Sacred Mundane: The Blog

And, best of all…

“It is not only prayer that gives God glory but work.  Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, white-washing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, everything Gives God some glory if being in His grace you do it as your duty.  To go to communion worthily gives God great glory, but to take food in thankfulness  and temperance  gives Him glory too.  To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail,  give Him glory too.  God is so great that all things give Him glory if you mean that they should.”  St. Ignatius Loyala, p. 70

Amen and amen!

[On our aversion to mundane repetition] “The paradox may be unraveled, I think, if we remember that when human beings try to “do everything at once and for all and be through with it,” we court acedia, self-destruction, and death.  Such power is reserved for God, who alone can turn what is “already done” into something that is ongoing and ever present.” p. 42

[on lofty religious language] “…language as this, lovely and resonant as it is, can cushion the radical nature of our intimacy with God and make Christian discipleship sound far too easy. What seems terribly spiritual, holy and mysterious can lull us into an unholy complacency, and lead us away from probing the areas of our lives that need the most attention if we are to be faithful to God and to each other…such religious language requires us to be vigilant and to guard against spiritual vainglory, against anything that would allow us to dis-incarnate our faith and escape into the ether of gnosticism.”p. 52-53

“I sense that striving for wholeness is, increasingly, a countercultural goal, as fragmented people make for better consumers…things exercise a certain tyrrany over us…I recall St. Teresa of Avila’s wonderful prayer of praise, ‘Thank you, God for the things I do not own.'” p. 35

“Our culture’s ideal self, especially the accomplished professional self, rises above necessity, the humble, everyday, ordinary tasks that are best left to unskilled labor. The comfortable lies we tell ourselves regarding these “little things”–that they don’t matter and that daily, personal, and household chores are of no significance to us spiritually–are exposed as faleshoods when we consider that reluctance to care for the body is one of the first symptoms of extreme melancholy.” p. 40

[On doing dishes] “It is precisely these thankless, boring, repetitive tasks that are hardest for the workaholic or utilitarian mind to appreciate, and God knows that being rendered temporarily mindless as we toil is what allows us to approach the temple of holy leisure.  When confronting a sinkful of dirty dishes…I generally lose sight of the fact that God is inviting me to play.”  p. 27

“And it was in the play of writing a poem that I first became aware that the demands of laundry might have something to do with God’s command that we worship, that we sing praise on a regular basis.  Both laundry and worship are repetitive activities with a potential for tedium, and I hate to admit it, but laundry often seems the more useful of the two.  But both are work that God has given us to do.”  p. 29