There is an invisible and subtle aspect of existence. It's the arena where morality is spawned, virtue cultivated, and the essence of things seen. It's not susceptible to scientific proof, logic, or even common sense. Some might call it “spiritual,” and that is partly appropriate for it is spiritual, but that's too vague. It might be called “poetic,” but that implies it's available only to the sentimental. Whatever it's called, it's a gift to those who are blessed enough to recognize it and cultivate it. For those who do not recognize it–or refuse to hearken to its calls–life is bland, consisting at best of artificial amusements and base pleasures and, at worst, boredom and despair.
John Senior in The Restoration of Christian Culture does a pretty good job of getting at these subtle aspect of existence. Here's a representative passage:
Appearances are not only signs of reality but in a sense are like sacraments; they effect what they signifify. I mean that there is a cause-effect relation between the work we do, the clothes we wear or do not wear, the houses we live in, the walls or lack of walls, the landscape, the semiconscious sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touches of our ordinary lives–a close connection between these and the moral and spiritual development of souls. It is ridiculous but nonetheless true that a generation which has given up the distinction between fingers and forks will find it difficult to keep the distinction between affection and sex or between a right to one's body and the murder of one's child. If you eat ketchup-smeared French fries with your fingers day after day, you are well on your way to the Cyclops. The semiconscious, ordinary actions which come under the category of manners are the cultural seed-bed of morals, as morals in their turn are of the spiritual life. We are creatures of habit, as the nuns used to say. In the moral and spiritual order, we become what we wear as much as what we wear “becomes” us–and it is the same with how we eat and what we do. That is the secret of St. Benedict's Rule which in the strict sense regulated monasteries and in the wider sense, through influence and example of monasteries . . . civilized Europe.
