A few weeks ago, I preached using a passage I love from Annie Dillard's book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In this passage, toward the end of the book of essays, Dillard gives this advice:
"There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end....I won't have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus."
But what about our everyday lives, where so often our itsy-bitsy work feels both central and vital to who we are? What about caring for our children, or our ailing parents? What about bringing a garden to life? What about getting the car fixed, or doing the dishes, or chopping the garlic and onions? What about waiting at the doctor's office? We are not, most of us, free to do away with these itsy-bitsy demands on our time. Most of us would not want to.
Annie Dillard was able to spend a year living in the wilds of Virginia and writing about it. Even so, she must have needed to keep her cabin clean, pay the electricity bill, and shop for groceries. Her predecessor in simple living, and our religious forebear, Henry David Thoreau, was lucky to have his laundry help from his mother and hot meals with the Emersons while he lived at Walden Pond. None of us escape the everyday tasks of our lives. None of us lives at the extravagant, wild edge of our lives all the time.
We can draw inspiration from one of the religious traditions that informs our faith. In the Buddhist tradition, especially in Zen, we are reminded that every act can become one of mindfulness and spiritual attention. As we peel the orange for our children's snack, we are mindful of the smell of the orange oil and the feel of the pitted peel under our fingers. As we wait for the doctor, we are mindful of our breath and our spirit. As we sit with our elderly family, we are mindful of the person before us and the person we are. There is gratitude, too: gratitude for the good food to eat, gratitude for care we give and receive, gratitude for presence, gratitude for being alive in the world and present to what is going on around us.
Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh writes of mindful dish-washing that "no boundary exists between the sacred and the profane." I would add no boundary exists between the sacred and the mundane. Perhaps our spiritual task is to bring the sacred into everything we do. With mindfulness and awareness, all our activities may be sacred. The friends, meals and journeys are sacred, just as the bitter, extravagant and bright may surprise us from corners of the most everyday world.
"Go up into the gaps," Dillard advises, and we should. Yet those gaps, and their unexpected depth and power, may surprise us from even the most ordinary steps along the way.
In faith,
Rev. Sarah C. Stewart
