“The world is charged with the grandeur of God” and “Not all those who wander are lost”: meditate on these two statements in conjunction for a moment. Put together, I think they evoke a principle too often forgotten in the modern world: Providence.
Gentile or Jew, servant or free, or however the hymn goes, we’re all supposed to believe that God is guiding history. Our less religious society often expresses this as “everything happens for a reason.” But I’m saying more than that. I’m saying that virtually everything has a meaning or significance whether on the everyday or the cosmic scale. Not just for the individual and his reasons, but in the grand scheme. We may not always know that meaning or be able to discern it. We can’t see suffering and evil as totally significant, but we also can’t ignore them as senseless and alien. And so, that doesn’t mean suffering means God hates you nor does it mean success is a necessary reflection of your virtuousness; it just means the world is filled with signs and wonders, ways of experiencing the mystery that is reality.
Why does any of this matter? Well aside from the fact that I’m a pedant with a bully pulpit, this can redefine how we see politics. It needn’t be that President Obama was sent to punish an impious nation or that the end is nigh. It could be as simple as recognizing the significance of having a decent person occupying your congressional seat, Democrat or Republican. On the grand scale, we can come to see how modernity itself, with its faults and imperfections has something to teach us. We can hate Progressivist ideology, but then what do we make of improved sewage systems, women’s rights, and the large-scale abolition of slavery? All of these are related to modernity and yet positive.
This needs to be written because the world is less a mystery than it once was. But mystery and significance go together. I am not speaking about imposing ourselves on the world. Of course, there is the danger of the critic working harder than the author as it were, but I’d rather the critic work a little too hard than miss the point of the author all together. We must remember that although not all that glitters is gold, existence is rich in meaning not to be imposed but to be discovered.
