Check out this sweet swirling escalation of a tune, “Look Around the Corner,” by Quantic and Alice Russell, with the Combo Bárbaro. (Thanks to N. for the recommendation.)

As I listen to it, I think of the worldly mysticism that seems to be gaining traction among affiliated and unaffiliated nonspiritual- and nonreligious-, and well as spiritual- and religious-identified persons in the secularizing countries in the contemporary world, and that also seems to be gaining adherents in some dimensions of interreligious dialogue.

It is a mysticism that celebrates what another era called the “sacrament of the present moment,” wherein what is known and loved about this life becomes central, the higher goods that can be pursued are defined as within the tentative grasp of worldly experience and knowledge, tasted on the plane from individual emotion to the seemingly grand indifference (to us) of the cosmos. A divine reality in or beyond this world is not foreclosed, but not foregrounded. A willingness to live with the love that can be had here, and a range of agnosticisms, these become moral codes of their own. This is one species of belief and practice outlined in recent works on secularity, and is very close to the domain of experience that continental philosophy has been wrestling with, as “religion without religion,” in the last two decades.

And here it is, in the lyrics at least, of “Look Around the Corner.” Even the title suggests an intuition of an event, a desire to live with what can be anticipated but not grasped.

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