The Sacred Ordinary
The Sacred Ordinary
It is a quotidian mystery that dailiness can lead to such despair and yet also be at the core of our salvation. . . . We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing and even ecstasy, but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are. . . . We must look for blessings to come from unlikely, everyday places. -Kathleen Norris
As “Bang Bang” by Dizzy Gillespie flooded our Brooklyn apartment last night, my wife and I were dancing in the dining room, our 3-month old baby girl in our arms. As it turns out, the baby LOVES Dizzy (which makes me unrealistically hopeful she and I will one day bond over music). If this sounds romantic or cute, rest assured, I knew we were mere moments from an evening meltdown, either hers or ours (or both).
But it’s true we often dance during this witching hour of sorts, stretching to get to PJs, a big nighttime bottle, a book, kisses, and bed. We pray with the baby, then pray for the baby, that she sleeps long enough for us to get some rest as well.
Our baby came on Christmas last year and while she was the best gift for which we would ever have dared ask, her arrival changed everything.
For several weeks, she slept a lot. I mean a lot. And when she wasn’t sleeping she was extremely mellow. We’d heard all the stories that babies meant sleepless nights, but in our naiveté we had delusions that our experience would be different.
We were quickly disabused of our blissful ignorance through a process that was less than blissful. Soon the three of us were up for hours on end at night, for round the clock feedings punctuated by gas that kept her crying. It wasn’t long before we decided it was in everyone’s best interest to begin sleep training.
As a new parent, I have learned that sleep training can go hand in hand with “scheduling” to solve not only the werewolf problem, but also add structure and rhythm to the daylight hours.
This has reminded me that the importance of schedules, structures and rhythms is not limited to infants, but also has weighty, often unseen effects on adults and families, even on whole communities. As Tish Harrison Warren points out:
Most of our days, and therefore most of our lives, are driven by habit and routine. Our way of being-in-the-world works its way into us through ritual and repetition...We don’t wake up daily and form a way of being-in-the-world from scratch, and we don’t think our way through every action of our day. We move in patterns that we have set over time, day by day. These habits and practices shape our loves, our desires, and ultimately who we are and what we worship.
In a very real sense, our habits and routines are a form of liturgy, or as Warren calls them, “thick practices”. Liturgy positions us in proper postures before God--praise, confession, silence, communion, repeat -- in the hopes that these practices will carry into our lives and become reflexive. Thick practices are routines that we may not realize have become liturgies. As Warren completes the above:
...the question is not whether we have a liturgy. The question is, “What kind of people is our liturgy forming us to be?
We are practicing liturgies ceaselessly. They are simultaneously becoming reflexive and shaping our reflexes, powerfully influencing who we love and what we worship. These liturgies fill our days. And, as appointed by God, days fill up seasons. There are rhythms to both.
We are collectively in a strange season now. Our normal rhythms have been thrown into chaos; and perhaps worst of all, access to our communities, families and support systems is diminished. It is a somber time with great uncertainty ranging from financial to medical to economical to political to sociological, and everything in between. In the midst of these extraordinary times, still we must live our ordinary days.
One could reasonably receive Warren’s message as a prompt that we must be more deliberate in the daily routines that both form and reveal our loves. This would be a fine takeaway and would also likely offer many benefits. By all means, I hope we honor God with thick practices that shape us more and more into the people of God -- directing our loves and worship to God -- and filling us with longings for His beauty and graces. This season may give some of us unique opportunities to re-order our days in the hopes of properly ordering our loves.
I am loath to add burdens in a season already wrought with grief, anxiety and emotional fatigue. But I don’t think that’s what we’re called to here. The call may not be to add yet more practices, but to see the ones we already have as transcendent.
Warren is serving as a herald who directs us to the God of the Ordinary. She is shining a light on the One who “moved into our neighborhood” to seek and to save those burdened with grief, anxiety and emotional fatigue. She is calling our attention to something too little considered in the miracle of incarnation. In his life as a human, Jesus lived in the ordinary. He woke up in the morning and had to gather his bearings. He got hungry, misplaced things, sometimes had bad breath and knew the feelings of fatigue and grief.
We know ordinary moments are sacred because the Divine has animated them. Therefore, we can live with longing for and wonder at the beauty and grace of moments, small and large, in this time and place where we spend our lives. THIS time and place. “We must look for blessings to come from unlikely, everyday places”
Warren gives us some examples that have revealed God’s truth in her life...
Making our beds as an act of co-creation
Drinking tea as a reminder of God’s sanctuary
Phone calls or texts with a friend as a revelation of the beauty of community
Waking up as a reminder of being loved by God before we have done anything at all that day. The Lord says in that moment, “Good morning.” Opening your eyes is revealed as a liturgical act of love and worship!
So maybe during this difficult season we can focus less on re-inventing our routines and more on finding God in them, remembering that God Himself took on the ordinary — including the sad, the repetitive and the dull. Because of that we can surely find Him in those things. And we are also assured that life’s seasons ultimately end in the extraordinary -- a feast, where “...we arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” We will be home and all will be restored.