"Yearning for the Transcendence"

            What else look so familiar to us than the ‘places’? Our world is a place that is completely irrefutable. The metaphor of ‘place’ is so powerful an image that affects our entire activity of thinking and living. We can argue whether we are going to ask about the ‘time’, the ‘what’, or the ‘who’ we want to talk, but the necessity to situate ourselves before anything else shows how determining the ‘where’ of our own being—the being ‘in place’. The first thing you might ask yourself when you wake up in the middle of the night is “Where am I now?” Failure to realise where I am now can bring serious consequences in terms of our being and becoming in the moment ahead. Perhaps we need some kind of ‘repetition’ of the familiar for we are unlikely to hold on if everything is ever new each time. We cannot stand the eternal newness because it will only cause us to lose the ground. Newness may not always be a sign of advancement. A certain amount of both repetition and newness in the experienced moments are still needed in order for the latter to remain meaningful and significant.

            While we are at home in the moments, art seems to precede philosophy and theology in terms of illustrating the various interruptions that occur within the reality and it revives the process of reinterpreting the ‘places’ from a different perspective. All our thoughts and writings may be a sort of repetition of what had been understood and viewed at a time. However, when we delve into them, it is no longer the text that is more pre-eminent but the ‘text’ created and composed anew in our mind during the reading process. We can never measure any sudden excess drips from a glass filled with knowledge and hermeneutics. We are always ‘crossing’ a hermeneutic of events and despite trying to return to the same place again, we are never the same any longer.

Each repetition was never a repetition of the same. Every newness we found in some ‘places’ was not really new for others. Perhaps we need to approach and appreciate each glimpse of transcendence however human it may seem. When one day we wake up and do not know where we are at that moment, perhaps the sudden and interrupting presence of ‘others’ will put us back in a relationship, a network, which is so familiar and at the same time so new. Perhaps it is time that we need the presence of a transcendence which always wants to interrupt our thoughts, our perspectives, our beliefs.