Extraordinary Ordinary Moments
Spiritual teacher and CAC friend Mirabai Starr poetically describes the contemplative experience that is stirred through regular lives, whether in nature, through relationships, or our suffering:
Contemplative life flows in a circular pattern: awe provokes introspection, which invokes awe.
Maybe you’re making dinner and you step outside to snip chives from the kitchen garden just as the harvest moon is rising over the eastern slopes. She is full and golden, like one of those pregnant women who radiates from within. Suddenly you cannot bear the beauty. Scissors suspended in your hand, tears pooling at the corners of your eyes, you nearly quit breathing. Your gaze softens, and the edges of your individual identity fade. You are absorbed into the heart of the moon. It feels natural, and there is no other place you’d rather be. But the onions are burning, and so you turn away and cut your herbs and go back inside. You resume stirring the sauce and setting the table.
This is not the first time you have disappeared into something beautiful. You have experienced the unfettering of the subject-object distinction while holding your daughter’s hand as she labored to give birth to your grandson; when curled up in bed with your dying friend …; while yielding to your lover’s lips. You have lost yourself in heartbreak, then lost the desire to ever regain yourself, then lost your fear of death. You long ago relinquished your need for cosmic order and personal control. You welcome unknowingness.
Which is why seemingly ordinary moments like moonrises and lovemaking undo you. The veil has been pulled back. Everything feels inexhaustibly holy. This is not what they taught you in the church of your childhood. Your soul has been formed in the forge of life’s losses, galvanized in the crucible of community, fertilized by the rain of relationship, blessed by your intimacy with Mother Earth. You have glimpsed the face of the Divine where you least expected it.
Starr connects these moments of awe to a renewed commitment to contemplative practice:
And this is why you cultivate contemplative practice. The more you intentionally turn inward, the more available the sacred becomes. When you sit in silence and turn your gaze toward the Holy Mystery you once called God, the Mystery follows you back out into the world. When you walk with a purposeful focus on breath and birdsong, your breathing and the twitter of the chickadee reveal themselves as a miracle….
So you sit down to meditate not only because it helps you to find rest in the arms of the formless Beloved but also because it increases your chances of being stunned by beauty when you get back up. Encounters with the sacred that radiate from the core of the ordinary embolden you to cultivate stillness and simple awareness. In the midst of a world that is begging you to distract yourself, this is no easy practice. Yet you keep showing up. You are indomitable. You are thirsty for wonder.
From Surprised By God. …..the woman at the well…..
“Just then his disciples came” (John 4:27). Precisely in that moment—before we’re told a word of her response to Jesus’s self-revelation—the disciples return. We should live as if this is always true: we arrive in every moment just after the One Who Is has made himself known. Whomever we encounter, and whenever we encounter them, we already find ourselves having returned to holy ground. Because the I Am is always there before us.
……….
We have much to learn from her witness. Not least that our task is not to convince our neighbors to believe in Jesus, much less to accept our beliefs and way of life as their own. We need to remember that our calling is nothing more or less than to bear witness to what God has done in our lives in ways true to his character—his humility, his gentleness, his mercy, his patience, his compassion. In evangelization, the how and the what are inseparable and mutually determined. The kindness of God leads to repentance, Scripture says. So it is only as we kindly bear witness to God’s kindness that we can help others find the way to repentance. We are at most only midwives: we do not create life in others; we merely come alongside them to help them give birth to the Christ the Spirit has formed in them.
Green, Chris E. W.. Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters . Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
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