An unholy
mess. That is how my Dad would describe a situation that he could find no worse
negative descriptors for. I have found myself using that expression almost daily in the last 6th months. A Pandemic, an abrupt cessation of
life as we knew it. No socializing, Work from home, don’t work at all. No
restaurants, no concerts, no in person school, no assurances, no toilet paper,
no Lysol, no Bread flour. No Gathering in our Sanctuary with our Church family.
No handshakes. No hugs. Race relations. Politics. Hurricanes. Earthquakes.
Fires. We suddenly became a country even more polarized than before – who would
have thought THAT was possible? There are the “I think we have a responsibility to the
greater Good to Wear a mask” people, and the “Don’t tread on me and infringe on
my rights - I WON’T wear a mask” people. Climate change is real – climate
change is fake news. Trust the Science –
Science is bogus, Black Lives Matter – All Lives Matter, Democrats will be the
ruination of our country – Republicans are will be the ruination of our country…..it
seems there is no end in sight. The issues are so big and overwhelming, that it
easy to feel powerless – like you have no control, and I am weary to the bone
of it. How do you find the holy in an unholy mess?
Last Sunday, at our first in person, outdoor Vespers
, I sat in the parking lot and tried to take my mind off of how hot it was
while waiting for the service to begin. I was thinking about how much the trees
in the side courtyard have grown in the last 50 years, when I was struck with a
memory – of lying on my stomach in the
grass beneath the largest tree as a teenager. I was looking for 4 leaf clovers with Steve, our youth minister at the
time…Pouring my heart and my pain out to him…receiving his wise counsel and
words of comfort – it was a golden, holy moment. Then I looked at the birdbath
in front of the Gathering Room Picture Window – painted by the Children of
Emerywood Baptist Church as a gift for our congregation, and remembered our
laughter and happy chatter as we worked on it…another holy moment…it was then
that this notion took hold, and I have thought of it all week….how in the midst
of the everyday, holiness – sacred moments can be found. In Music….In cool
water on a hot day….in the smell and feel of the stirrings of Autumn… In
walking outside and seeing red and yellow and blue birds eating together at the
bird feeder…. When sitting around the table with your entire family at the end
of a long anxious day – realizing you had made it through another day, safe and
sound…together. If it is indeed truth when our Pastor Timothy prays “God of all
things”…..God of ALL things – then we are surrounded by the divine, the sacred,
the holy, in the midst of an unholy mess….In her book The Liturgy of the
Ordinary, Tish Harrison Warren offers that we are shaped by the everyday. The
ordinary. In regards to the ordinary divine She writes this - “ In the creation story, God entered chaos
and made order and beauty. When we seek the divine – the sacred in ordinary
things, we can do the same. And of all the things he could have chosen to be
done “in remembrance” of him, Jesus chose a meal. He could have asked his
followers to do something impressive or mystical – climb a mountain, fast for
40 days or have a trippy sweat lodge ceremony – but instead, he picks the most
ordinary of acts, eating, through which to be present to his people. He says
that the bread is his body and the wine is his blood. He chose the unremarkable
and plain, average and abundant, bread and wine.” If we ARE shaped by the
everyday, then how much better shape would we be in if we had hearts and minds
and eyes open to the presence of God in our every day. The normal – the
ordinary, as we see time and time again in Scriptures, is deeply holy and
sacred to God. God came to us as an ordinary baby, born in an ordinary town to
an ordinary Girl. Maybe the secret to an unholy mess is to find the Holy in the
small things, and the Sacred in the everyday.
Did you know that you can trap bees if you
get them to the bottom of a mason jar? You don’t even need a lid. They become
trapped because they don’t look up to see the freedom above them. They will
continue to walk around, bumping into the glass – getting more agitated and
distressed as they repeatedly hit a solid wall. As he so often does, John O’Donohue says it
best “ We seldom notice how each day is a holy place where the Eucharist of the
ordinary happens, transforming our broken fragments into an eternal continuity
that keeps us.” In much the same way, we
can become trapped in these days that are so full of overwhelming,
disheartening, frightening things. Waiting for the next news cycle for the
Other shoe to drop, grieving our changed circumstances, being brought low by
divisiveness…We too would benefit from looking up, and around for the holiness in
the moments, in the everyday – even in the midst of the unholy mess….
