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“…a rediscovery of the sacred in the immanent, the spiritual within the secular… it is our everyday world, not some other one, that, in the words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘is charged with the grandeur of God.’”
~Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith
We had dodged the rain all day. Whenever it fell too hard, when it ran in rivers down my backpack and pulled my hair into flat, dripping slops, we would duck into a castle, eat at a ramen shop, jump onto a bus. It was a speed run through Japan, riding trains between towns and sleeping in parks, cramming as many sights and experiences into these few days as Calvin and I could afford. We barely had time to sleep.
We finished another castle tour and hurried to the twenty-five acre Kenroku-en Garden, which was not a garden with carrots and peas or scraggly flowers transplanted from plastic grocery store pots, but a four-hundred-year-old landscape garden that our map declared to be one of Japan’s most beautiful. We raced through the designed landscape, trying to see and remember everything. A pond and a fountain, stone lanterns and a plum grove. Trees bent and pulled into perfect arrangements by ropes and wooden crutches.