Meals Ordinary and Extraordinary

I recently read Tish Harrison Warren’s wonderful little book Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life. For her, the regular, mundane events of our daily lives are practices that shape our souls. She finds the spiritual significance of such apparently unpromising candidates as making the bed, brushing teeth, and getting stuck in traffic. In a previous post, I wrote about her experience with losing keys. In this post I’ll reflect on one of these familiar events pregnant with meaning, namely eating leftovers.

Most of us, I would venture to say, have more unremarkable than memorable meals. We eat the same thing again and again. Sometimes, as with Warren, it’s reheated from the night before. Her taco soup was just a quick and easy way to feed the family, and reheating some of it for lunch was particularly uninspiring. Yet such humdrum meals are important. Warren says,

“Thousands of forgotten meals have brought me to today. They’ve sustained my life. They were my daily bread.” p. 65

I, too, mostly eat what’s unremarkable. My diet is rather monotonous–usually oatmeal and boxed cereal for breakfast; fruits and veggies, yogurt, and bread for lunch; and soup and a salad for dinner. It doesn’t take much preparation, is cost-effective, and is environmentally friendly. It’s simple but nutritious. Yet I’d be hard-pressed to remember the specifics of any of those meals eaten more than just a few days ago.

Warren pauses to pray before she eats, offering thanks to God. This reminds her that everything we have is a gift from him. Such gratitude for things large and small is in fact a spiritual practice, one that gradually replaces the grasping hands of self-sufficiency with the open hands of receptivity to what God supplies. It’s easy to undervalue the foods we eat and the large and complex system that delivers them to us:

“This abundance, the sheer amount and variety of food and the ability to keep it for days, would astound much of the world and most people throughout history. But I have been dulled to the wonders before me. I take this nourishment for granted.” p. 68

Once in a while, when shopping at the local supermarket, I’m struck by the abundance and variety of what is there. Within those four walls is a veritable horn of plenty–foods from across the world, fresh, frozen, baked, cooked, pickled, butchered, roasted, juiced, homogenized, pasteurized, dried, or prepared in countless other ways, transported here by boat, train, plane, or truck, all available for a fraction of the money in my wallet. Most of the time, I am, like Warren, “dulled to the wonders before me.” I do a little better at the local farmers market, where much of the bounty on display was grown within a fifty-mile radius, often by those there selling it to me. Somehow, it’s easier to direct gratitude locally. especially when I receive the food from the grower’s hand. There is of course just as much reason to be thankful for food from far-away fields tended by farmers I’ll never meet.

We do not live by bread alone. As Warren notes, the central acts of Christian worship, Word and Sacrament, are comparable to the food we eat each day. “Both are necessary because both, together, are our nourishment.” (p. 63) And, like our meals, the Word of God in Scripture sometimes seems mundane or tasteless:

“There are times we approach Scripture, whether in private study or gathered worship, and find it powerful and memorable–sermons we quote and carry around with us, stories we tell of being impacted and changed. There are other times when the Scriptures seem as unappetizing as stale bread. I’m bored or confused or skeptical or repulsed.” p. 67

What to do when the Word is dry or tasteless?

“We keep eating. We receive nourishment. We keep listening and learning and taking our daily bread. We wait on God to give us what we need to sustain us one more day.” p. 67

There were times in my life when I didn’t seem to get much out of reading Scripture. For the most part, I managed to follow Warren’s advice: I continued to go to it for sustenance, just as I continued to eat foods that didn’t seem particularly appealing. And, just as food does nourish me in ways I don’t understand, the Word somehow nourishes me. Some portion of it has become a part of me, just as molecules from meals I’ve eaten have been incorporated into my cells. I’m a different person than I would have been had I not regularly chewed on Scripture–less egotistical, braver, more at peace. Both physically and spiritually, I’m sustained by God’s good gifts. Some of those gifts seem mundane, some extraordinary, but each is remarkable in its own way.

 

Ordinary Apocalypses

 

I recently read Tish Harrison Warren’s wonderful little book Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life. For her, the regular, mundane events of our daily lives are practices that shape our souls. She finds the spiritual significance of such apparently unpromising candidates as making the bed, brushing teeth, and losing keys. This post is about the last of those everyday events.

When she loses her keys, Tish begins with rational problem-solving. When she still can’t locate them, she proceeds to self-condemnation, then anger and blaming others. She searches frantically, then tries to regain her equanimity with self-talk and a quick prayer. Finally she lapses into despair. A little while later, she finds her keys under the couch.

We’ve all been there, losing perspective and panicking over some relatively minor aggravation. Warren points out that such events are more than minor inconveniences. They are apocalypses.

An apocalypse is not just an ancient literary genre characterized by extraordinary creatures, destruction, and divine intervention. The root word actually means “an unveiling or uncovering.” Warren explains this apocalyptic character of her lost keys as follows:

“In my anger, grumbling, self-berating, cursing, doubt, and despair, I glimpsed, for a few minutes, how tightly I cling to control and how little control I actually have. And in the absence of control, feeling stuck and stressed. those parts of me that I prefer to keep hidden were momentarily unveiled.” p. 52

I have such apocalypses regularly. Sometimes it’s about losing something, though losses usually don’t make me melt down to the extent that Warren describes. There are plenty of other situations that are more revealing for me:

• The train from St. Louis to Chicago is running late and I might miss the train to Michigan. I tell myself that the worse result from not getting there in time would be that I would have to reschedule a few appointments tomorrow and spend the night in a hotel that Amtrak is paying for. Still I fret for hours (and end up missing my connection by 10 minutes). Apocalypse.
• At my mom’s house, I want to use the kitchen sink but my mom is there. I wait impatiently, annoyed that she’s not moving faster. Truth be told, in my pride I think I’m more important than her and should have access to the sink whenever I want it. Apocalypse.
• The stock market goes into free fall. I am concerned about my investment accounts. I spend way too much time checking the latest price of the stocks I hold. I tell myself that my security depends on God rather than on my account balance, yet I’m acting as if the opposite were true. Apocalypse.
• I’m out in the yard when a young woman wearing a sleeveless blouse and short shorts strides by. I stop what I’m doing and watch her. What’s going on in my mind? I’m objectifying her. I’m evaluating her attractiveness, as if she is of greater worth if she is curvy and cute than if she is plump and plain. Apocalypse.

I can make excuses for each of these, saying that they are minor faults that don’t hurt anyone. Yet fretfulness and self-importance and greed and objectification hurt me and also affect how I relate to others. Better to do as Warren suggests:

“In these small moments that reveal my lostness and brokenness, I need to develop the habit of admitting the truth of who I am–not running to justify myself or minimize my sin. And yet, in my brokenness and lostness, I also need to form the habit of letting God love me, trusting again in his mercy, and receiving again his words of forgiveness and absolution over me.” p. 56

This twofold process–admitting how we’ve strayed and accepting God’s forgiveness–isn’t original with Warren. It comes from the time of confession found in many worship liturgies. This practice is essential to our spiritual, emotional, and relational well-being. It also prepares us for gratitude and praise. Thank God for ordinary apocalypses–when we respond with confession and trust, they are the means by which we’re being made whole.