Quotidian Faith

"Quotidian Faith"
Proverbs 12:28; 14:6; 15:21; 17:24


I first ran into this word, quotidian, while staying in a Benedictine monastery up in NW Missouri for a couple of weeks.  I was trying to find a spiritual island upon which I could rest and avoid burnout.  I spent a lot of days and late evenings in the stacks of the library there, reading, thinking, praying; mostly slowing down the merry-go-round that had become my life.

One of my favorite authors is Kathleen Norris, a transplanted New York City poet, now living in Lemmon, a tiny town in northern South Dakota.  I got to meet her a few years back at the Convocation of the High Plains.  Kathleen was one of our main speakers.

I had read all her books, I thought, including her collection of poetry, titled, Little Girls In Church.  Her poetry was a lot more provocative than I expected.  But there, buried in the stacks of my two week home, that nearly silent monastery, I came across this little book by Kathleen that I’d not heard of before.  It had an odd title:  The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and Women’s Work.  It was a collection of talks she gave at a seminar at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame.  I know what laundry is.  And liturgy.  And, because I’ve raised two kids pretty much on my own, I have an inkling about women’s work.

But I didn’t know what quotidian meant.  It was a new word.  I went looking for a dictionary.  It simply means, “daily.”  Of all the books I took down from the shelves of the Benedictine monastery library, that little one ended up being the most important for me at that time.  Kathleen Norris helped me see, again, that there are daily routines and rhythms (simple daily tasks) that don’t seem too important.  We might even call them by other names: drudgery, or menial, or more negatively, “donkey work.”  But it’s in the donkey work of our daily routines, if our eyes are open, that are infused with holiness and the presence of God.

But we don’t see the quotidian, the every day kinds of routine, as particularly infused with the presence of God.  In the book of Ecclesiastes Solomon’s depressive outlook on the world was that everything was a daily round-and-round that made life so awful.  He looked at how so much in life occurs and reoccurs each day to the point that he ended up hating life.  What his eyes couldn’t or wouldn’t see was how it is in the very dailiness of life that God makes himself known and visible.  If God can’t reveal himself in our daily events, then how is God going to make himself known at all.

Solomon, in Ecclesiastes, wanted the big splash event.  He wanted something entirely new that stood out from the daily routine.  He wanted what Isaiah cried out to God for at one point, “Oh, that you would rip open the sky and come down.”  That’s what Solomon wanted.  The bright light that would knock him off his horse, like what happened with Paul.  The burning bush, like what happened with Moses.

The wisdom of Proverbs, indeed of the whole Bible, is that God is rarely found in those kinds of splashy events that stand outside the boundaries of the dailyness of life.  Most of the time, God is bumped into (or God bumps into us) as we are making our way through the everyday recurring routines and places of our lives.  We say with Jacob, who spent the night out in the wilderness, using a rock for a pillow, having a dream about angels going up and down on a staircase: “Truly, God is in this place--and I didn’t even know it” (Genesis 28:17).  It is when we are going about our daily routines, in our everyday places, not expecting a whole lot that we see God best.

Cynics look high and low for wisdom--and never find it;
The open minded find it right on their doorstep.  (Proverbs 14:6)

We could substitute a lot of words in that proverb for the word wisdom.  Life.  Happiness.  Contentment.  Or, God.  For so many people, wisdom, life, happiness, contentment, even God, is not here.  Its got to be somewhere else.  Out there.  I was talking to a boy at the junior high at lunch one day, when I was working with special ed. kids in Leoti.  He asked me why I moved to Leoti, KS.  Why would I want to move to a place like Leoti after being in California, was his question.  How could I like life here after being some place like California?  His view was that I needed (or, more to the point, HE felt he needed) to be someplace else in order for life, happiness, contentment, whatever, to happen.  Life was back there for me, according to this 7th grader.  Or life was going to be found out there, away from this place.

The problems with that attitude are many.  One is that you will never be satisfied.  Suppose that boy moved away from Leoti some day.  He’s convinced himself that nothing worthwhile is going to happen for him in Leoti.  So, let’s say he goes some place else.  But he’s already developed eyes that are closed to the ordinary, daily ways that God can make life good where you are at.  He will get dissatisfied with the new place.  Surely, what he is looking for is still out there some where.  And off he goes.  The search for life, for God, for whatever, becomes his life, rather than seeing life and God in the ordinary and everyday of where he is at the moment.  Even in a place like Leoti.

There is the story of a man who lived in a simple house in a simple village.  But he, like my junior high student, became dissatisfied.  He thought to himself, as he looked at his wife, and children, and friends and town, that surely there is a better life out there some place else.  So he left all that was his, and set out on his search.

At the end of the first day, he was deep in some woods.  As he prepared to lie down and sleep, he wanted to make sure he headed in the right direction the next morning.  He took off his shoes, and pointed them in the direction he was heading, so he could continue on in the morning.  But during the night, another traveler came upon the man, saw the shoes, and pointed them in the opposite direction.

When the man awoke the next morning, refreshed and ready to continue his  search for a new place, he put on his shoes and headed off in the direction they were pointing.  Soon, he came to a little town with ordinary looking houses and ordinary looking people, and settled in with a familiar looking family, who had familiar looking friends.  He said to himself, “Certainly this is a grand place, a better place than I was before.”  The thing he desired, the thing he went searching for, was right on his doorstep all the time.

The empty-headed treat life as a plaything;
the perceptive grasp its meaning and make a go of it.  (Proverbs 15:21)

Those who treat life as a plaything are also apt to treat God in the same way.  That is, those kinds of people try to use life and God, rather than being immersed in life and God.  Meaning will never be found by those kinds of people.

Because that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?  Finding meaning?  The quotidian moments can convey not just a grab bag of emotions and sensations, but a sense of wonder, beauty, and peace.  Meaning always bushwhacks the mundane.  That is, it is in the mundane, tedious, daily routines of our lives that surprisingly and wondrously get ambushed and transformed into moments of holiness and revelation.

Annie Dillard is another favorite author.  In her book, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, she wrote of one of these moments where meaning bushwhacked one of her ordinary moments.  Pulling into a gas station on an interstate highway in Virginia, she discovered a holy moment in a convergence of mundane events:  a simple conversation with the gas station attendant, a free cup of hot coffee, a frisky beagle puppy, and the setting sun’s light performing tricks on an enormous mountain range.  She wrote of that quotidian moment:

This is it, I think; this is it, right now.  The present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am petting a puppy, I am watching the mountain.

It doesn’t seem like much, does it.  But meaning bushwhacked her mundane moments, and suddenly she felt immersed in life and full of God.

Of course, the nature of these quotidian moments is that you can’t punch an 800 number on your cell phone with one hand, while clutching a VISA card in your other hand, and order such a moment.  You can’t pore over your calendar and pencil such a moment in for next Thursday.  Much better to sharpen your senses to pay attention for the holy in the daily, recognizing that the fodder for quotidian and God-filled moments of meaning surrounds you.

In this age of frenetic activity and general racket of discordant emotions and voices, this means fighting.  Fighting to keep your eyes open, to clear the cobwebs that shroud ears and eyes and souls from sensing.  Fighting to sense the breeze through your hair, the sun upon your face, or hearing your friends quirky laugh, or looking up during a nighttime walk at a sky spread with stars like peanut butter.  In all that and more, sensing this is it, this is that quotidian moment that gives me peace, that matches my pulse with the pulse of God, that gives me that certain sense of meaning that abides throughout the other 98 percent of life that appears so static, so obvious and so humdrum and unremarkable.

I think there is another aspect to this one proverb about treating life and God as a plaything and missing out on the opportunity to grasp meaning in the here and now, in the present moment.  It has to do with cultivating a nonjudgmental awareness of the present.  Think how we both consciously and unconsciously judge our present moments and places.  I saw that in the junior high boy I mentioned earlier.  He was making a value judgement that this present moment and this present place was not important, or is not filled with any  kind of possibility.  His judgement lead him to a sense of boredom and unfulfillment.  This is not my real life.  My real life was back when, or yet to come.

As long as we are looking at our quotidian, daily moments and places with a sense of judgement, we will not see what is really and actually here.  Our judgmental attitudes only raises our stress, and adds to the shroud that covers our senses to the hand of God in the here and now.  Because of judgementalism about our daily moments, we let the present slip away, allowing time to walk by unobserved and unseized, squandering the precious seconds of our lives.

The perceptive find wisdom in their own front yard;
fools look for it everywhere but right here.  (Proverbs 17:24)

Once there was a cobbler who lived in a small village doing what he could to get by in his daily routine.  One night he had a dream of finding a treasure under a bridge in a certain city.  The next morning, he gathered some things together and headed for the city.  There he found the bridge from his dream.  For days he looked under, and around the bridge to find the treasure.  He dug holes; he sorted through piles of trash.  Nothing.

After several days of this, he sat dirty and exhausted on the bridge.  He was ready to give up.  A man standing near by struck up a conversation.  The treasure hunter tells about his dream and the treasure.  The stranger laughed, and then said, “Just the other night I had a dream of finding a buried treasure beside an old tree stump in the back yard of a cobbler who lived in some small village.  But you don’t see me going off, chasing after nonsense that I only saw in a dream.”  He laughed again, and walked away.

The cobbler, thinking of the old stump in his back yard, hurried home and dug up the treasure that was right in his own back yard all the time.

The buried treasure that all these proverbs are talking about is our daily, ordinary life.  Each quotidian moment, each day, is a treasure waiting to be found, waiting to be recognized.  They are treasures because God is in each of those moments, no matter how mundane.  In fact, maybe the moments that lack the most interest for us are actually the most God-filled.  It’s just a matter of seeing that and living into them.

I was watching an interview with Pat Summitt, the coach of the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team.  She had won her 1000th game as a coach, more than any other coach in men’s or women’s basketball.

During the interview they filmed her talking to her team during timeouts.  At one point she said to her team, “We didn’t do that well in that last segment.  We need to rebound better if we are going to do better in the next segment.”  Then, after that clip was over, Coach Summitt talked about how she breaks the game down into what she calls segments.  Not quarters or halves, but smaller segments of how the flow of the game is going.  In one segment they may be shooting well, but then all of a sudden, nothing is dropping, and they are moving into a different segment of the game.  She described how she does that for the women on her team so they can stay in the moment of the game, and not think about what happened in the past segments, or what may or may not happen further on in the game.

I thought that was a good idea.  When we’re looking at life, and how and when we find most meaning in it, it’s usually in the immediate segment we are living in.  It’s in the “right here” as the proverb states.  The same is true with how God shows up in our lives.  God is the God of the immediate segment, because, when you think about it, that’s all we have.  That’s where we live.

We are tempted (and we succumb to the temptation often) to look back at past segments of our lives and get stuck.  Or, we look forward to segments of our lives to come that we have no idea what will come our way.  Both temptations keep us from living in the present moment, in the immediate segment, and from finding the treasure in the front yard of those present moments and immediate places.


In conclusion, maybe you’ve read Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, Eat, Pray, Love.  At one point in her travels, she writes about a friend, who, whenever she saw a beautiful place, blurted out with ecstasy, “It’s so beautiful here!  I want to come back here someday!”

Gilbert then wrote, “It takes all my persuasive powers to try to convince her that she is already here.”

And so are you.  You are already here, in this present moment, in the present place; this quotidian, daily moment of beauty, awe and wonder, filled with God and what God wants to show you.  You don’t need to come back, or wait for it.  It’s here.  If you see it.