What events in your life point beyond themselves? Which happenings, perhaps trivial in appearance, have carried you upward toward higher meaning?

These are questions that remain important for seekers after spirit and light. I met such a seeker last week at a conference in Denver, a woman named Priscilla Ebersole, who is two days older than I and lives in San Bruno, California. There she edits a magazine for nurses and also helps people sift their life experience for meaning.

From her own life, Dr. Ebersole (she has a Ph.D.) recounted two experiences that she called “transcendent.” The first came on a walk that she and her aged mother took some ten years ago through a forest in Oregon. They were looking for her mother’s favorite flower, the extremely rare lady slipper, hoping to find a blossom hardly ever seen.

To their initial disappointment, they never did come upon their precious prize. However, to the delight of Priscilla, they did discover a calypso orchid. This flower itself was of surpassing beauty and she was rapt by its splendor. To her, this discovery became an experience that drew her upward to contemplation of the highest beauty –  – the spirit, supreme reality, God.

The second such event in Priscilla’s life was the discovery, in the basement of her home, of a trunk containing a bundle of letters. These were letters composed between 1929 and 1935 by Priscilla’s grandmother who wrote each week to her daughter, a missionary serving in India. “It was as if I had stepped back in time,” says Priscilla about reading the letters long lost to anyone’s view.

Reading them, Priscilla learned things about her grandmother and other family members that she had ever known before and felt stirred by this new knowledge. She expanded her view of life across the generations and was moved to contemplation of what it means to be human.

These two incidents have in common the element of surprise. Priscilla did not know in advance what she would come upon. They were eureka experiences, events that drew “ahas” from the woman. They brought with them a rush of welcome emotion that swept her up into a higher universe.

The experiences have also proven to have lasting power in one woman’s life. They are events that at first looked unimportant but have had astonishing legs, to use a word favored by some show biz types. Priscilla has remembered them for years now and they continue to feed her soul. They serve her as fulcrums on which her interpretation of her whole life is balanced.

Priscilla Ebersole also believes that “transcendence teaches us compassion.” For me, this connection remains mysterious but I regard it as worth thinking about. I also hold to the connection between things. Dr. Ebersole quotes approvingly a woman 102 years old who, not long before her death, said, “I just have the feeling that I’m connected to everything.”

Every human being must have had experiences that reveal extra dimensions of reality, at least potentially. But we can blunt their edge by not being attentive to them. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, but often we remain indifferent to grandeur. Hopkins also wrote “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” but most of us cannot appreciate that much reality very often.

Another poet, William Blake, suggested seeing “a world in a grain of sand/ And a heaven in a wild flower.” Doing so, however, requires a disposition of soul that holds us ready to see beyond surface reality. We must, at least occasionally, be poised to grasp the precious opportunities for seeing beyond.

At the funeral of a man of letters recently, his son stood up to read one of his father’s poems. Before doing so, however, he made a few remarks about growing up in his father’s household. He spoke movingly about his father’s love and kindness for him and his two sisters.

The only occasions in which his father became impatient with his children, the son recounted, came when they showed themselves lacking in a sense of wonder. His father called this defect “sloth” and warned his children to resist it steadfastly. He wanted them to remain alive to the wonders of the world, the way he was himself, and not to yield to the temptation of staying on the surface of things.

Richard Griffin