Synesthesia as Sacrament?

O Lover,

Recently I have been becoming aware of another of Your startling and exquisite gifts: synesthesia (syn
[“together”] + esthésia [“perception”]). Synesthetes experience one or more of the senses through either
yet another sense and/or emotional state: e.g., color via the tactile, visual shape, or affective experience;
olfactory via the auditory; gustatory via a virtue-emotion such as love, etc. Found roughly half as often
among males as females although vastly under-reported among the latter, the condition appears to be
both congenital and consistent across the lifespan, with percentage estimates varying wildly. Largely
undisputed is that synesthesia cannot be generated by either act of will or repetition. It is perhaps most
dramatically evidenced in artistic persons, particularly musicians; Wagner, Liszt, Scriabin (?), Messiaen,
Duke Ellington, Paul McCartney, Billy Joel, Beyoncé, and Itzhak Perlman show up on synesthete lists.
The effort to explain the condition scientifically is still young, but it appears to involve “lateral” connections,
in degree greater than in the general population, between various sensory centers in the brain.
Synesthesia thus appears to be yet another dimension of humankind described by the psalter as “fearfully
and wonderfully made” (139:14) by You.

I have been pondering the subject of synesthesia, perhaps somewhere near the interface between the
metaphorical and the literal. I begin with questions: does not the interconnectedness of all things within
the human being sign a characteristic of the cosmos at large, indeed, in the word of 13th C Hadewijch of
Brabant, the “Totality” (of Creator and creation)? Might synesthesia image Your brooding immanence,
infused presence, omni-sacramentality, in all having being? Is there indeed a “lateral” connectivity
between all having being and You, Being Itself? Is mono-esthesia actually both illusion and delusion, synesthesia
Reality?

The questions do not stop. Does creation in the imago Dei include a latent hard-wiredness of us creatures
to You the Creator so that via sense and affective encounters our trans-sensatory capacities are fired up,
whether, for example, in total silence or in a sense experience such as hearing Mahler’s Symphony #8?
Do my anecdotage experiences of encountering You most anywhere—whether in night sky or human
love, yesterday’s sunrise or the blooming of a great-granddaughter, the In Paradísum of Fauré’s Réquiem
or a random act of kindness in the pharmacy queue—evidence this pervasive and intrinsic “lateral”
connectivity? Do not all of us humans, whatever our religiosity or handles for the divine, thus contain the
potential to experience this lateral “slide” from sense perception to intuited awareness of You? Unlike the
relatively few who experience human love as slaked with color or fragrance or musical harmony, for
example, is not the capacity to enlarge awareness of You via any of our sense, intellect, and affective
faculties universal? Could synesthesia then be yet another way of expressing Isaiah of Jerusalem’s
declaration that “heaven and earth are full of Your glory” (6:3), the text from which the Sanctus of the
Mass is derived? Is not connectivity a dimension of the Mystérium which characterizes both our human
core and You as the Abyss of Love?