Days or Wonder, Days of Miracles

Paul Simon knows how to weave lyrics into paradoxical complexity with flair and calculated affect.

"These are the days of miracle and wonder

This is the long distance call

The way the camera follows us in slo-mo

The way we look to us all

The way we look to a distant constellation

That's dying in a corner of the sky

These are the days of miracle and wonder

And don't cry baby, don't cry

Don't cry"

The surrounding stanzas all depict the contradictory observations of a world gone crazy with its own technological and political imbalances. Is he speaking hope or mockery? I choose hope.

I always choose hope.

These are indeed days of miracles and wonder. I have never doubted that. I see miracles everywhere and, like Rabbi Heschell, I stand in wonder and awe.

It is indeed a long-distance call, it it is also a local call. God is both imminent and transcendent. He is near and far, among us and beyond us, involved and removed. He defines paradox even as He reconciles paradoxical truth within Himself.

The camera follows us in slo-mo and that is but one perspective. Speed it up, like looking at the vastness of the infinite universe with focus on a distant constellation that may not be today what it was when the light we are now beholding was dispatched. Miracles and wonder.

We stand back from ourselves and our circumstances and we see things differently. we are part of something greater.

Don't cry, baby; don't cry.