Everyday Spiritual Practices

We give birth and raise the young. We seek God. Why has loyalty to the former, such a potentially rich source of spiritual inspiration, seemed to impede, derail and compete with the latter? How might we sustain and adjudicate both these fundamental human needs?1

History seems to have taught us that a monastic way of spirituality (involving quiet reflection, solitude and retreat) is the ideal way of spirituality. Many early church theologians taught that marriage and “family life is inferior to the celibate life of religious heroes and saints.”₁ Do we still not think of our spiritual life (or lack of one) with guilt and regret when we can’t or don’t manage to put aside time to pray, read the Bible and get away from our busy daily lives to retreat into “the private inner room of the soul”₂ to seek out God?

“Christian perception of faith as something that happens outside ordinary time and within formal religious institutions, or within the private confines of one’s individual soul, still pervades Western society…
…twentieth-century theologians continue to look past the sheer messiness of daily family life. Similarly, disregard for the material basis of life continues to frustrate contemporary believers’ efforts to embrace their faith daily. Bias against “outward” forms of spirituality, as enacted by the body in the midst of family and community, marginalizes many Christians. Limiting spirituality to the “inner” life and restricting theology to the life of the mind ends up excluding a huge portion of life from both faith and theology.”₁

How many suggestions have been offered (and sold) to us in order for our spiritual life to flourish despite our daily schedules of living? How many books, magazines, articles, blog postings, preachers, etc. out there are offering more and different ways, tips and tricks if you will, for us (as mothers especially) to set aside time to spend with God, to get away from the kids and husband to be with God, to step outside of ourselves and into the recesses of our hearts and minds to hear from God. I certainly don’t want to discredit the value and importance of these ideas of trying to relate to God, but is there not a way of relating to Him in the midst of all our busyness too? In the midst of playing with our children? Feeding and nurturing them? Even disciplining them? Can God only be met in the inner sanctum of our souls or is He all around us every day in the small and big moments of daily living? Can these moments be seen and experienced as communion with God?

Various disciplines from theologians have been recommended to us down through the ages in order to experience a closeness with God. “As helpful as all these aids to prayer are, however, they still require an interior focus of mind, will and heart that one can rarely find in family life. They call for a kind of stepping outside of one’s routine, or for bringing something that is outside one’s routine – God, spirituality, tranquility – into it. One participates in these disciplines “despite” or “regardless” of the chaos. They still assume one meets God in a quiet inner space.” Bonnie Miller-McLemore, the author, continues, “What I am trying to describe, instead, is a wisdom that somehow emerges in the chaos itself, stops us dead in our tracks, and heightens our awareness. I am talking about a way of life that embraces the whole of family living in all its beauty and misery rather than about individual acts of devotion, as important as they are to sustaining the whole. In other words, I am not trying to recommend a better way to pray. I am suggesting that faith takes shape in the concrete activities of day-to-day.”

Even Thomas Merton, well-known twentieth-century Catholic monk and mystic, argues, “Certain active types are not disposed to contemplation and never come to it except with great difficulty.”1 The author writes “about practicing the presence of God not through a prayer discipline that sustains a peaceful inner life but rather through practices that invoke, evoke and form faith in our outward lives. We already participate in such practices in the varied contexts where children and adults live together: playing, working, eating, talking, learning, fighting, making up, arriving, departing, and otherwise making a home.” She lists eight “practices” in becoming more aware of God’s presence. They are:

• Sanctifying the Ordinary,
• Pondering,
  
• Taking Children Seriously,
• Giving to Others and Oneself,
  
• Doing Justice,
  
• Playing,
  
• Reading and
  
• Blessing and Letting Go.
  

In the weeks ahead, we’ll find out more about these individual practices - how they may already exist in our everyday lives and how we can better commune with God through them.

Blessings,
Crystal

1. All quotes, unless otherwise specified, have been taken from the first chapter of In the Midst of Chaos.

2. Quoted by Thomas Keating, a Catholic monk