Like passing over an open border, many of us shuttle regularly between the mundane and the transcendent worlds. For meeting our basic needs of life and comfort and dignity, for our performances, our achievements, and our regular maintenance responsibilities, we are busy in the mundane. But for play, and intimacy, as well as occasions of hospitality, friendship and exploration, in short for all those occasions where what goes on between ‘you and me’ is the point, we are in the transcendent.
We know the transcendent operates differently than the mundane; and we go there for what we know is good and essential but not necessarily practical or pertinent to ambition; things like generosity, curiosity, kindness, hope, vision itself.
But the transcendent is not just a dimension set; it the active workshop where freshness ‘mints’ lasting encounters that transcend the mortality which haunts everything in the mundane. It’s where freshness creates the spaces of its own play– formal or unstructured, serious or light-hearted, always adventurous–that will resound with life forever.
As we do when passing by a kitchen, that common, domestic workshop, from which waft aromas that arouse appetite and meals that satisfy and nourish, we often acknowledge the presence and the products of transcendence in our lives. Usually, however, our focus is on the savor of the scents and the flavors of the food (even raiding the pantry), but not the actual process of cooking.
Most of us have encounters regularly, but frequently don’t recognize them as such. Encountering, if we take it seriously as a practice, calls us however to learn our way around the workspace of the kitchen under the tutelage of the chef, freshness itself. That is, it means intentionally building our skills and expanding our repertoire of ways for integrating the mundane and the transcendent in our lives in and through encounters.
The transcendent world is not a duplicate of mundane world just armed with intrusive superpowers, nor is it a pervasive, tremendous ineffability, nor is it a virtual locus of vague, unrealizable longings. It is a place of tools and benches, of works in progress as well as works in pause, of steady engagement where freshness produces by its actual, active and potent participation what it loves most: encounters. We are partners, and also apprentices.
A good way to begin this apprenticeship is to begin each day with an invocation of freshness and a commitment (or request of help) to 1. be alert to recognize and to actively notice others and othernesses, and 2. accept and to actively issue invitations to encounter. This readiness and pre-encounter preparation is freshness setting up the encounter. What follows–the actual making of common cause with the livingness of an other–is that three way, free way, interaction that melds the concreteness of the mundane with the beyondness of the transcendent to create something with fresh future forever.
The threshold of the transcendent is unguarded and everywhere near at hand, never knowingly crossed by some but commuted across habitually by others without a thought. It distinguishes the world of urgencies and complacencies from one where, calmly, steadily, and incessantly, occasions of intrinsic and lasting value are ‘cooked up.’
The pans are down there under the counter; the spices are up in the cabinet behind you; find the utensils in the drawer; and let’s get cooking.