By Sophia Lyons, guest preacher
If you want a major lesson in humility, do the following.  Allow the children in your lives to take over your camera while you busy yourself with normal household to-do’s.  While your devices’ memory will become utterly overloaded with pictures of the lint under your couch, close-ups of stacks of papers, and way too many cat pictures, you will also have, MAYBE, the jarring, yet eye-opening, images of yourself engaged in the business of routine jobs.  Lost in thought, oblivious to the stealth photographer lurking around the corner and under the tables, here you might catch a glimpse of yourself tackling the TEDIOUS.  Truth be told, and maybe you have already picked up on this, I have trouble seeing these pictures of myself.  Really.  I have trouble seeing them because they often capture a Sophia that is just getting through. Checking off boxes with a tunnel like focus that sees nothing but the task at hand.  Or so the picture says.   Should you be up to trying out this experiment, this challenge, I might warn you that your outside face, your “neutral” face, might not be telling the story you want it to.  These photo shoots have shown me a side of myself that often shouts: exasperated, bored, tired.  It’s hard to see these sides of ourselves.  It’s hard for me to acknowledge that despite being someone who tries to live a deeply spiritual and connected life, I also miss the mark a lot.   

So if you think this service is about how to banish the just getting through face from your life, I am sorry to say I can’t possibly offer this to you.  I can’t offer it because imperfection is an integral and unavoidable part of our human experience.   

The hope I have today is to not banish tedium or obstacles from our lives, but to attempt to experience them differently.   AND.  AND.  Forgive ourselves when we don’t. 

The poem that I offered to you as our opening words, entitled “Otherwise,” was written by poet Jane Kenyon shortly before she died of leukemia at age 47.  Knowing that things would soon be “otherwise” for her, she envelops us in  ordinary, everyday things, turning them extraordinary; transforming them into all that is precious and, indeed, sacred.  Sweet milk; Ripe, flawless peach; Silver candlesticks; A bed in a room with paintings on the walls.  Faced with her own mortality the routine, the mundane, comes alive with possibility.  Maybe some of us have had these kinds of brief moments when the world around us shifts on its head and we are able to encounter the Holy, the utterly Holy, in the tedious.  

The word I’m kind of dancing around right now is reverence.  Reverence.  You see reverence has much to do with experiencing awe and wonder, right?  Episcopalian Priest and author Barbara Brown Taylor defines Reverence as the recognition of something greater than the self…something that might be beyond our creation or control…and that to feel reverence actually dwarfs us and allows us to sense the full extent of our limits.  A great example of this feeling might come out of, say, star gazing.  Taking in an enormous sky, vast and infinite; feeling so, so small underneath its marvelous size.  And!  Here’s the thing about reverence–it’s not just that we are encountering something greater than ourselves, it’s also that we feel our smallness. But the amazing piece here is that true reverence leaves us FAR from diminished.  In fact the word “small” is very misleading.  Reverence, in actuality, leaves us expanded.  Precious, Divinely ourselves, connected.  So you see it is through the momentary forgetting of self, and the ability to encounter that which is greater than ourselves  that offers up the possibility of, I would say, spiritual nourishment and a more expanded, connected self in this thing called life.   Most remarkably, in the book that Taylor wrote of this in, An Altar in the World, it is the stuff of the ordinary, the mundane, the often tedious, that Taylor experiences as reverent-worthy; places and people, tasks and long-lines, bumper to bumper traffic–here is where altars can be built; marking them as holy places.  And that they are everywhere!   You don’t need to be standing underneath an open sky to be transformed by them. 

In Kathleen Norris’ book “The Quotidian Mysteries,” and I want to define that word for those of you who don’t know it (I did not know it, and it’s a great one).  Quotidian means “of occurring everyday; the mundane and ordinary.”  And it is in this book, that she spends 88 perfect pages exploring the tasks of laundry, vacuuming, cleaning out filthy garages, sitting in traffic, rinsing off scallions–the routine, quotidian, everyday must-do’s–as being akin to worship.  Akin to prayer.  What she means by this is that it is in these routines that we find the possibilities for the greatest of transformations.   

She 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.  It is the perfunctory nature of the mundane and drudging routine that has the power to transform a seemingly indifferent spirit.   

How, you might be asking, HOW can I possibly be transformed by vacuuming?  How can I find spiritual sustenance in the laundry?  How might we feel reverence for a two-hour traffic jam?  Or an irritating human.  Do you know any of these?  And maybe it’s more than these for some.  Maybe the pains of our lives, our current complicated situations and relationships, make cultivating something sacred out the mundane feel like a flippant and impossible undertaking–one that care-free people attempt.  Maybe many of our lives don’t feel or look like our Jane Kenyon poem, yes, yes, but I can promise you that there is not one person on this precious earth that is care-free.  This isn’t to minimize anyone’s pain, but rather to remind us that we are all connected in this messy thing called life.  And I now want to ask you this, really ask you this:   What if there is more possibility in this moment, in this very moment, than there is at any other moment?   Take that question with you today my friends.  Take it home with you, keep asking it.  Keep asking it.  

This is about a shift in perception.  And when I say “perception” what I mean is how our minds interpret and make sense of all that is around us.  I can easily move through a day categorizing all that I encounter into neat, separate categories.  Assigning labels to people, places, tasks and objects that I have allowed my water-tight perception to interpret.  It’s an attachment of sorts–because I am literally attaching myself to the interpretation.  Right?  This laundry is mindless drudgery and has nothing to offer my spiritual practices.  In fact it keeps me from them.  This traffic is the worst part of my day; it’s a complete waste of my time.  This person in front of me is holding up the whole line–they are keeping me from the important things I need to get to.  Buddhist monk Pema Chodren writes that non-attachment, this is the practice of letting all that keeps us hooked and attached go, is actually a desire to know, like the questions of a three year old.  I’m going to repeat that.  The practice of letting go of all that keeps us hooked and attached is actually a childlike desire to know.  And what do we know about a childlike desire to know?  We know that it involves a curious, open mind and heart.  One that has yet to completely form perceptions.  So, this is how we start.  We start by looking at all that we see as mundane, and all that we see as an obstacle, as being, rather, a potential place to build an altar.  A place to practice reverence.  

Barbara Brown Taylor also writes that, “The Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.”  Can you stop what you are doing long enough to see where you are, who you are with, and how awe-some this thing called life can be?  How your order of service came to be–what was that paper’s original form?  What your shoes do for your feet.  What it took to get that cup of coffee in your mug this morning, or tea, or water.  A hot shower.  A woman on a train eating almonds. What if you set a stone at the foot of these places and things or quietly flagged each and every one of them before moving on to wherever you are due next?  What if you called them all altars? Imagine for a moment what your day might look like, what your surroundings might look like, if you set a marker at the altar of every ordinary thing and place in your lives that, upon closer look, upon careful contemplation, took on extraordinary-ness?  What might we look like in these pictures? 

I promise you, I PROMISE you that there is transformative possibility to be found in this practice, this spiritual practice.  I also promise you that we will never, never get it perfect–and that is ok.  It’s more than ok, it is good and right; because our imperfections,  our whole human-ness, is the stuff that keep us hungry.  It’s also the stuff that keeps us connected to each other–sharing our struggles with one another, our less than flattering, BUT TRUE, pictures with one another.  This is meaningful connection.  This is service to our fellows–because we are sharing our whole selves, and when we do this we inspire others to do the same.  We create beloved communities out of all of this. 

Rainier Maria Rilke writes, “It’s not too late to open your depths by plunging into them and drinking in the life that reveals itself quietly there.”  It’s not too late. My friends, it’s never too late to crack your shins on the altars that are, right now, at your feet.   

It’s not the big things.  It’s the little things. The Divine traffic things.  Let us not miss them.  Let us not dismiss them.  Let us not allow them to keep us from living, but, instead, bring us back to life.  May it be so.