High up in the wooded hills of Hinton, West Virginia, stands the Carmelite desert house of the Washington Province, the only English-speaking one of its kind throughout the Order. Here I was 'sequestered' for seventy days and seventy nights in what the Americans call 'the Fall' of 2002. We were a permanent community of just three friars, living in hermitages about a hundred yards apart. Mine was small and simple, with a covered balcony where I spent hours on end drinking in the surroundings - which were very beautiful indeed. The encircling woods were teeming with wildlife: gentle deer and rabbits, chipmunks and squirrels, and an endless variety of colourful birds. The balcony afforded shelter from the sun in the heat and cover from the rain which in the latter part of my stay fell steadily and softly, leaving in its aftermath that unique sound of dripping leaves in the woods all around. Sitting on the balcony, I grew into a heightened awareness of the life around me and found myself part of it in a way I had not experienced before. I felt a bond and a unity with the little creatures in their daily battles for survival in a manner that was new for me

The 'school' of leisure
I took up again an old favourite, Josef Pieper's classic, Leisure the Basis of Culture. Leisure has always been a concept close to my heart. While putting the concept into practice has met with mixed success down through the years, I have found it a balancing quality in my life, often affording me "in hours of weariness sensations sweet" (Wordsworth).  Pieper speaks of leisure as "a mental and spiritual attitude - it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a week-end or a vacation. It is, in the first place, an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul. Compared with the exclusive ideal of work as activity, leisure implies ... an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being 'busy', but letting things happen... [It] is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation."

The desert does rekindle one's sense of wonder which still subsists in our deeper selves but is often smothered by the noise and pace of life. Stepping off the treadmill, even momentarily, and allowing 'the senses to revive again' brings a reawakening of wonder and a new awareness of the beauty of small things that otherwise get trampled underfoot, unnoticed. As Blake writes: 'To see a world in a grain of sand, And heaven in a wild flower; To hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour'.

Pieper again: "A man who needs the unusual to make him 'wonder' shows that he has lost the capacity to find the true answer to the wonder of being.... To perceive all that is unusual and exceptional, all that is wonderful, in the midst of the ordinary things of everyday life, is the beginning of philosophy'. The comment of  Thomas Aquinas, that "No philosopher has been able to grasp the being of a single fly" points up the wonder that lies at our "clay-shuttered doors" at every turn - what the Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh, calls 'the placeless heaven that's under all our noses'.

"Without vision the people perish"
The Romantic poets had that same sense of the throbbing mystery at the heart of creation, none more so than Wordsworth, whose articulation of this "something other" in his Tintern Abbey is unsurpassed: "And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; A sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things'.

"Without vision the people perish" (Pr 29: 18).  It can be a battle today to stay in touch with the inner core and to "be still and know that I am God"(Ps 45,1l).  Thomas Aquinas constructed his vision of philosophy on the key principle of Aristotle, that all learning begins in wonder: "Initium philosophiae admiratio est".

Fragmentation and hyperactivity are the hallmarks of our modern age and it is hardly progress if we can no longer say, along with Wordsworth: "My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky". In his fine book, Dive Deeper, Michael Paul Gallagher says that "by visiting our ordinary humanity with wonder, we may find ourselves drawn towards the larger Mystery of our existence".

The sky at night
In my Oxford student days I developed an interest in, and a fascination with, the night sky. It has never left me. And so it was that I could be seen on clear moonless nights with binoculars trained on the Milkv Way over West Virginia. Nothing awakens the sleeping beauty of our wonder more than the contemplation of this awesome phenomenon of the vastness of our universe. No wonder St Teresa used to encourage her sisters, when their world was becoming too small, to go out under the night sky and look up at the stars and measure that vastness against the trivialities of the daily round

"Beauty ever ancient ever new"
Gerard Manley Hopkins deplored the havoc the Industrial Revolution wreaked on the beautiful English countryside and, indeed, the negative effect it had on human life:

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.'

The saintly, if eccentric, Jesuit had a keen sense of beauty and appealed with passion to anyone who would listen to his words: "Give beauty back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver". The Welsh mountains around St Beuno's nourished his sense of wonder as he saw "the world... charged with the grandeur of God".

A recent book on the theme of beauty makes a plea for beauty to be restored to the heart of our Christian outlook and quotes Hans Urs von Balthasar to telling effect: "We can be sure that whoever sneers at beauty can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love".  Beauty is a window onto the Being of God.  Conscious encounters with beauty in the "bits and pieces" of the everyday will lift life out of the humdrum and bring shafts of light into an otherwise dark world.  The great French religious thinker, Simone Weil, puts it strikingly: "The beauty of the world is Christ's tender smile for us coming through matter. He is really present in the universal beauty. The love of this beauty proceeds from God dwelling in our souls and goes out to God present in the universe. It is like a sacrament".

In reality, there are shafts of beauty in every life,  no matter how banal,  if only we have eyes to see. Every day has its moments of light, however black it may otherwise be. Every day, every person touches beauty capable of uplifting the spirit - if only we can notice.. So often, writes T S Eliot in Four Quartets, 'we had the experience but missed the meaning'. Keats was right:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases;
it will never pass into nothingness;
but still will keep a bower quiet for us..(Endymion).

There are things in daily life that energise the spirit and enable us to touch God in spontaneous prayer, thus creating an underlayer of spirituality that facilitates our contact with the Divine.

Age and familiarity and the cares of life tend to stifle the wonder in things for us mortals who are "busy about many things".

Tis ye, tis your estranged faces,
That miss the many-splendour'd thing
and we fail to see that  'There: lives the dearest freshness deep down things'.

If, in the words of St Irenaeus, "the glory of God is man, woman, fully alive", then nurturing (or recapturing) a sense of wonder is an essential part of the process and will ensure an inner stillness by which we can listen to the essence of things. This will create a kind of interior sanctuary, even in the midst of busy-ness, that will bring "in hours of weariness sensations sweet" - sentiments well summed up in this little verse of Katherine Nelson Davis:

I am serene for
I have built a chapel in my heart,
A silent, sheltered citadel,
A separate place apart.

This article first appeared in The Carmelite Review and later in Pastoral Renewal Exchange (December 2004).