The Sacred Humdrum

When Every Ordinary Moment Winks at You

An old friend used to say she hated August—it always made her crazy. Although a brilliant writer, I mostly agreed that her ideas were pretty out there, especially during the dog days. One August, she managed to paint her kitchen cupboards, the counter and the floor. The color wasn’t a horrible blue, but she’d used the wrong type of paint, and the result was a chalky mess. It was like walking in on what your toddler, armed with indelible markers, just did to your walls. Every time I visited, I had to contain a sharp gasp.

Or maybe I was stifling a judgy giggle. The friend was much older than I was, and it seemed disrespectful to comment. Yet now I know that I missed another one of those really boring moments in life that scream, it’s holy, you fool.

While I was busy giving her kitchen floor a one-star review, my friend was creating space for the sacred. She’s gone now, but that’s why I loved her. She did stuff that was off-the-wall yet wholly and holy creative. Her nutty ways remind me that we can connect with God in the dullest of days, the moments we’re just trying to get through so we can do important stuff.

If you believe as I do, that everything is interconnected, it’s possible to hang out with your idea of the Creator in all the good times and the sucky times. And, get this: God doesn’t care if you come around with your head in your hands or dancing with joy. Whatever lies I’ve told myself melt away in that Presence, whether I’m cleaning out the litter box or singing hymns in church.

You can’t stand in the throne room and not be infected by love.

Good ol’ Bro Lawrence was supposedly in on this angle. He communed with God while doing piles of stinking, burnt-on food dishes, putting in the required elbow-grease in a time before steel wool pads. If I was the SNL “Church Lady,” I might say, “Isn’t that special?” But instead, Lawrence understood an important pathway to the sacred: do boring stuff.

Do stuff that you hate. Scrub toilets in a household where the men outnumber the women and all of them have terrible aim. Mop the floors, do laundry or dig through the trash to find your child’s thrown-away-by-mistake permission slip. Let your mind go fallow while you do any kind of mindless task.

As you pick up after the dog or clean up yet another trail of muddy footprints across the carpet, trade your thoughts for the door in your heart, God’s favorite meeting spot. As you sweep or vacuum or mow or tinker, fling your heart’s door wide open. As we once sang in Sunday School, “let the sunshine in.”

How can we know if God will show up? Of course there are always the traditional praising, prayer-ing, worshipping or thanking ways. But if you listen in August, the background hum of sprinklers and katydids and heat bearing down all invite you to open not just the door, but all the windows of the heart. And just bask in the late summer glow of God’s invitation.

My older friend showed me a clever way to keep the sacred circulating in the deepest places of the mundane. She confided that she’d placed tiny figurines of different Hindu gods in out-of-the-way places: Rama under her washing machine, Shiva behind the lamp, Ganesh on top of the fridge. She was a cradle Episcopalian, but whenever she passed those places, she connected with God.

Even her bathtub (the sides also painted with the same wrong paint) functioned as a shrine of sorts. As she watched water swirl down the drain in a funnel that suggested Fibonacci numbers, she said, “Hello, God.”

I don’t have little altars everywhere, but my life is definitely better when God crashes the party. Years ago, after my mother’s tragic fall that left her quadriplegic for weeks, she was still not in control of all her bodily functions. She was ashamed when I had to clean her up in a department store bathroom, but I felt honored.

Only weeks ago, as my husband recovered from his car accident in a rehab, I had a similar experience, helping him clean up and into fresh pajama bottoms. I was so grateful to help, especially since God was so close that I felt breath tickle the nape of my neck.

Every disgusting task that I’d rather not do (cat-puke, anyone?) is an opportunity to step into the holy of holies. As I move toward the Presence, my kindness quotient goes way up too. You can’t stand in the throne room and not be infected by love.

Maybe all those angels and seraphim and so forth are chanting, “Holy, holy, holy!” while they Swiffer the floor. All I know is that whether you go nuts with paint, hide statues all over your house or just put your head down and tackle some ignoble chore, you can meet God for a chat, a wink and a nod.

Let God in for any length of time, and Love will try its darnest to become a permanent resident of your heart. You might even grow to love those boring jobs and hold your nose just so you can get an extra moment with the One who loves you more than you can ever know.