Keeping On

     “In her song “Holy as a Day is Spent,” singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer describes the wonder of everyday life. Quotidian activities like washing dishes, making breakfast, and encounters at the market become charged with divinity for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear… As Abraham Joshua Heschel asserts, radical amazement is at the heart of the  spiritual journey. While we might never before have thought ourselves mystics, we can experience the living God in the midst of domestic life. “

     I’m penning this reflection at a time when I feel anything but radical amazement at the divinity of everyday life. The unremarkable tasks I have been doing today feel empty of the spiritual richness that I believe lies hidden beneath their ordinariness, their routine, their chore-like nature. Perhaps like you, I spend much of my time doing what is required to maintain the status quo – to keep my body and my house in working condition without the “wind beneath my wings” energy that would bring a sense of meaning to it all.

     There are times when it is otherwise, whole days, even, when I am amazed at the sacredness of being alive and of doing what is required to maintain my life in the world. But I have yet to discover how to hold on to amazement, and I’m pretty sure there is no lasting way to achieve that state of being.

     I resonate with the words of William Blake who in his poem “Eternity,” states that “He who binds to himself a joy does the winged life destroy. He who kisses a joy as it flies lives in eternity’s sunrise.” The joy of spiritual consolation is not to be clung to, but allowed to come and go. The “winged life” of the spirit that can enliven us in our daily doings will return if we, despite feeling its absence, continue to give ourselves to the tasks at hand with a heart open to their unfelt divinity. In other words – keep on keeping on!