Unknown Lives

I wake up without an alarm at about 5:45 each morning, and, in the few moments that I lie awake in the dark before swinging my feet to the floor, I ask God to abundantly bless every person I see that day, every person whose voice I hear, every person I hear about, and every person I think of, and especially those whom I do not think of, who make up by far the largest group in my general supplication -- all those forgotten or unknown not just by me, but by even those in their physical midst.

Perhaps we are all such forgotten and unknown ones. Each person is a profound mystery, containing worlds upon worlds that no one else will ever enter.

Recently a trove of photographs was found, most of them images of people now forgotten and unknown, taken by Vivian Maier, above, a nanny in Chicago. Maier died in obscurity herself, and never told anyone about her luminous art. The photographs are stunning and beautiful, the kind of thing I could look at for hours.

Read more here.

As Caryll Houselander wrote in The Passion of the Infant Christ:

There is no outward sign of the miracle that is taking place. Office workers are bending over their desks, mothers working in their kitchens, patients lying quietly in hospital wards, nurses carrying out the exacting routine of their work of mercy, craftsmen at their benches, factory workers riveted to their machines, prisoners in their cells, children in their schools. . . . Everywhere an unceasing rhythm of toil, monotonous in its repetition, goes on.

To those inside the pattern of love that it is weaving, it seems monotonous in its repetition; it seems to achieve very little. 

In the almshouses and the workhouses, old people, who are out of the world's work altogether at last, sit quietly with folded hands. It seems to them that their lives add up to very little too.

Nowhere is there any visible sign of glory. But, because in every town and village and hamlet of the world there are those who have surrendered their lives, who have made their offering daily, from the small grains of the common life, a miracle of Love is happening all the time, everywhere. The Holy Spirit is descending upon the world.

Upon the world that seems so cruel, mercy falls like summer rain. . . . The heart of humanity that seems so hard is sifted, irrigated, warmed; the water of life floods it.