Holy the Quotidian

You have to go right into life and find your spirituality on a cross-town bus at rush hour, when it's raining and you have a stomachache.
— Peter Himmelman, quoted in the November 2005 issue of Acoustic Guitarist Magazine [(16)5; 155: 38]

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There's something about mountaintops. Those of us in the "Judeo-Christian" tradition are familiar with Mt Ararat, where the ark landed, and the mountain where Moses received the commandments, and the mountain where Jesus stood with Moses and Elijah. From these and other similar events, we have coined the term "mountain-top experience". Plains Indians, much like the desert dwellers of ancient Palestine, also revered high geographical places.

There is also something about valleys. The psalmist speaks of the "Valley of Death", of course. Ezekiel has a vision of the rebirth of Israel in the valley of dry bones.

The Celtic tradition speaks of Thin Places, in which one may be aware of the meeting of heaven and earth. One well-known thin place, the isle of Iona, is a craggy high place. It is "beyond the beyond", as they say. It's not a warm fuzzy Disneyland experience one will find at a Thin Place. Indeed, it may be profoundly UNcomfortable. Confronting the eternal often is.

Nietsche said that when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you. I think this is another way of saying that Thin Places not only put you in touch with the eternal; Thin Places also cause you to confront your real self, without any masks or self-deception. That's what can make a Thin Place so uncomfortable.

Mountains and valleys are also terms we often use for high and low experiences in our lives. At one extreme is the mountain-top experience of a new birth; at the other, the valley experience of the death of someone you love. These are times when one is more vulnerable to the eternal, or divine.

When we go on pilgrimage, when we go to the Thin Place, or the lonely place apart, we also make ourselves vulnerable. In one instance, we choose to become vulnerable; in the other, we may become vulnerable due to external circumstance.

But what about the in-between times? The normal times? The quotidian dailyness of "Ordinary Time"?

In a sense, finding the eternal at the margins, the extremes of life, is easy. The challenge is finding the divine in the every day.

There are a few people venerated for finding the divine in the ordinary. Teresa of Lisieux, the "Little Flower", is one. Brother Lawrence, who wrote The Practice of the Presence of God, is another.

This is the time of year the Roman Catholic Church calls "Ordinary Time". There are the High Holy times, of course, of Christmas and Easter. By designating this period between those great mountain tops as "Ordinary Time", the church recognizes that Ordinary Time is also Holy.

That's the challenge, then. Find the holy in this Ordinary Time. Find the holy in rushing for the bus, or when you have a sinus headache, or when you're feeling tetchy with your spouse (or significant other). Find the holy when you're angry. Find the holy when your job is a drag, and it's a challenge to start the car to drive to the commuter lot.

Seeking the holy in the Thin Places is easy. But you can become vulnerable to the divine right now. You can seek the holy even in the computer screen or the keys at your fingers. Indeeed, you can find the holy even at your very fingertips.