Peripheral Visions

empty, she turned in distress to a stranger, taking him to be the gardener, and asked where the body had been taken. “Mary,” he said. And in that moment of being recognized she recognized him as well. But ecclesiastical tradition talks of bodily resurrection instead of looking with new eyes at every gardener, traveler, stranger. In spite of the stories of men and women entertaining angels unawares, we remain stubbornly blind to angel faces—all the faces—in the crowd, and angel voices singing in the forest or the sea. The entrepreneurs of the Shiraz festival hardly saw the human faces of that group of monks as they ordered them to perform.
    I had picked the Tibetans up in the transit lounge out of the habit of curiosity and because I had once heard a Tibetan Buddhist sermon that stayed in my memory. Curiosity is a good place to start if one is going to encounter the sacred. One of the great tragedies in Western history has been the notion that the inquiring mind, questioning orthodoxy, is therefore irreligious, so that only once in a while do very distinguished and elderly scientists admit that behind their curiosity there is an attitude of wonder. I worry sometimes about the children of religious parents whose piety is protected by the cultivation of large areas of ignorance and the suppression of imagination, even as their virtue is protected by a deliberate concealment of the realities and delights of the human body. The habit of curiosity can also be corrupted, turned into a restless search for novelty, which is equally blinding.
    In our overly busy culture, only a few experiences—sailing alongside singing whales in the advancing dusk, listening to the chanted harmonies of Tibetan refugees, looking at the enigmatic smiles of archaic Greek statues—cut through to the response of wonder, and not for everyone. A recognition of the wonder of the natural world can transcend human concerns, even the concerns of hunger or fear or impending death, but no such recognition distracted the teams felling the great trees in Mindanao for sale to Japan. The alchemy of recognition does not always work.
    Going alone into primeval forest is moving not because the forest is big or ancient or even because it separates the visitor from routine concerns, though all these things are true, but because it is orderly, the working out of patterns of ecological interdependence and coevolution more complex than any symphony. The attitude of mind that responds to the forest is the habit of searching for and responding to pattern, a consciousness ready to be schooled by complexity. The size of a forest or even of a whale cannot be central, for the analogs of great forests can be seen in ponds, even transiently in tide pools, more visible and comprehensible to children and newcomers than the great forests or prairies. More and more, I believe, we will learn to look for epiphanies by looking through microscopes. The challenge for parents and educators is to create the readiness to respond, the quality of attention that makes recognition possible: pattern matched with pattern, vagrant awareness welcomed, empathy established. The kind of subtle interior shift that happened to me as I toured around Tehran with the Tibetans is only described in love songs.
    What was most moving to me was the agility with which the Buddhist and the Sufi moved from courtesy to mutual recognition. It used to be that explorers or traders or missionaries looked at the exotic peoples they encountered as orthodox mullahs would look at Tibetan monks, as benighted, but you cannot learn easily or at any depth from those you look down on. I have spent my life as an anthropologist trying to learn how to share enough with strangers to make learning possible, learning to identify divergent premises instead of taking my own for granted, and to accept a broader or more ambiguous view than common sense. The basic challenge we face today in an interdependent world is to disconnect the notion of difference from the notion of superiority, to turn the unfamiliar into a resource rather than a threat. We know we can live with difference—men and women for instance have lived together throughout history. We know we can benefit from difference. But the old equation of difference with inferiority keeps coming back, as fatal to the effort to work together to solve the world’s problems as the idea of competing for a limited good.
    Today encounters between different spiritual and