Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.

G. K. Chesterton

Seeing what's there, seeing heaven, starts with getting the focus right. But there's a second half. The mind must comprehend what the eyes take in.

The Los Angeles detective agency did not succeed. With too few clients in California and the New York office busier than ever, Daddy drove the family back east. And on the way we visited the Grand Canyon.

Daddy held out the promise of the three-day stopover there as a consolation - to Mother for a second huge packing chore in six months, to us children for another change of school. As we climbed into the Packard and drove away from the rented house in Westwood, he talked up the natural wonder awaiting us.

Listening, I formed a mental image of a steep-sided vertical cleft in the earth. As I imagined it, the Grand Canyon was about three feet across and bottomlessly deep. A slit in the ground plunging straight to the center of the earth.

As we neared the lodge on the canyon rim, my heart hammered so hard it hurt. For hours we'd driven through a desert moonscape. Hills, valleys, multicolored rock, barren and beautiful. Just the setting, it seemed to me, for the awesome phenomenon we were about to see.

"Here we are!" Daddy announced, pulling into the parking lot. We walked beneath some stunted pines to a rocky ledge overlooking the widest valley yet. Sculptured rock formations filled the space between the plateau where we stood and another plateau, miles away.

But ... where was the Grand Canyon?

The mesas rising from the valley floor before us were rust and pink and tawny yellow, somewhat more varied than those we'd been driving past all day. Still, it was simply another western panorama, more scenery of the kind we'd been looking at. I mumbled something about going back to the car for my diary; I didn't want the others to see me cry.

If we had left then, if that afternoon had been the whole visit, this disappointment is all I would remember. But we spent two nights at the lodge. Next morning we followed a trail part of the way down, that afternoon drove to another vantage point on the rim. And slowly, little by little, hour by hour, I began to see the Grand Canyon.

Immense, overwhelming, vast beyond comprehension, it had simply been too big to take in all at once. This time it was not a question of optometry. With my new glasses, shape and color, depth and breadth were perfectly visible. Seeing, in this case, meant, in part, letting go of a preconceived image - that three-foot-wide slit in the earth. And in part, letting mind and spirit expand to take in something grander than anything imaginable.