People are not parts. So often we separate ourselves and others into sectioned things, as if something emotional was not physical and vise versa. When we see the person as one whole and the world in some way connected or affected by this wholeness, we stop using the language of conceptual thought and commit “to the kind of intelligence that perceptively reads the gestalt of things.” Gestalt is a German word that translates best as figure, but to get at this idea further one must imagine their day unfold and the movement that guides this unfolding.
We get up: we ache, we shift and whine inside while the whine comes out in body language. Then we recall: what happened last night, what will happen-the day before us and we approach the side of the bed half-ready to do something about it. The very act of awakening is not simply physical; it is a movement-a gear shift- that takes every once of our being. There is a reason for the light and the dark that is in no way divorced from physical realities but is wholly connected to the spiritual…while awakening we glimpse salvation daily.
The world is animated then with a figure, a whole, that sets the universal and local in cosmic connection with one another. Hans Urs von Balthasar, who was quoted just a moment ago labels Jesus Christ the “concrete universal.” There is a weight to this life that can only be measured by truth, starting from the very fibers of our lives. The waking up, the walking, the things we see and do that shape us are connected to a reality so true we can’t help but breath it in, swim in it, and glimpse this figure on the horizon of every moment.
