Domestic Mysticism

I must give credit to Grace for the title of this posting. Grace and her sister came to our church once recently and stayed for lunch and the inquirer's class afterward. We were talking about calling, and Grace said that she is called to domestic mysticism, among other things, you know: where you meditate as you sweep. Someone else that day was a proponent of mindfulness while doing dishes.

Poet Ann Weems poses the question of how we might do this in her poem, The Holy in the Ordinary, from her book, Kneeling in Jerusalem, a recommended resource for Lent and Easter. The last part captures the question:

Spiritual contemplation is all right
for those who have the time,
but most of us have to make a living.

Most of us have to live in the real world
where profanity splashes and blots out
anything holy.

Where, O Holy One, can we find You in this unholy mess?

How, O God, can we find the holy in the ordinary?

The Buddhist version of domestic mysticism is found in the saying, "chop wood, carry water." How do we practice mindfulness in everyday life? How do we gain the understanding that our everyday tasks are worthy and holy?

Molly Wolf has a book worth reading, or skimming and re-reading, if you've already read it, about this: White China: Finding the Divine in the Everyday. Mostly, I think this is about paying attention, about knowing that God really is present everywhere, and about understanding that being made in the image of God allows the possibility that we are and can be whole and holy, and Wolf emphasizes, while not letting our language about "God-stuff" get in our way.

Personally, cleaning is something I prefer in small doses. Unfortunately, like much of the rest of New England, I spent a lot of time the past two weekends cleaning out my waterlogged basement. After bailing out buckets and buckets of water to keep my basement from overflowing while it rained, mopping up, and picking up and taking out sixteen bags of soggy tiles and trash, I think that I may not want more opportunities to be a domestic mystic for a while.

As Passover coincides with Easter this year, though, I am reminded that a critical part of the ritual preparation for Passover is the attention paid to cleaning the house—mindfully and thoroughly. As we are planning to have both a Passover Seder and an Easter dinner, I just realized that I'm going to need to find the time to give the house a good cleaning. I think I may need to ask for help.

But you know, I don't find the phrase "clean house" in the Bible. So perhaps I will turn to this song that is often used during Lent instead:
Give me a clean heart, so I may serve you, a paraphrase of Psalm 51: 10:

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.

May our hearts be swept by and with the Spirit, and perhaps then cleaning our houses can be an ordinary, yet mindful and holy practice of our spirit filled hearts.

Highway Driving

The problem with getting away from it all is that when you live, as I do, in an urban area, you have to do a lot of highway driving before you are away from it all. If the highway is congested, it's yet another stressor that presumably you were trying to escape.

The other day as we were getting away from it all, heading south on Rt. 93 from Boston, I came to the split in the highway for the HOV lane (high occupancy vehicle = 2+people—and how it is that two people is high occupancy for a car is yet another commentary on the need to get away from it all). I don't take this road often and didn't act quickly enough to get into the lane, but consoled myself with the thought that there would be another chance.

Not so.

You see, the HOV lane has one entrance and one exit—if you take the HOV lane you can't get lost, and really, you can't get off either. You've made a commitment, and can sail on by the others who are stuck in the traffic jam.

A highway shall be there,

and it shall be called the Holy Way;

the unclean shall not travel on it,

but it shall be for God's people;

no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.

Isaiah 35: 8

What does it take for us to get onto the Holy Way? God promises that we will not go astray once we are there. I think that many of us fear that we only had one chance, that we've missed our turn, or that it's too much hassle.

After missing the HOV lane, we finally made it down past the congestion and traffic thinned out some. But the point where you know that you really are away from it all is when, on Rt. 6 on Cape Cod at least, the road narrows to one lane with no passing for the next 13 miles. "No traveler, not even fools, shall go astray." There are a couple of exits, but for the most part, it is just a clear shot down the road. Sometimes, I think, we have to make choices to turn our lives over to God, to be on the Holy Way. Oddly, but blessedly, once that decision is made and we get past the congestion and mental mess that we are in, it is smooth traveling.

Perhaps the most important thing is not to mistake the commuter HOV lane for the Holy Way.

What We Worship

The Gods we worship write their names on our faces, be sure of that. And a person will worship, have no doubt of that either. One may think that tribute is paid in secret, in the dark recesses of his or her heart, but it is not. That which dominates imagination and thoughts will determine life and character. Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we are worshiping, for what we are worshiping we are becoming.

From the Gates of Heaven alternative services, quoted on the CD, Life's A Lesson, by Ben Sidran.

I picked up this CD at the public library and brought it home mostly because of this quote. Ben Sidran is a Jewish jazz musician who was trying to find a spiritual home for himself and his young family in Wisconsin when he wandered into an alternative service led by Hannah Rosenthal at the third oldest free-standing synagogue in the United States, Gates of Heaven. His story about the making of the CD is wonderful background, but it is this quote that really caught my attention.

What am I becoming? What is written on my face? What do I worship? Worship comes from the Old English root of "worth," so what do I find worthy of my love and attention?

I have been working on developing my habits in this new year of accessible and fun physical exercise. The key for me has been to make the exercise either playful or with some twist and/or short enough that I can either do it mindlessly or mindfully, and the time slots must fit in my life. I have spent five minutes bouncing a foam practice tennis ball or throwing a small stuffed bear repeatedly up into the air, ten minutes dancing to Ziggy Marley's Walk Tall while hitting a punching balloon in each hand, or taking a 53 rock walk (that is, using decorative stones as counters for the laps as I walk around my house). I call these "Spark" exercises after the book by Dr. Glenn Gaesser, that is, bursts of relatively high intensity exercise that spark your fat burning and ignite your energy levels.

I've also done more mundane weight lifting using the Strong Women Stay Young book by Dr. Miriam Nelson, breaking the sets up into something that I can do in 10-15 minutes, but using the goal setting and tracking psychology to add weight each time, and have also used a walk at home DVD by Leslie Sansone, because she's fun, but not manic about form: just walk.

Doing exercise requires a mindfulness all by itself so that it doesn't become too much of a focus in and of itself. Certainly that's the reason the quote about what we worship caught my attention. I don't want exercise to become an idol that I worship. But neither do I want avoiding exercise to be something I worship.

These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us, on whom the ends of the ages have come. So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall. No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and God will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing God will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it. Therefore, my dear friends, flee from the worship of idols. 1 Corinthians 10.11-14

idolatry

1. Worship of idols.

2. Blind or excessive devotion to something.

I also think that Christianity's Hellenic heritage has created a very dualistic view of mind/body, with the body getting the bad rap. The idea that our body is wonderful and holy has been twisted by some of our forebears into the idea our bodies should be contained and kept pure. Where is the joy of glorifying God in your body?

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.
1 Corinthians 6: 19-20

Yes, you worship in your body and your body will reflect what you worship.

I realized on Thursday that I had done a fairly good job of paying attention to my body this past week, but my mind and soul also need to be fed. That wheel-spinning sense of ennui or boredom that still provokes my unmindful eating and frankly my general distress at the state of the world, the state elections, and the health and well-being of my community of friends needed something as counter-balance. As serendipity would have it, my new issue (January 26, 2010) of Christian Century magazine had just arrived in the mail, and I began flipping through.Paula Huston's article on "A midlife spiritual challenge," Wake-up Call documents her "third" conversion: a call to pay attention to doing the Spirit's work in the world.

Benedictine Michael Casey captures what's going on during experiences like these. "Conversion means being liberated by God's grace so that we can at last follow the intimate spiritual aspirations that have long been unheeded, neglected, or frustrated."

Oh, yeah, I remember now: Call—that was the reason I went to seminary. Now I have to ask again what am I doing about my intimate spiritual aspirations? That's right: what am I worshiping?

If how you spend your time is a true reflection of what you worship, then I am worshiping my secular job, and it is not a place where I often remember call or grace. This week there certainly was frustration. So I took today off. In an attempt to be restorative, yet spontaneous, I let my morning music on the iPod go to shuffle—a random selection. As my UCC friends would say, "God is still speaking," and the first piece of music was Crux Fidelis from Women in Chant: Recordare. My early morning translation only got as far as "faithful cross," and I meditated on that while listening to the Latin chant. What is my cross? How am I faithful in spite of or because of the cross? Again, what do I worship?

The next song was Shiviti HaShem, from the album Each of Us by Ya Elah, and I know that that HaShem is a name for God, so I knew that God was in front of me when this song came up, although I didn't know what shiviti meant. My Hebrew was better than I knew, as I found out that this is the Hebrew phrase from Psalm 16: 8, "I have set the Lord always before me," "shiviti Hashem lenegdi tamid."

Am I keeping God in mind? Well, you get the message—or at least I started to get the message. By the way, these are not songs that I regularly listen to, and in fact I suspect it's been more than a year since I had listened to either song.

Today as I did my 56 rock walk, I stayed in the moment: the way my foot needed to step to make the corner as I did my turns around my house; the way one beam of sunlight could catch and illuminate the color of whatever rock I was holding in my hand as I came past the living room windows; the beauty and mystery of veined rocks and stones; the feel of rough and tumbled stones; the twinge in my hip. God is present in all of this.

God creates us whole and holy and in order to worship truly we must bring our whole and holy selves to the presence of the Creator. My prayer is that we each remember to set the Other, whole and holy, in front of us, and worship and become more whole and holy.

Finding God at the Hardware Store and the Holy at the Kitchen Sink

So, celebrate with me!! This past Wednesday, I turned in the final paper of my M.Div. degree, an epic that I have been sharing in bits and pieces here on this blog. I now understand that I could write a book, as I had a start on one with this paper—it was perhaps longer than anticipated, but when the professor said, "Don't leave any of the good stuff out," it just kept coming. Graduation is two weeks away—I have my cap and gown.

In the past several days, I've tried to remember what it's like not to have school work to do. On Wednesday night I stopped at a bookstore and bought three fat science fiction and fantasy books, and got burritos to go. On Thursday evening I raked the winter's debris from part of my yard, and on Friday morning remembered that I had not been doing that sort of exercise in a while.

Today, I think I may go to the hardware store. Last weekend my letter carrier chided me for not replacing the broken handle on the screen door: "you can buy a new one for nine dollars at the hardware store, and if you don't, your screen door is going to get all messed up banging in the wind." You see, I had removed the inside portion of the handle because it was stuck in the locked position and was locking me out of the house. When I'm inside, my jury-rigged solution is a rubber band around the outside handle over to catch on the door frame, and perhaps he's tired of being shot by the rubber band every Saturday for the past ten or twelve weeks. The UPS guy has figured out how to pull open the door and slip packages in, but the letter carrier doesn't try.

The screen door is not the only thing that needs attention around the house. I have been making a list waiting for this day, this week, this summer. But the last five years have had an impact, and I came across this poem as a witness to continued theological reflection.

A Hardware Store As Proof of the Existence of God
Nancy Willard
from Claiming the Spirit Within: A Sourcebook of Women's Poetry, Marilyn Sewell, ed., Boston: Beacon Press, 1996

I praise the brightness of hammers pointing east
like the steel woodpeckers of the future,
and dozens of hinges opening brass wings,
and six new rakes shyly fanning their toes,
and bins of hooks glittering into bees,

and a rack of wrenches like the long bones of horses,
and mailboxes sowing rows of silver chapels,
and a company of plungers waiting for God
to claim their thin legs in their big shoes
and put them on and walk away laughing.

In a world not perfect but not bad either
let there be glue, glaze, gum, and grabs,
caulk also, and hooks, shackles, cables, and slips,
and signs so spare a child may read them,
Men, Women, In, Out, No Parking, Beware the Dog.

In the right hands, they can work wonders.

This poem in turn reminded me of a song from this iTunes playlist,
"Holy As A Day Is Spent" (Carrie Newcomer, The Gathering of Spirits).
I quote only the first stanza, and I commend the rest to your listening:

Holy is the dish and drain
The soap and sink, the cup and plate
And the warm wool socks, and the cold white tile
Showerheads and good dry towels

And frying eggs sound like psalms
With a bit of salt measured in my palm
It’s all a part of a sacrament
As holy as a day is spent
~Carrie Newcomer 2001

So, I am planning for a holy day, because there are also dishes in the sink waiting, and then hope to find God, or at least a screen door handle, at the hardware store. But these are wonderful reminders that God is present with us in all that we do and all that we encounter.

My prayer for today is that we each are able to savor our meetings with God and the holy in the everyday things: the dishes in the sink, the good dry towels, the plunger, the brass winged hinges, the screen door handle, and maybe even in the new doorbell. The sacred is always present and I invite us today just to notice its presence, and let it work wonders in our hands, and always in your life and in mine.