FPW – “Instructions for Living a Life” – December 17th, 2023

Rev. Sophia Lyons preaching, with Carole Katz, Charlyn Bethell, Guy Urban and Mark Pickering who will offer his Journey of Faith!
So often we think that the spiritual life is only attainable through grand gestures of devotion or practice, and who has the time for this? The truth is that the mundane–the seemingly small comings and goings of our lives–is jam-packed with the sublime. One need only learn how to look for it. In this season of Mystery, let’s reflect on how to better do this together. 

READING: “Found,” by Frederick Buechner

Maybe it’s all utterly meaningless.
Maybe it’s all unutterably meaningful.
If you want to know which,
pay attention to
what it means to be truly human
in a world that half the time
we’re in love with
and half the time
scares the hell out of us…

The unexpected sound of your name on somebody’s lips.
The good dream.
The strange coincidence.
The moment that brings tears to your eyes.
The person who brings life to your life.

Even the smallest events hold the greatest clues.

I think a lot about time. Maybe it comes with the job. How it passes, how I make or don’t make use of it, how we are all connected by time–age, stage, era–what these times we are living through are trying to teach us. How time spans so far behind us, and so far ahead of us–oh what a mystery time is!

I especially struggle with feeling there isn’t enough of it. Here we are in this season of WAIT where we are asked, as spiritual people, to find spaciousness in time, and if you are like me, highlighting or trying to center spaciousness can often spotlight, quite harshly, how little time we have, or how hard it is to make time or find time. What I hear most troubles so many of you–is how little time you feel you have in your busy days and weeks. “I just don’t have the time, Rev. Sophia,” I hear you say.

I’ve been ruminating on my relationship to time for decades, particularly when I had children. When my time was turned on its head.

And mainly what has occupied my mind for all these years is how I might, how we as people might, better cultivate a meaningful relationship not just with spaciousness and wait and rest–cultivating more of that, sure–but also with the things that we say take our time–and to, instead of doing less of it, reconsider the thing, and most importantly, how we do the thing.

No matter what stage of life we are at, we all have the things. The things that we are certain steal us away from ‘time well spent.’

I am sure that many of you are thinking about those things right now. And there are so many things. But today I want to home in on one variety of them. The daily things.

Laundry, dishes, making coffee in the morning, or lunches for our kids, vacuuming, sitting in traffic, errands. The things that many of us might say are the opposite of a spiritual life. And how they keep us so busy. We all have a laundry-list (no pun intended) of THINGS.

The wonderful writer Kathleen Norris, cuts to the heart of this and says that it is in dailiness–the tasks of laundry, vacuuming, cleaning out filthy garages, sitting in traffic, rinsing off scallions–the routine, everyday must-do’s, the quotidian, she calls it, meaning occurring every day; belonging to every day; commonplace, ordinary–it is in the seemingly inconsequential tasks of our lives that the profoundly meaningful can find us. Norris writes that “we think we are only getting through” these tasks but that “the joke is on us,” for it is the perfunctory nature of the mundane and drudging routine that has the power to transform a seemingly indifferent spirit. 

If you are like me and you often find yourself dreaming of the life of an aesthetic, the monk, who gets the privilege and luxury of days spent cultivating a relationship with the Divine in beautiful, wild places, you should know that the majority of their time is devoted to…the quotidian.

Norris writes in her sweet little 80-page book called the Quotidian Mysteries that it’s dailiness that brings us down to the ground, to rhythmic periods of what many might call dead time–but what are really invitations to spiritual gestation. Its repetitive-ness–say of washing dishes–a kind of chant, it’s ‘mindlessness’  a liberation of mind and heart, it’s simplicity a chance to breathe, pray, bless (particularly in traffic on the highway), or time to consider the wonder that is the small thing at hand, its origins, for example, or it’s life-giving gifted-ness to us and those we love: clean clothes, a meal, transport, and so on.

It’s all how you come at it.

Episcopal Priest Barbara Brown Taylor who writes in her book An Altar in the World that while we human beings “may separate things into countless piles–separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world…we should not be surprised when God doesn’t recognize the distinctions we make between the two… most of my visions of the Divine have happened while I was busy doing something else.” My work, she writes, is to “glimpse the altars of the world”–places, people, tasks so rife with meaning and yet so easy to pass right by or dismiss as, what? Unimportant?

When Jesus is asked about what the kingdom of heaven is like, what does he say? It is the mustard seed. The tiniest of seeds. The mustard plant, at the time, and still to this day, considered a weed. Dismissible. Unimportant.

A short teaching from the bible: The ancient story of Jacob in the Hebrew Bible goes something like this: He is on the run. His family is in total crisis. And the world, oh the world is on fire–this is the backdrop to the entire bible really, hence still applicable–and Jacob, with his life on the line, flees. And on his way to some unknown place where surely, he believes, he will find meaning and value and safety and hope–all the big things we long for–he stops in the middle of nowhere to rest. He comes upon a place which SEEMS to be no place, the bible says.

And night descends. All the good stuff in the bible so often takes place under a blanket of stars. He makes a pillow out of a rock and has a wild dream. He sees a ladder extending from earth to the heavens, with messengers from God traveling up and down it. And then, out of nowhere, God is standing right next to Jacob whispering all kinds of wisdom into his ear. And when Jacob wakes up from the dream, he doesn’t repeat anything God says to him, or suddenly know what to do about the big stuff–family drama or unknown future. Or even have some kind of big mystical knowledge to impart. He simply pours oil on that insignificant rock, his pillow, in that place that is no place, calls it an altar, and shouts: “God is in this place, and I didn’t know!” and then: “How awesome is this place!”

Jacob’s “how awesome is this place!” doesn’t come because he ascends that ladder up into the heavens. It arrives down on the ground. It doesn’t come because he’s made any grand gesture of prayer or penitence or promise. And it leaves me thinking that the Torah is telling us that a Godly encounter is possible anywhere, and out of any circumstance. No grand gestures needed.

Said another way, Barbara Brown Taylor writes: “What is saving my life now is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth.”

Human life on earth.

I believe this. I must believe this, lest I fall victim to hopelessness and despair in a world begging for hope. And meaning. And love. Every great and wise prophet and teacher throughout time are bearers of this hope and meaning and love, and they are often people who teach us again and again about the preciousness of life and the gifts of simplicity…like our opening hymn sang: tis a gift to be simple…and in the end, we come round right. Isn’t this what we all long for, as a world–to come round right?

I’ve gotten enough glimpses of majesty in the mundane to know this coming round right is possible, and it is powerful. Ultimately, each of us have the power to transform that which seems meaningless or small and disposable, into that which is most meaningful. And that, my friends, is a life of presence. We have this choice. Every day we wake up with it. How will I choose to live this human life I’ve been given? Where nothing, nothing, that it asks of me is small. Or of less value.

And while what I am preaching about today, laundry and dishes, feeding our cats, when the world is on fire, might seem irresponsible, I promise you that collective repair and reparation and repentance, collective liberation, requires us to be practitioners of care and presence: spiritually open and awake so that we might glimpse our own humanity, and the humanity of others. How we live, how we are present in time, how we make meaning, search for these altars, consider time here and now, is not small. It is massive. It is the mustard seed. You plant it, and oh how it grows…and spreads.

Just a few years before Mary Oliver died ,she wrote a poem called “Sometimes” that has seven sets of wisdom teachings about life and death. And smack dab in the middle is the shortest stanza which simply reads:

#4. Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Pay attention, be astonished and tell about it.

And in this spirit, let’s listen to Frederick Buechner’s teaching again.

“Found”

Maybe it’s all utterly meaningless.
Maybe it’s all unutterably meaningful.
If you want to know which,
pay attention to
what it means to be truly human
in a world that half the time
we’re in love with
and half the time
scares the hell out of us…

The unexpected sound of your name on somebody’s lips.
The good dream.
The strange coincidence.
The moment that brings tears to your eyes.
The person who brings life to your life.

Even the smallest events hold the greatest clues.

May we search for them. May we know them when we see them. May we be open to the healing and restorative power of astonishment. And may we share this with the world. This is my prayer for us all in the coming days and weeks. Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it. Instructions for living a life, mending a life and loving the HELL out of this world.

May it be so and Amen. We are going to close our time with a sung prayer that teaches us about still, small voices of love. Let us sing and pray together now: Dark of Winter, #55.