Time & Perspective Quote by Willa Cather

Cather quietly flips the usual miracle story inside out: the wonder is not an interruption of reality but an upgrade in our ability to register it. By dismissing the expected props of sanctity - charismatic faces, disembodied voices, dramatic healings - she drains the church of spectacle and relocates the sacred in sensory attention. The provocation is subtle: if grace arrives as sharpened perception, then the miraculous is less a supernatural event than a temporary lifting of the dull film we live under.

The line works because it treats faith as a mode of seeing rather than a set of claims. Cather, a novelist trained on landscapes and the texture of daily life, smuggles an aesthetic argument into religious language: revelation is an intensification. "Made finer" is doing heavy lifting. It suggests refinement, discipline, even artistry - the kind of attentive practice you associate with musicianship or craft, not thunderbolts from heaven. The church becomes less a factory for divine interventions and more a place that recalibrates the senses, offering a brief interval when the world comes into focus.

Subtextually, this is a critique of credulity and a defense of the ordinary. Cather doesn’t deny that something holy exists; she denies that it has to travel "from afar off". The sacred is local, ambient, and relentlessly present. The problem is us: our numbed perception, our appetite for drama, our habit of overlooking what's "there about us always."