One Corner Ma

One of traditional China's most famous painters was named Ma Yuan, but he was jokingly nicknamed "One Corner Ma" by his thirteenth-century contemporaries.

You can imagine what his typical paintings are like. In one bottom corner is a lovely scene-a lush cliff or waterfall or mountain edge, trees, rocks, and birds. The middle of the painting is bounded by dim silhouettes of leafy trees, and beyond that-a limitless void. Our eyes are led back into the foggy distance, and we move from the material world through the mist into one without substance, into a mystical space that we cannot see. I wonder whether Ma's real corner was not the corner filled with trees, but the corner that led into infinity. That's where he really wanted to take us.

Scientists say that our visible world is a little like one of One Corner Ma's paintings-only a small part of the whole universe. Most of the universe is invisible to us. The rest is made up of mystery-the scientists call them dark energy and dark matter.

 In other words, our universe and our life is a little like One Corner Ma. Our earthly life is but a tiny piece of our whole life; we are only part of a whole. Like the foggy mist in Ma's paintings, the divine realm is usually hidden from us. But sometimes, I think, the mist rolls away just a bit, and we can see snatches of what lies beyond. That snatch may come with a breathtakingly beautiful landscape, or an unexpected act of caring, or a deep sense of fulfillment when something wrong becomes right.

When that happens, we're in Ma's corner-and beyond, is God.