All of us have experiences in which we feel we have become a part of something bigger, times from which we come away thinking that we have stepped into a plane of situation, circumstance, or thought above and beyond what we normally know.  Writing in Cloister Walk, her reflection on a year spent in a Benedictine monastery, Kathleen Norris, after watching some of the monks do their prayers and recitations, observes that, "Sometimes these people who live immersed, as all Benedictines do, in the poetry of the Psalter, are granted an experience that feels like a poem, in which familiar words that have become like old friends suddenly reveal their power to bridge the animal and human worlds, to unite the living and the dead."
     Norris has captured the heart of the "essential" experience.  When we see and touch life as poetry, when we enjoy our existential experience as a poem, a poem woven into the poetry of God's creation, we indeed gain a deeper picture of reality.  We come into new insights into the bridges that connect us and the gaps between us, new pathways crossing the span of physical and divine.  We see ourselves as we are.
     Sure, life be hard and cold at times, but if we endeavor to view it as a stanza in a much larger poem, a verse in a enormously lilting sonnet, we understand that life has boundaries and borders and openings of which we are not always aware.  We grasp that to exist is to live in a very large world, a world well beyond our intellectual and spiritual ken, and that to "be" is to take hold of the infinity, the personal and eternal God from whom all has come.
     We find the seminal meaning of human heart:  God with us, God for us, God before us.