journeying into lent: the call of fullness...

NOTE: This is turning into a Lenten exploration. I started it late last week, got side-tracked, played a musical gig and did some other work, too. I am eager to riff on the invitation to become "perfect - or more accurately - mature or full as God is full" from the sermon on the mount. This is how it started out...

Today I will bake bread - and do some grocery shopping and a bit of laundry, too.I will do the later first so that I can give my full attention to the bread. As Kathleen Norris puts it in her little book, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and Women's Work, "Laundry, liturgy and women's work all serve to ground us in the world, and they need not grind us down. Our daily tasks, whether we perceive them as drudgery or essential, life-supporting work, do not define who we are as women or as human beings.”  Over the past year, I have come to treasure these small tasks. They center me in an earthy awareness that all of creation is saturated with sacred love.  Norris continues:

The Bible is full of evidence that God's attention is indeed fixed on the little things. But this is not because God is a great cosmic cop, eager to catch us in minor transgressions, but simply because God loves us - loves us so much that the divine presence is revealed even in the meaningless workings of daily life. It is in the ordinary, the here-and-now, that God asks us to recognize that the creation is indeed refreshed like dew-laden grass that is "renewed in the morning" or to put it in more personal and also theological terms, "our inner nature is being renewed everyday". Seen in this light, what strikes many modern readers as the ludicrous details in Leviticus involving God in the minutiae of daily life might be revisioned as the very love of God. 

I don't think it is quite right, however, to call the ordinary tasks of home-making meaningless. Necessary? Yes. Repetitive and taken for granted? Without a doubt. Undervalued and sometimes tedious and tiresome? For sure. But never  meaningless. There is nothing irrelevant about a hot shower after a day of hard word. There is nothing insignificant about clean sheets. Or a cleansed counter. Or the smell of freshly baked bread. As I have found over and again with bread, paying attention to the small steps of a recipe is essential to taking a satisfying loaf out of the oven. It is also a wise practice for living awake and aware of the small ways we can share love - and bring healing to the world. When I am too busy to pay attention, I have rushed through baking recipes and created disasters. I have skipped steps and turned bread into stones. In fact, I have tried to cook as if I know better than master bakers only to learn again that I am still a novice - and nothing good comes of my arrogance.

Last night, after four grueling hours of trying to get our new digital television set up with our ancient sound system, dinner needed to be cooked. I was going to quickly fry some white fish, make a small omelet and garnish with salsa and fresh guacamole. Being tired and harried could have been a reminder to go even slower... but I rushed through the process and wound up burning my hand with seriously hot oil. (Thank God for aloe vera!) Like St. Paul writes in Romans 7: oh foolish slug that I am! I know better and still do what I hate and too often fail to do what I know is best. (And I have the scars to prove it.)

What Norris is really pointing to here is a deeper truth: "It is in the ordinary, the here-and-now, that God asks us to recognize that creation is... refreshed... and renewed like dew-laden grass in the morning." She starts her song to the mysterious grace of God that fills creation at the bottom: in loaves of bread, well-washed clothes and freshly swept floors. Richard Rohr makes much the music but he begins from above. His theological reflection on a God-saturated-cosmos amplifies St. Paul's macro confession in Romans 8:

"And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 8:38-39, New Living Translation) Did you ever notice that Jesus tells the disciples to proclaim the Good News to “all creation” or “every creature” (Mark 16:15), and not just to humans? Paul affirms that he has done this very thing when he says, “Never let yourself drift away from the hope promised by the Good News, which has been preached to every creature under heaven...

Norris evokes the Alpha and Rohr the Omega in their invitation to reclaim the radically inclusive grace of mystical, contemplative Christianity. They celebrate an incarnational world view as "the key to mental and spiritual health" as well as a guide to "basic contentment and happiness" in the 21st century. Collaborating 
with Ilia Delio,, an expert on geologist and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin (1881 –1955), Rohr adds:

Building on the idea that love is self-communicative, Teilhard indicated that in the [first] incarnation, the “self” of God is in the “self-emptying” of God. God is that which is constantly becoming “element,” drawing all things through love into fullness of being. God incarnate invests Godself organically with all of creation, immersing [Godself] in things, in the heart of matter and thus unifying the world. This investment of divinity in materiality is the Christ. The universe is physically impregnated to the very core of its matter by the influence of this divine nature. Everything is physically “christified,” gathered up by the incarnate Word as nourishment that assimilates, transforms, and divinizes. The world is like a crystal lamp illumined from within by the light of Christ. For those who can see, Christ shines in this diaphanous universe, through the cosmos and in matter. (Delio in An Incarnational Worldview, RR, 2/22/2019)

Christians believe that this universal presence was later “born of a woman under the law” (Galatians 4:4) in a moment of chronological time. This is the great Christian leap of faith, which not everyone is willing to make.We daringly believe that God’s presence was poured into a single human being, so that humanity and divinity can be seen to be operating as one in him—and therefore in us! But instead of saying that God came into the world through Jesus, maybe it would be better to say that Jesus came out of an already Christ-soaked world. The second Incarnation flowed out of the first, out of God’s loving union with physical creation. My point is this: When I know that the world around me is both the hiding place and the revelation of God, I can no longer make a significant distinction between the natural and the supernatural, between the holy and the profane. (A divine “voice” makes this exactly clear to a very resistant Peter in Acts 10.) Everything I see and know is indeed one “uni-verse,” revolving around one coherent center. This Divine Presence always seeks connection and communion, not separation or division—except for the sake of an even deeper future union.

Well - twelve hours, four loaves of bread and a good night's sleep later - I smile to myself as I edit: damn, this is a long prelude into what I really wanted to write! (In reality, it is now 72 hours later and counting...) But it is all inter-related. For it has been the slow but consistent journey from intellectual awareness and theological information to experiential trust and faith that reality genuinely is God-saturated that has brought me a measure of peace to my anxieties and sliver of perspective concerning how to engage the current social, environmental, and political chaos of this moment in history. It is a work in progress, mind you, and some days are better than others. But always and honestly, underneath all my frantic fretting, my heart knows God's love is greater than my chaos. Or emptiness. Or fears.