Many years ago, someone of my acquaintance recounted what might be called a mystical experience in D.C.’s Maryland suburbs: “In the parking lot at my apartment complex, among all the identical 1990s gray Hondas and Toyotas, someone had parked an impossibly long, tailfinned bright crimson 1960s antique. Despite the splendid paint job, it was obviously in an advanced state of rust and dilapidation; nonetheless, its color, size, and strangeness made it the glory of the parking lot. As I gazed upon it, though, I had the weird sense that despite its tonnage, it had a great lightness and thinness; I felt that if I were to poke it, impossibly, with a pin, I would reach not a carburetor or seat vinyl, but the terrible Heart of Being Itself — it, like the rest of phenomenal reality, was a translucent skin behind which lies the truth that is God.”

It turns out that a famous American mystic, the monk Thomas Merton, had a similar experience, with an even more decrepit vehicle. This is from his poem “Elias — Variations on a Theme”:

My old trailer; faster and faster it stands still, Behind the felled oaks, faster, burning nothing. Broken and perfect, facing south . . .
Where the woods are cut down the punished Trailer stands alone and becomes (Against all the better intentions of the owners) The House of God The Gate of Heaven. (“My chariot of fire”)

“Faster and faster it stands still” is a wonderful phrase, capturing as it does the Thomistic understanding that being itself is primarily Act. In its act of being, every substance proclaims the active energy of its eternal source; the Psalmist says that “the heavens declare the glory of God” (19:1) – but this is also true of the most prosaic substance. I can imagine an unsympathetic sociologist pointing to these two instances as examples of 20th-century America’s idolization of the automobile, and perhaps even extending it into a critique of Americans’ atomistic individualism – “See, they worship the machine that enables them to flee from others.” But I think there’s something much more fundamental going on here, and it has to do with the fact that man has an innate capability for transcendence. The place you transcend is precisely the place where you are; and that, in America’s last century, is a freeway or a parking lot.