in his hand. It was awesome to watch.

The fortunate child who purchased a yo-yo received not only this wooden toy shiny with fluorescent colors, just like the yo-yo that performed such marvelous feats, but also, free of charge, a scene carved on its side by this man from Manila, carved with a small pen knife right before the child's eyes. The carving depicted a scene from his native land—palm trees and mountains, sometimes a stream, a hut, sometimes even the owner's name. The child who possessed such a yo-yo could always admire the scene, running a finger over the lines of it, even if the particular yo-yo never behaved, tangling and twisting at the end-length of its string.

Would it be proper to label this master of yo-yo skills, talented also at carving landscapes on his wooden wares, an artist? Probably not. Did his talents, performed on the porch of a small grocery store in a small mid-western town, constitute a spiritual experience? Few would call it so. But suppose a painter replicated that scene taking place at lunchtime on an early April day, suggested with oils on canvas the delight and adoration on the faces of the boys and girls gathered around, the pleasure the man took perhaps in his skill, perhaps in the rapt attention of the children, perhaps in the colors and sounds of the spring day with its new sun, perhaps in the all-in-all. Or suppose the scene was described in a cadence of language, with words that evoked the vitality, the unique camaraderie and complex interaction between humans and the details of this place and time. Or suppose the patterns and rhythms existing among the children, the man, the yo-yos, the warming earth, the store keepers watching from the doorway, the motions and sounds of returning birds, were expressed by violins, flutes, oboes, clarinets, timpani. Suppose through their works the painter, the poet, the composer, the musicians, conveyed both the loss of this moment and the eternal nature of this moment? This we might call art. This we might call spiritual.

The arts are those disciplines that bring to our awareness our deepest and most persistent yearnings, longings that are always present with us to a lesser or greater extent. The arts, in their various manifestations, remind us of these basic and profound yearnings, whether the yearning concerns our inability to define ourselves, or our...