Check out this sweet swirling escalation of a tune, “Look Around the Corner,” by Quantic and Alice Russell, with the Combo Bárbaro. (Thanks to N. for the recommendation.)

 

As I listen to it, I think of the worldly mysticism that seems to be gaining traction among affiliated and unaffiliated nonspiritual- and nonreligious-, and well as spiritual- and religious-identified persons in the secularizing countries in the contemporary world, and that also seems to have adherents in some dimensions of theologies of interreligious dialogue.

It is a mysticism that celebrates something not so totally different from what another era called the “sacrament of the present moment,” wherein what is known and loved about this life becomes central, the higher goods that can be pursued are defined as within the tentative grasp of worldly experience and knowledge, tasted on the plane from individual emotion to the seemingly grand indifference (to us) of the cosmos. A divine reality in or beyond this world is not foreclosed, but not foregrounded. A willingness to live with the love that can be had here, and a range of agnosticisms, these become moral codes of their own. This is one species of belief and practice outlined in recent works on secularity, and is very close to the domain of experience that continental philosophy has been wrestling with, as “religion without religion,” in the last two decades.

And here it is, in the lyrics at least, of “Look Around the Corner.” Even the title suggests an intuition of an event, a desire to live with what can be anticipated but not grasped.

The chorus intones, “Another day is born, rise up with the new light of the dawn / Another day is here, tell me what do you see?”

Humans are cosmicized and existentialized in the line, “We are made of the stars, you and I / so enchanted, hypnotized by space and time”

So the agnosticism is casual, but far from naive: “Who knows if this is all there is / come the morning we get to start anew / but we must tread wisely / till our days are done”

And then closing with those verbalized soothings, the wonder-sing-song-sounds at the end, “hoo, hoo, hoo…” As if to celebrate what is in the joy of a pleasurable sound, and let it pass without a word actually having been uttered, because no single word will do for the kind of faith that is faith in this world.

Tom Beaudoin

 Tom Beaudoin is associate professor of theology at Fordham University, in the Graduate School of Religion. His latest book is Witness to Dispossession: The Vocation of a Postmodern Theologian.