Yesterday our friend Ann wrote:
‘Very blessed by a beautiful walk with Varley this afternoon in the winter sunshine. Varley of course, did his usual chasing through the sea thing but I felt so much peace in my gentle wander, listening to just the sound of the water and the crunch of pebbles underfoot. Sometimes all you need is a beach, a dog and a ball.’
Gaining pleasure from the ordinary…
Yesterday I enjoyed seeing… the first frost of the winter in our garden… a rainbow over the sea… brown autumn leaves.
Life is such a strange mixture. Yesterday I had conversations about troublesome daughters, prostate cancer treatment, job interviews, writing for publication, Jacob Rees-Mogg, beautiful new grandsons…
In ‘Woven – a faith for the Dissatisfied’ Joel McKerrow talks about the mundane parts of being a young parent: ‘I talk more about vomit and poo than I ever used to.’
I used to make sense of my life by dividing it up into boxes – work, family, church, leisure, holidays…. McKerrow talks about all of life being woven together; you can’t segregate one part from the other. As you see life as a whole it makes sense and you discover faith:
‘…these mundane realities are actually where faith finds a footing – a woven faith that looks past the profane to see the sacred in everything…’
Musing on the introduction to the Jesus story: ‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.’ A story about God who entered into the mundaneness of daily life…
McKerrow describes faith as ‘…not an escape from ‘normal life’ into something spiritual… Rather it is to find the spiritual in the normal… It is to experience God in the silence, in the noise, in the washing of the dishes, in the talking with friends, in the walking along the sand…’
I think that’s what Ann found…
‘The sacred hides behind reality. There are no mundane moments, if we have the eyes to see.’
malcolmsmusings.org 