A panel of students at one university was discussing what it's like to be a young person today. They talked of many things - their work, their fears, their ambitions. And then the moderator asked them: "What does it take to get your attention?" One young man was very direct: "Bright and loud," he said. "It's the kind of world we live in, and in that kind of world, that's what it takes."

Bright and loud. Think about that response. It rules out a lot of things, doesn't it? He doesn't notice the different songs of the birds, or the color of wet bark, or the tiny stars that may in actuality be many times the size of our sun. He probably never sees the delicacy of a cat's fur or the eagerness in a child's eyes or the lines in an old woman's face. In fact, he's missing most of the treasures that have always caught the attention of artists and photographers and poets and mystics and musicians.

How many people are like him and miss the most intricate wonders of our environment? Is our secular culture breeding people who have no eye for the lilies of the field, who no longer make the connection between all of these delights and the God who fashioned the world? Has our runaway materialism, with its glut of things inured us to the fragile network of miracles around us, what one Oriental religion calls the "web of jewels?" It would be a pity, wouldn't it, to live in a world of rainbows and geese and wildflowers and never see them, never have our hearts lifted, never make the connection between them and a transcendent Presence presiding over our existence.