Since this was the last week of classes for the semester, my Friday seems a bit lighter. I still have a bit of grading to finish but it isn’t weighty or laden with expectation.

I’m contemplating actually cleaning my whole house, not just quickly cleaning one bathroom sink for the week. At the same time, I just happen to be reading The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and Women’s Work by Kathleen Norris. I came upon this quote:

I have come to believe that the true mystics of the quotidian are not those who contemplate holiness in isolation, reaching godlike illumination in serene silence, but those who manage to find God in a life filled with noise, the demands of other people and relentless daily duties that can consume the self…. If they are wise, they treasure the rare moments of solitude and silence that come their way, and use them not to escape, to distract themselves with television and the like. Instead, they listen for a sign of God’s presence and they open their hearts toward prayer.

I am reminded of Brother Lawrence seeking God’s presence in doing his best to honor the work before him in that presence—literally while scrubbing pots and pans– his daily monastic responsibility. However, I take this notion, as Norris does, a couple of steps further.

Last week, I also made a cake that required slicing 5 apples, greasing and flouring pans, and layering in addition to the usual egg cracking and thorough mixing. The occasion wasn’t a party but a death; when food means more, not as sustenance, but as prayerful support to the bereaved.

In this case, a ninety something woman I love has now outlived the final of her three children. I baked as much for me as for her; she has plenty in the material world. A phone call or card wouldn’t do the same as I sliced, broke open, and mixed the ingredients with thoughts of collective care for her; from her friends, other church people, and my understanding of a Presence that is with us all.

I’m not very good at inviting people for dinner or hosting even a small gathering. This week as I clean out the car that smells like a wet dog, scrub the 50’s something tub that really doesn’t ever look clean, wipe up muddy footprints and refresh restful beds; I want to listen for signs of another Presence. And in doing so, for even just my family, that mindless work becomes welcoming.

As Kathleen Norris says, the paradox is that these essential tasks retain possibilities for religious meaning.

Ironically, it seems that it is by the means of seemingly perfunctory daily rituals and routines that we enhance the personal relationships that nourish and sustain us…. it is in the routine and the everyday that we find the possibilities for the greatest transformation. Both worship and housework often seem perfunctory. And both, by the grace of God, may be anything but….What we think we are only ‘getting through’ has the power to change us, just as we have the power to transform what seems meaningless—the endless repetition of a litany or the motions of vacuuming a floor.

Of course I can’t find it now, but someplace, Barbara Brown Taylor has written about cooking as prayerful hospitality when we do it in that spirit. Maybe she didn’t, but I know this is true.

In Altar in the World, she does say,

My life depends on engaging the most ordinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them. My life depends on ignoring all touted distinctions between the secular and the scared, the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul. What is saving my life now is becoming more fully human, trusting that there is not a way to God apart from real life in the real world.

The real lesson here for me is that now that classes are over for the semester, I face everyday tasks more intentionally. December is full of days that require choosing how to be in the real world of parties and presents and dinners and deserts that come with real people attached.

Instead of meeting the days with dread, I could choose to be attentive to signs of God’s presence in my everyday tasks and to live the truth that faith is not an intellectual pursuit, but requires (inter)action with real people. The point here is that Jesus taught the practice of encounter amidst everyday living, even I guess, in December. 

Unlike me, Jesus did not have a home to welcome people to or a place to cook anyone a meal, or offer a bed for the night but as Barbara Brown Taylor points out that may be what gave him such an hospitable heart. The issues of this season are not about rituals or even expectations but about encounter. Barbara continues more simply eloquent than I am able.

The point [of encounter] is to see the person standing right in front of me, who has no substitute, who can never be replaced, whose heart holds things for which there is no language, whose life is an unsolved mystery.

That kind of encounter happens most often when you are doing things like making cakes and washing dishes. You dry; I like to wash and sink my hands deep in the hot soapy water that cleans the dirt out from under my fingernails.

Faith in God is less apt to proceed from miracles than miracles from faith in God.

Buechner – Wishful Thinking

At this time of year I hear words about the miracle of Christ’s birth and I wonder.  Most of haven’t seen heavenly hosts of angels or have we?

Maybe miracles, too, are the result of a different kind of faithful attentiveness.

The weather around here has been strange for November and December.  The trees are bare and there is certainly a morning chill, but the days are noticeably warmer than they should be.  I don’t know if that has anything to do with the majesty of the sky at dusk I witnessed the other day.

I took a picture; an inadequate representation of awe.

The hint of blue you see was not at all like that. It was bright and vibrant. A shade of blue I haven’t seen before rested beneath a faint orange ribbon visible between the dark tree branches. I cannot capture true light.

God speaking through the beauty of this day; if we only notice.

What have I always known about my life?  I often hear people, speaking about vocation, say they have always known they had a passion for… or wanted to be…; but I’m not so sure.  Frederick Buechner  writes originally in The Sacred Journey,

By the time I was sixteen, I knew as surely as I knew anything that the work I wanted to spend my life doing was the work of words. I did not yet know what I wanted to say with them. I did not yet know in what form I wanted to say it or to what purpose.But if a vocation is as much the work that chooses you as the work you choose, then I knew from that time on that my vocation was, for better or worse, to involve that searching for, and treasuring, and telling of secrets which is what the real business of words is all about.

When I was young, maybe 9 or 10, I distinctly remember the realization that my life would involve working for God.  That is everyone’s vocation really, right?  What did I know then or sense at least that made me know that?

One is that I have always been a deep thinker– pondering my life in unforeseen ways.  Like the time we were “camping” in my backyard in our small town neighborhood of tract homes.  I think I must have been in junior high school.  My friends at the time, I don’t even remember who they were for sure, wanted to leave the relative safety of our fenced-in back yard and venture out into the neighborhood around midnight.

Even though I knew my parents were sleeping and really weren’t of dispositions to check up on me, I didn’t want to do it.  It wasn’t the right thing to do and I stood my ground; they went.

I remember my inner voice that was strong even in the face to face encounter with peer pressure.  It wasn’t concern that I would get caught; it was my own inner voice that didn’t think it was a good idea, even though I was confident my parents would never know.

What was that strong sense– God in me?  I can’t say for sure but I know for certain that a sense of God’s presence was always with me in my teenage years, lifting me above my life and propelling me forward.

What else would compel me to go to Hardin Simmons, a university over 1000 miles from my home that I’d never laid eyes on; to get on a plane when I had no idea where I was going much less how I would get from the airport to the school.

That year really was one of blind (and I do mean blind) TRUST.  I have no idea how that year changed me and maybe that is it, trust.  Trusting the ride home at Thanksgiving with a crazy hippie girl who drove a VW and picked up hitch hikers, I knew getting to come home at all was a kind of miracle even though being home was not.

Somehow I knew that year would not be more than that one year, so far away, but it gave me a taste of trust that did suspend me above heartbreaking family life.  It moved me beyond what seemed real to see myself as capable and smart and even a writer for the brief moments before my 1:00 composition class and a thinker in that biblical studies class where I dug deeply into highlighting thematically every verse in the New Testament.

That same sense of trust brought me to the large midwestern university and then to Florida for an internship– again with NO IDEA how I would make it–so many miracles really.  That blind trust seems to have waned or is it growing up?

What do I know about choosing or being chosen by God?  How do I enter that place of trust again with confidence that God is ever-present in ways that I don’t even know?

When I, like Buechner, consider the miraculous work of the spirit undergirding even my wondering and wandering around in the wilderness, my strong voice inside and my deep thinking and writing have brought me to this new place.

Fortunately I know to trust, yes, trust that I am not alone, that my real life is above just circumstances.  I will take a new step everyday into unknown places that are solid and full of incredible possibility.  Is that a vocation?

 

 “Welcome everyone as if you are welcoming Christ.”

Benedictine Credo

Hard to live sometimes when you are with the people with whom this should be the easiest– family. On Thanksgiving, or any holiday where there is a gathering of extended family, we truly are thankful for each other. However, those little things that draw more attention than the bigger truths separate us from that thankfulness so easily spoken.

Today I wait. Others peoples’ schedules and sensibilities about how the day unfolds don’t always match my ways especially when I am someplace else. The truth is that here, in someone else’s home, it’s not my ways that matter.  

To have the patience and insight to see the goodness of God at work in other people’s lives is grace. To understand how that goodness can be nourishing and nourished by my honoring their presence is a gift.

The lesson comes again for me, to meet this day with openness. To welcome another person means that I am open to other ways of seeing the world. There isn’t just “one story” but a continual story that changes moment by moment.

Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

This works for paying attention to people too, even those we hold so closely that it obscures this expanded and liberating view.

 

You’d think it would get easier; figuring out what is important to do in a day.  Because, as it goes, each day makes a lifetime.

Kathleen Norris’ found poem, Imperatives, puts together Jesus’ spoken words on the subject.

Imperatives

“Look at the birds

Consider the lilies

Drink ye all of it

Ask

Seek

Knock

Enter by the narrow gate

Do not be anxious

Judge not; do not give dogs what is holy

Go:  be it done for you

Do not be afraid

Maiden, arise

Young man, I say arise

Stretch out your hand

Stand up, be still

Rise, let us be going…

Love

Forgive

Remember me.”

Today is before me; it is very clear right now what to do. Remember.

This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one
day will grow. We water the seeds already planted
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects
far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of
liberation in realizing this.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,
a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s
grace to enter and do the rest.

This is part of a prayer composed by Bishop Ken Untener of Saginaw titled “A Future Not Our Own.”  The whole is worth reading (click here).

As we do, we construct meaning from powerful words like these that connect and make sense of our own experience. I grew up in a family of secrets.  I learned how to be self sufficient so that others would consider me strong and reliable so the secrets remained safe.  It’s taken me many years to realize that and how trust is not just about trusting God but trusting other people who have given me every indication that they are trust worthy.

Even though I sometimes falter, I know I am capable; I am productively aware that I cannot do everything. I only catch glimpses of the sense of literation in realizing this.

I do know that I can let go of the wheel, so to speak, and the world keeps turning; that letting go is another opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter…even me.

I decide I should leave by 8:30 to arrive in plenty of time for my day long interview that begins at 9:30.  Thanks to my phone I know it will take me about 20 minutes to drive.  I’ve never been here so I should give myself a bit more time. I gather everything I need to take with me.  But, where are the car keys? 

Losing car keys, even for a rental car,  is not life threatening.

Frantically, for a few moments, I search.  Pockets of yesterdays jeans or jacket?  Suitcase?  Work bag?  Left at the hotel desk when I checked in?  Laying near the car in the parking lot?  No, I remember pushing the button to lock the car on my way into the hotel.  They are big keys, what did I do with them?

In The Wisdom Way of Knowing, Cynthia Bourgeault writes that “surrender is an act of spiritual power because it opens the heart directly to the more subtle realms of spiritual Wisdom and energy.”

Meeting this day in a state of anxiousness will not serve me.  I know that.  I also know that I can’t find my keys.  Surrender, not to give up, but to know there is more I can find here.  

First, give up that I can do everything for myself.  Call the chairperson of the interview committee and admit I’m not perfect and need help.  Well, not in those words… I will say I’ve done something embarrassing by misplacing my car keys and need help to get to the interview on time.   She isn’t answering, I’ll leave a voice mail.  I’ll further admit my vulnerability to someone I don’t even know.  Call the main number and ask for the administrative assistant’s number, that seems logical to get  a message to the committee.

“No one by that name works here, are you sure that is the person you are looking for?”  Yes, she works in this department, her name is on the itinerary.  I’m connected with the chairperson’s voicemail again.  I call back and the kind lady says,  “Oh yes, I found out her father passed away and she is not in the office.”

Don’t be anxious, meet this with calm surrender… this is what to do. 

At the hotel’s front desk, the person in charge had lost her voice.  She listened as I calmly (amazing, I know) asked, I need to get to an interview by 9:30.  Anyone who could take me?   Wade, the security or maintenance person, cheerfully said he would pull his truck around front to pick me up.

Wade trusted me (really my phone), the one who’d lost her keys, to get him there.  He wasn’t sure of the way as we navigated winding roads full of fall color and rolling hills. It was a beautiful October day and  a joy to just ride and listen to his story of Wades. His father and grandfather before him were named Wade he told me, when he heard my son was named Wade too.

The main entrance was blocked due to construction but in good hands we made our way around another curve to the entrance that led directly to the building where I needed to be.  Wade pulled over so I could ask a young girl who kindly directed us. I thanked him for the ride, he noted I was early and had some time; no need for hurry or be anxious.  

Losing [my keys], I had to let go of outcomes that were beyond my control.  Losing is giving up seeing what will happen next. Losing is ultimately not knowing, but also knowing that I must do what I have before me in the moment; where I suspend the lostness to lean into other kinds of provisions.   In that surrender, I was able to notice and experience care.  Paying attention to the care of hotel staff who looked out for me; the hug instead of a handshake I received from the chairperson who had listened to my voice-mail and called me to say everything would be fine; the care of one who shared his thick sweater with me when we walked outside because I forgot my coat in my hurry; and the casual conversation with the quiet one who gladly took me back to my hotel.  And more…  to lean into the vastness of the world around me and the abundance of God’s imagination for living.

Ephesians 3:20  “Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or imagine.”

I’m wiggling this quote out of the context in which it was originally written for my own purposes, just so you know.

Frederick Buechner wrote this line in a piece titled “Healing” as advice to the one who prays for another to be healed, whether it is in body or soul or both.

Like all writing we read, we scrape out bits that help us tell the stories of our own lives.

“Think of yourself rather (if you have to think of yourself at all) as a rather small-gauge, clogged-up pipe that a little of God’s power may be able to filter through if you can just stay loose enough.”

First of all, being unselfconscious, as I see it, is a struggle.  Even when I think I’m honestly putting myself out there for the sake of another person or cause, I’m still putting myself out for all to see, don’t you see?  Those continuous conversations, wonderings and to be honest—stories I create in my mind are based on my assumptions that are rarely filled with truth.  Clog.

Stay loose enough?  Letting go, being attentive to the moment occur fleetingly in my clogged mind; but even small moments make break-throughs possible.  Open up even enough to let God’s power filter through.  And…

“if God doesn’t seem to be giving you what you ask, maybe he’s giving you something else.”

Struggle and grace are recursively lived.

Holding on to what I discover and experience—what does that look like in real life, over and over anew?

It means to me that I listen for how God is already working and that I work alongside capable people, wherever I am, to live lives in response to God’s love.

The monks at Gethsemani I observed on my recent retreat there generally don’t make themselves known individually. Collectively they create a place for people like  me to renew and find my life by living their own lives—being true as they see it to the people God made them to be. By caring for each other as a community, they make it possible for each one of them to live out their devotion to God.

In the little I know about Thomas Merton from his work and other’s writing about his life; he couldn’t have, wouldn’t have written what he did without the support or collective presence of Gethsemani.

How does struggle and grace enable me to live outside the lines, or as Father Seamus, housemaster at Gethsemani, explained the contemplative life as countercultural?

Parker Palmer records that Rosa Parks, when asked why she sat on the seat in the front of the bus that ordinary day in Montgomery, Alabama, said that she did it because she was tired.

That seems to me like she had the courage to do what was right for her at that moment that was counter to the cultural norm. Was it that simple or profound?

Palmer says it was more than her body being tired. It was her soul that was tired of playing by the racist rules and denying her selfhood.

One of my challenges as an educator is to find,  as Parker Palmer says, ” a right relationship to institutions with which I have a lifelong lover’s quarrel.” Is an academic presence a way for me to build new relationships that create an ethos of shared lives that dismantles hierarchies? My faith compels me to work alongside other people to create more equitable footings in a spirit of grace and growth.

Every journey, honestly undertaken, stands a chance of taking us toward the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.

I met someone yesterday that says that place found him. I am on the way there, too.

Surrender is not acquiescence, reluctantly yielding; it is an opening up to unknown possibility.  In Whistling in the Dark, my dear Mr. Buechner explains sleep as surrender.

…a laying down of arms.  Whatever plans you’re making, whatever work you’re up to your ears in, whatever pleasures you’re enjoying, whatever sorrows or anxieties or problems you’re in the midst of, you set them aside, find a place to stretch out somewhere…

An inner yieldedness, Cynthia Bourgeault calls this state.

As I enter a week of out of the ordinary opportunity, I want to remind myself of how to be open on the inside. Too often I am anxious, controlling, and self-conscious.   How do I soften, open and yield.

Surrender is not an outer state, like rolling over and playing dead, that is precisely what troubles me about the idea of surrender I learned from my childhood faith.

Bourgeault continues in Wisdom Way of Knowing.

On the contrary, interior surrender is often precisely what makes it possible to see a decisive action that must be taken and to do it with courage and strength…action flows from that place of relaxed, inner opening.

Setting aside or laying down all anxiousness, all the reasons “it” won’t work, all my inadequacies to stretch-out in God’s provision.