The Holy Ordinary

Oct 30, 2024

Painting of a bald Moses atop a hill seeing a burning bush in the distance near blue-gray mountains — Henry Ossawa Tanner. “Study for Moses and the Burning Bush.” Oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Jesse O. Tanner. Public Domain.

I know recently I have written about sorrow, uncertainty, and spiritual struggle, all through the lens of the bittersweet “bright sadness” which is the reality of the Christian life. We exist in a beautiful world that is broken and fallen, one which we continue to abuse, and live in bodies that will eventually fail us. We lose people, homes, ways of living and thinking, and we grieve for all of that.

But despite all this, there is still joy.

Take, for example, the scene this morning from the upstairs window: below a slow-falling blanket of leaves rests our tiny garden.

From this perspective, it doesn’t hold the same grandeur as sitting in the grass, eye-level with cosmos budding in monarch-colors. But the pecan tree is simply operatic in trios and quartets of pecans, waiting to plummet to the ground next month, and a gray dove preens her feathers among the slender leaves just beginning to yellow in a hot October. Illuminated in morning sun, all this sparkles like chrysolite, the dove a silver queen on a bejeweled branch.

Even higher across the alley, I watch a red cardinal flit from tree to tree, sending out his single, strong chirp. The sound rises above the cacophony of sparrows dashing between the feeder and the rosebushes, chittering their business as they scan for beetles to pluck.

Next to the roses, my raised garden beds collapse into the grass. Their boards - even varnished - are no match for the savage West Texas heat. Despite this and a brutal early-fall drought, swiss chard reaches from the beds’ soil with strong leaves textured and veined like blood rivers. Autumn peas try to climb. A second round of sunflowers races against the first frost.

Nearby, a creeping thyme has overgrown its boundaries and tumbles into the red mulch path. Crush it between your fingers or accept a stem plucked as a gift, and you’ll be transported to memories of meals and days of other years. The mint I threw down in seed two years ago appeared last winter and now crowds out everything else around it with its strong shoulders; I can’t cut it back quickly enough for tea.

The last cowpea blossoms blush for a single day in purple flashes. The gold lantana and sky-blue morning glories open one last time.

And the fennel - fragrant as an untapped perfume - begins to unfurl bronze fans in the possibilities of a coming-cooler season.

All this, and just this morning.

***

My bare feet turn out our back door, across the red brick patio, and into the small patch of grass that serves as a green blanket in spring, a small ball field to tiny hands in summer.

The cold, soft grass shocks my feet this morning, and I feel a shudder of wakefulness rise up and through my body.

I walk the same path in habit almost every morning so that I can enter the morning, put my body back into space and communion with the air, with myself, and with God.

“One has made a relationship with the landscape, and the form and the symbol and the enactment of the relationship is the path,” Wendell Berry wrote in “A Native Hill:”

These paths of mine are seldom worn on the ground. They are habits of mind, directions and turns. They are as personal as old shoes. My feet are comfortable in them.1

My feet are comfortable in this old path of habit, too, which is almost always the same: a scant dozen yards from backdoor to the fence and back again. Ordinary.

But like the sunflowers, which learn to track the light of our solar system’s star, it is a habit attuned to the East, to greeting the spiritual embodying the physical and the physical embodying the spiritual.

It is a sacred ordinary.

***

A few months ago, I swung around when my son yelled, “Look!”

I expected my gaze to meet a plain bird, or an early moon, or maybe one of the squirrels that chides me from a neighbor’s fence.

I expected the ordinary, which to my son, is still thankfully sacred.

Seeing and experiencing everything as new and wonderful is the most precious gift of childhood. He plucks the dandelions we welcome in the grass and brings them to me as presents. He knows we can blow them, and make a wish, and maybe our wish will root somewhere out here, or out beyond the faded borders of our yard, and grow again.

Every time we’re out walking and he plucks another dandelion from someone else’s lawn or untended edge of park, I wonder if that dandelion is the offspring of a past wish. I like to think about this circularity: plucking and blowing our same wishes over and over again. My wishes almost always never change:

Let my family be well and happy. Let us live long together. Protect and bring peace to the ones I love. Protect this place. Help me.

And my son’s wishes are almost always the same, too. When I ask him what he wishes for when the dandelions release on the breeze, he smiles a shy smile.

“Ice cream,” he says.

These are our sacred, ordinary rituals, embodied in our sacred, ordinary lives.

So I was surprised when I swung around at my son’s “Look!” and found not a plain bird or cresting moon, but instead, a possum meeting my gaze.

A huge possum. Backlit by the late afternoon sun, it loomed over us like a great white question.

“My possum!” my son said, for we have been a refuge for possums since last summer when we first saw one waddle across the shed’s roof. We named that possum Mathilda. Later, when we thought we saw Mathilda in the old conifer (this time with a wicked gash that gnarled her face even more), I gently shone a flashlight into the branches. Oh. Mathilda - if that was her - was a he. We renamed her Opi.

But the possum on the fence my son shouted about was female through and through. One tiny baby - a miniature of her mother, right down to the line of white teeth exposed in a gaping yawn - tumbled out of her pouch along the precarious edge of the fence, right as Mother tried to walk to her destination (oh, how I have been there).

Now we realized maybe the backyard, accessible and sustaining thanks to tunnels beneath the blue-gray shed and our compost corner piled high with all the kitchen’s triumphs and failures, has been a home to multiple possums this year.

I like to think of them at night, walking across our fence above the foxes, squeezing beneath the shed for safety at the corners of dawn and dusk, drawn to unexpected suburban sustenance.

“You’ve created a haven for these things,” my husband told me when I showed him the video of Mother Possum and Baby.

And it struck me that perhaps the work of worn paths, evaluating the morning, tending the compost pile, and making havens of home and hearts are all important and even holy works because it is all so ordinary.

Backyard birds. Peering into the heart of blooms. The quick intake of breath at the visitation of an everyday creature, scorned and misunderstood, and yet magnificent in its trust and wild attention to us.

“The way to the holy is in the ordinary,” David Adam wrote in Occasions for Alleluia:

The ordinary is far more extraordinary than we think or imagine.2

I write about the ordinary and the sacred a lot because I think about it so much, for it is the coming-and-going of life: the dirt and how we put our hands into it, the paying attention to the type of bird in the sky; acknowleding a saint affixed to a chipped wall, the words of a little boy.

In a world and culture that is insanely frantic to be something other than it is (both in person and in created, “curated,” caustic digital spaces), we are immersed in a constant narrative that tells us the ordinary is wrong, bad, to be replaced, to be escaped.

But this dissatisfaction - even revulsion - toward the ordinary is not what the Church teaches. And it certainly isn’t what God designed for us. Our greatest longing shouldn’t be to be made in the image of perfection curated, but in the image of Perfection Created. Our greatest longing should be to find the icon of Christ in every person we meet, to see the whole world as an icon of His work and to increasingly work toward finding (and being worthy of acquiring) Him in ourselves.

It is to see the world and everything in it - created good, by Goodness Himself from the foundations of time - as sacred.

The sacred therefore always starts with the ordinary.

***

“Take your sandals off your feet,” God commanded Moses as he stared, slack-jawed, at the sight of a burning bush unconsumed by fire. “The place you stand is holy ground!”

I like to imagine Moses, a flee-er of life (like so many of us often are), stumbling upon an ordinary, scrubby plant, in an ordinary wilderness, surrounded by ordinary sand. He’d lived in the land of Midian for forty years, and I like to imagine him familiar with that landscape, walking his old paths of habit, habituated by sheep grazing.

Did he also walk the paths of his mind, wandering back to the sickening sounds of the Egyptian beating the Hebrew or the Egyptian’s murder at his own hands? Did Moses feel hot sand between his fingers and toes or choked breath as he fled into the desert?

Who knows.

But we do know that suddenly - from a bush he might have seen growing a hundred times around him - the voice of God reminds him, because he did not know, that:

‘I am the God of your fathers - the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ And Moses trembled and dared not look.
Then the Lord said to him, ‘Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.’3

The ordinary sand became sacred and the burning bush became holy because God made His Presence known through these mundane things.

We can remember this in our own lives, too, when our eyes and minds and lives have become clouded from too much thoughtless wandering.

“The burning bush,” continues David Adam,

can be seen as a symbol of all creation, for the whole world is afire with the love and the presence of God. Suddenly you turn a corner and find you are approaching holy ground. The very earth on which you stand has the potential to reveal God’s presence: each bush, tree, flower, bird or person has the power to open your eyes to the beyond in your midst.4

For the Orthodox Christian, the burning bush is also more. It is the actual revelation of God’s plan for the Incarnation of Christ and our subsequent salvation, conveyed through an ordinary thing in an unremarkable setting, yet … made holy. For us and for all Christians, “material things are conduits of divine grace,” as Robin Phillips writes in his tome, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation: A Manual for Recovering Gnostics.5

The bush might have been ordinary to Moses, until one day it became extraordinary.

The same holds true for us, even on our old, worn paths, if we will simply stop, take off our shoes, and look for the holy ordinary in our midst.

Did you enjoy this meditation? If so, please feel free to comment or share this post or Writing from the Desert Places. This is for all.

The Holy Ordinary

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