There is an importance to our unique way of conceiving of reality—the human ability to make meaning. I will be calling this process of conceiving reality not only our unique spirituality or outlook, but also the process of our inner artwork, the artwork of our inner life. This artwork is the great emphasis of what I write, something we all share in, and, I hope to show, something of enormous consequences for each of us individually and for ourselves as a family of people.

A brief, simple, and biblical example of what I am getting at is the conception of our heart expressed in Psalm 84: “They are happy, whose strength is in you, in whose hearts are the roads to Zion. As they go through the Bitter Valley they make it a place of springs.”Psalm 84:5–6, in Eoman Duffy, The Heartin Pilgrimage: A Prayerbook for Catholic Christians (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2013), 439. Their art of focusing their heart—their inner life—on God and Zion enables them to endure the hardships of the harsh desert valley.

This emphasis on our inner life and on seeing it as our artwork has a long history with me. I had just finished a brief career as an army officer and was living in Boston for a year, waiting to enter the Jesuits.The Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits, is a Catholic order founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola in 1540. I was in my twenties and just getting into a fascination with the arts. I was alone in a small, charming gallery of the Isabel Stewart Gardner museum when a little girl entered the room holding her father’s hand. I heard her breathe out in a soft expressive voice so unusual for a child, “Oh, Father, look at the Tintoretto.”Tintoretto (1518–1594) was an Italian painter and notable exponent of the Renaissance school. Now in my eighties, I still think back on that moment. I wondered then whether I was seeing in that painting what she saw. That led to my wondering how well I was seeing the world, whether I was truly seeing the beauty and truth around me. I still think of that moment with gratitude. It led me to think of the world as God’s museum and myself as an artist responding to God’s artwork. I have come to think of this as a great invitation in my life, an invitation to think of my inner life as my artwork, my way of choosing to conceive of reality and to express my reaction to it. I wonder, too, about the quality of my gratitude.

This wondering has made me sensitive to Plato’s wisdom that I chose as the first epigraph for this reflection. I think of my wondering as the examining that Plato urges. The other epigraph, the one by Heraclitus, has influenced me even more I have pondered his wisdom and altered and shortened it somewhat, now expressing it to myself this way: The color of what we love and what we trust most colors our soul, and our soul colors our world.

Thus we each live in the world as we choose to conceive of it. How we conceive of it is altered radically by what we love and value most. Is it health, money, career, achievement, family, God, the arts, sports, nature? I recall a time in my life when making the varsity football team seemed most important. My parents lived in a different world. Our often-used comment, that someone is “in a different world” gets at this reality. Fortunately my heart is now set on realities far richer than the varsity football team. Now my heart is set on the realities I will be inviting us to reflect on as we turn toward the habit, treasure, attitude, and outlook of the following reflections.

I have only been to Europe once, on a team sent to microfilm early books on the history of science, books in the library of the Jesuit seminary at Chantilly, France. I would have only three free weekends. Folks had told me I must see the Cathedral of Chartres, for it enshrined a dazzling display of stained glass from the Middle Ages. So, I took the train to Chartres my first weekend. I entered the towering, dark cavern, lit only by the soft rainbows of light from the tall windows. Since I did not know how to read these windows nor appreciate the marvel of the cathedral’s architecture, I soon began to wonder how I would spend my weekend. Had I wasted one of my three cherished times? As I was walking out, I heard a man lecturing on a window. Only later did I come to know him as the famous Malcolm Miller, who has spent his professional life coming to understand the symbolism of the cathedral and explain it to the world. I asked to join his group and was stunned by the next three hours, learning how to read a window and understand the design of the five thousand sculptures arranged around the nine doors of the three porches, and to appreciate the marvel of the cathedral’s architecture with its at-that-time contemporary employment of flying buttresses. I ended up spending all three weekends listening to his lectures. That was 1968, the eve of my ordination, and I remember those three weekends as though they were yesterday. I felt myself embraced by my tradition, my Jewish ancestors on the north and darker side, my Christian ancestors on the brighter southern side. It was as though I was in a holy communion with them, in the midst of experiences I later learned, through Abraham Maslow, to call peak experiences.

From Miller I learned that when the cathedral was built, from 1290 until 1326, paper had not yet come to Europe. Ordinary people did not have a parchment or papyrus Bible. It was here within this cathedral that people learned the Christian story as they heard the Scripture explained during Eucharist, and saw those stories and the lives of cherished saints depicted by the sculptures and the windows, all 159 of them. The many panels of each window were to be read from the bottom up, each window also with a unique design of its panels. The theological interpretation going on within each window was astounding. I distinctly remember one window that started at the bottom with creation, leading up to Cain striking Abel, who was then rescued by a passing stranger who took him to an inn, the innkeeper given two coins for Abel’s care and the stranger continuing on, being revealed at the top of the window not only as the good Samaritan but as Jesus, who had put fallen humanity into the care of the church, the two coins being baptism and Eucharist, and the innkeeper, keys dangling from his waist, being Peter. It was within these walls that people could make the words of Scripture the home of their inner life.

Later I realized that, had I not met Malcolm Miller, I would have stood in but not understood this dark yet enlightening artwork. In the language of the Christian tradition, I was standing within a mystery, a symbol, a sacrament, and not experiencing its transforming power. Through Miller’s influence I did experience it, in what for me were three weekends of peak experiences. Since then I have wanted to help others not only live in but understand the mystery, the symbol, and the sacrament of the reality we all live in.