The Spiritual Life is Everyday Life
“Life is what happens to you when you are busy doing something else.”
Kathleen Norris, Quotidian Mysteries
My life was saturated with activity this past fall. A heavy courseload at the college where I teach combined, with a number of speaking engagements and retreats meant I had little margin. The promise of a more human pace of life this spring sustained me as I tried to fulfill all the responsibilities at hand. There were days I wanted to barricade my office door that I might complete the tasks at hand. But then I remembered the wisdom of C.S. Lewis,
“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own' or one's 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls interruptions are precisely one's real life - the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one's real life is a phantom of one's imagination.” ― (Letters of C. S. Lewis)
The devil temps us to see the spiritual life as a life of escape. We seek to escape business and busybodies who disrupt our day. We seek to escape the crowd of people and retreat to a solitary place. In the end we hope escape this earth and go to heaven. Yet Scripture actually indicates we will go to the “new heavens and the new earth” – a place buzzing with life and activity far more real that the “real” life we try to create in this world.
We are tasked with preparing for that real physical world in this real physical world. Escape is not the vision set before us. Rabi Lawrence Kushner reminds us,
“The great insight of religion is not that we can find God in everyday life; it is that finding God returns us to everyday life.” – (God was in the Place & I, i did not know”). It is in this everyday life that our faith works out in tangible, simple, yet sacred ways. This is the wisdom of all the great saints.
The Cappadocian Church Father Gregory of Nyssa admonishes us,
“Let us remember that the life in which we ought to be interested is ‘daily’ life. We can, each of us, only call the present time our own… Our Lord tells us to pray for today, and so he prevents us from tormenting ourselves about tomorrow. It is as if God were to say to us: ‘It is I who gives you this day and will also give you what you need for this day. It is I who makes the sun rise. It is I who scatters the darkness of night and reveals to you the rays of the sun.” (On the Lord’s Prayer)
The profound wisdom of the saints teaches that we are already where we need to be. It is in these seemingly mundane moments that God works in and through us. We want ecstasy, to witness a dramatic work of God, or to experience a spiritual high. But these are rare and fleeting gifts – to be cherished for sure – but not clung to.
The prayer of Susanna Welsey may help us enter this reality well.
“Help me Lord, to remember that religion is not to be confined to the church, or closet, nor exercised only in prayer and meditation, but that everywhere I am in Thy presence. So may all the happenings of my life prove useful and beneficial to me. May all things instruct me and afford me an opportunity of exercising some virtue and daily learning and growing toward Thy likeness… Amen.”[1]
May it be so in our lives.
[1] Donald, Kline, Susanna Wesley: God’s Catalyst for Revival, pg. 42.