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People seem willing to look all over the place for this treasure. They will spend hours launching prayers into the heavens. They will travel halfway around the world to visit a monastery in India or to take part in a mission trip to Belize. The last place most people look is right under their feet, in the everyday activities, accidents, and encounters of their lives. What possible spiritual significance could a trip to the grocery store have? How could something as common as a toothache be a door to greater life?
All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are.
My life depends on ignoring all touted distinctions between the secular and the sacred, the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul.
What is saving my life now is becoming more fully human, trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world.
In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life.
The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw—and knew I saw—all things in God and God in all things. —Mechtild of Magdeburg
Even if Jacob could never find the exact place where the feet of that heavenly ladder came to earth—even if he could never find a single angel footprint in the sand—his life was changed for good. Having woken up to God, he would never be able to go to sleep again, at least not to the divine presence that had promised to be with him whether he could see it or not.
The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.
In biblical terms, it is wisdom we need to live together in this world. Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.
Wise people do not have to be certain what they believe before they act. They are free to act, trusting that the practice itself will teach them what they need to know.
Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.
reverence was the proper attitude of a small and curious human being in a vast and fascinating world of experience. This world included people and places as well as things. Full appreciation of it required frequent adventures, grand projects, honed skills, and feats of daring. Above all, it required close attention to the way things worked, including one’s own participation in their working or not working.
reverence is the virtue that keeps people from trying to act like gods.
reverence is the recognition of something greater than the self—something that is beyond human creation or control, that transcends full human understanding.
Reverence stands in awe of something
Reverence may take all kinds of forms, depending on what it is that awakens awe in you by reminding you of your true size.
Reverence requires a certain pace. It requires a willingness to take detours, even side trips, which are not part of the original plan.
“The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations,” she writes in Waiting for God. Human beings have a hard time regarding anything beautiful without wanting to devour it.
Regarded properly, anything can become a sacrament, by which I mean an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual connection.
What many of us miss, in our physical dis-ease, is that our bodies remain God’s best way of getting to us.
The daily practice of incarnation—of being in the body with full confidence that God speaks the language of flesh—is to discover a pedagogy that is as old as the gospels.
Christianity “is not a set of beliefs or doctrines one believes in order to be a Christian,” he says, “but rather Christianity is to have one’s body shaped, one’s habits determined, in such a way that the worship of God is unavoidable.”
We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual assent has turned as dry as dust, who have run frighteningly low on the bread of life, who are dying to know more God in their bodies. Not more about God. More God.
The miracle is not to walk on water but on the earth.
To detach the walking from the destination is in fact one of the best ways to recognize the altars you are passing right by all the time. Most of us spend so much time thinking about where we have been or where we are supposed to be going that we have a hard time recognizing where we actually are.
If you do not start choosing to get lost in some fairly low-risk ways, then how will you ever manage when one of life’s big winds knocks you clean off your course?
Popular religion focuses so hard on spiritual success that most of us do not know the first thing about the spiritual fruits of failure.
Anything can become a spiritual practice once you are willing to approach it that way—
Walk joyfully on the earth and respond to that of God in every human being.
The wisdom of the Desert Fathers includes the wisdom that the hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self—to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.
At its most basic level, the everyday practice of being with other people is the practice of loving the neighbor as the self.
In biblical tradition, the practice of encounter shows up most often as the practice of hospitality, or philoxenia. Take the word apart and you get philo, from one of the four Greek words for love, and xenia, for stranger. Love of stranger, in other words, which is about as counterintuitive as you can get. For most of us, xenophobia—fear of stranger—comes much more naturally, but in that case scripture is unnatural. According to Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of Great Britain, “the Hebrew Bible in one verse commands, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ but in no fewer than 36 places
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You shall love the stranger first of all because you know what it is to be a stranger yourself. Second of all, you shall love the stranger
“We have just enough religion to make us hate one another,” Jonathan Swift once observed, “but not enough to make us love one another.”
“The supreme religious challenge,” says Rabbi Sacks, “is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image,” 10 for only then can we see past our own reflections in the mirror to the God we did not make up.
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of too much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
What interests me is the way that a person’s work does or does not sustain that person’s sense of purpose. My guess is that many people work at jobs that are too small for them.
No work is too small to play a part in the work of creation.
In a world where the paid work that people do does not always feed their hearts, it seems important to leave open the possibility that our vocations may turn out to be things we do for free.
To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else’s hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that “I’m only human” does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality.
“The glory of God is a human being fully alive,”
God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by subtracting.
There is no talking about Sabbath rest without also talking about Sabbath resistance.
I freely indulge in what I call “holy envy.” When I find something in another religious tradition that sets my heart on fire, I do not admonish myself for wishing it were mine.
Sabbath is the true God’s gift to those who wish to rest and to be free—and who are willing to guard those same gifts for every living thing in their vicinity as well. Remember the commandment? It is not just for you. It is for your children, your employees, your volunteer helpers, your hunting dogs, your plow horses, your fields, and your migrant workers. It does not matter in the least whether they believe in your God. You do, so they get the day off.
Your worth has already been established, even when you are not working. The purpose of the commandment is to woo you to the same truth.
WHEN YOU LIVE IN GOD, your day begins when you open your eyes, though you have done nothing yourself to open them, and you take your first breath, though there is no reason why this life-giving breeze should be given to you and not to some other.
When you live in God, your day begins when you lose yourself long enough for God to find you, and when God finds you, to lose yourself again in praise.
There will always be people who run from every kind of pain and suffering, just as there will always be religions that promise to put them to sleep. For those willing to stay awake, pain remains a reliable altar in the world, a place to discover that a life can be as full of meaning as it is of hurt. The two have never canceled each other out and I doubt they ever will, at least not until each of us—or all of us together—find the way through.
I know that a chapter on prayer belongs in this book, but I dread writing it.
