The Mundane Way

In her book Leaving Church , Barbara Brown Taylor writes that part of what Sabbath looks like for her is living as though all her work is done. I like this as a guiding principle for Sabbath observance. I would set next to it the principle of doing the opposite of what I normally do, as a way to bring balance and rest. Since I spend much of the week sitting and looking at a screen, Sabbath for me might include walking around outside for a while. Since I spend my work days doing mentally taxing work, Sabbath might include mentally restful activities: doing puzzles, playing board games, or reading something light and entertaining. Perhaps most pertinent for me, since I spend most of my waking hours trying to improve myself, Sabbath must include rest from that heavy labor and the willingness, for twenty-four hours at least, to call my self good. To know myself to be beloved as I am. True Sabbath requires an interior rest, the cessation of the inner striving to do and be more than I am...

As an intellectually oriented person and a book lover, I have tended to put too much faith in the written word. The excitement of new ideas, the pleasure of an eloquent turn of phrase and, frankly, the cheap but powerful satisfaction of thinking I know something that someone else doesn't have too often driven me to read books of great spiritual value without profiting much from them. I simply read too many books too quickly to digest the gist of any of them. Before I finished one, my mind had already begun to hunt for the next, always looking past the wisdom offered in the present toward some supposedly greater wisdom in the future. This kind of reading was more compulsive than intentional. It stimulated but did not transform. Over the years my unhealthy relationship with spiritual reading has changed. Thanks to my spiritual teacher, Eknath Easwaran , I am coming to believe that truth and wisdom are not to be found among the aromatic pages and black ink of a paperback but within ...

Last fall I took my nine-month-old daughter outside a little after five o’clock in the morning. She had been up most of the night with a snotty nose and had apparently thrown up at one point because of all the drainage. In the dark of my bedroom I felt for an outfit to put on her, got her dressed, then took her out the back door. Despite the fact that we live in area with considerable light pollution, the stars were vivid and pointy. I quickly identified the Big and Little dippers as well as Orion’s Belt. Thin white clouds moved slowly between us and the stars. The moon hid somewhere behind the tall old oak trees. I paced in my flip flops up and down the gravel driveway, turning over small bits of rock with each step. My daughter lay in my arms, her head in the crook of my left elbow. For the first several minutes she gazed at the lights around her: my next-door neighbor's porch light, the street lamps, the light from our laundry room near the back door. Crickets chirped their fi...

After reading the day's prayers and scripture selections from my small copy of Magnificat  magazine the other day, I looked out from my office into the school library and was momentarily stunned by the fact of God's presence. Not that I felt anything directly, but I was struck by the truth that God was there--in that room, that building, at that moment. Through my doorway I saw the beat-up computers and the tiled ceiling strung with orange lights for Halloween. For the moment there were no students, and somehow their absence enhanced my sense of the Presence that filled the room--filled and embraced it at the same time, even though no one was there to be filled and embraced by it. This Presence, I realized, suffuses the room day after day, pouring itself moment by moment into every painted cinder block in the wall, every wooden chair, every book standing on the old shelves, every pixel on every scratched and smudged computer screen. This ordinary room blazes with glory. How ve...

Now that it is fall I have been opening a window in my meditation corner in the morning. With the blinds up and the window cracked, the dark seeps in with the cool air, along with the stirring sounds of the approaching dawn. One morning, a s I sat on my meditation bench, eyes closed, knees on the floor, I heard a smallish creature trot by just below the open window. In spring or summer I would likely not have heard anything, but with a blanket of brown leaves on the ground, the nimble feet made a light crunching sound on their way through the yard. The animal's gait was too rhythmic for a squirrel's distinct intermittent patter, which is often followed by a sharp rattle as it scurries up the chain link fence or scratches its way around the grooved bark of an oak tree. Nor was the passing animal loud or loping enough to be a loose dog, common as those are in the neighborhood. Neither was it a bird, hopping about and kicking up leaves to get at the bugs and worms in the grass....

Mainstream American culture is addicted to security, convenience and comfort. Ads of all kinds bombard us endlessly, promising products and services that will please, excite, satisfy, comfort or reassure us just the way we like. In short, they're selling a fantasy. Life is not always comfortable, secure or convenient. It is often messy, uncertain, fragile, confusing and unpredictable. What is the cost of our dependence on comfort, security and convenience? In addition to the strain on our wallets, what is it costing the earth, our bodies, our communities, our souls? I don't want to get extreme about this, but it might not hurt to allow myself to experience a bit of discomfort or to live with a minor inconvenience rather than buy something to "fix" it. If c onsumerism is the belief that the solution to every problem or the fulfillment of every need ends with a purchase, I could try instead to imagine solutions and satisfactions that don't involve acquiring anot...

I think very young children children know much more of Truth in a much more immediate way than adults can fathom. They can't tell us about it, of course, but not because their vocabulary or linguistic development are lacking. It's because there are no words with which to tell such a thing. Even those rare souls who have glimpsed Truth as grown men and women are ultimately at a loss to convey what they've seen, though many have tried and I'm grateful for their efforts. The Truth as seen by children and mystics cannot be described fully; it can only be experienced fully. So say those who have had the experience, anyway. I wouldn't know. What a child knows intuitively, the youth slowly forgets, and the adult must work tirelessly for the rest of his life to have even a faint hope of recovering it.