Holy as a Day is Spent: Our Awareness of the Sacred Around Us

I got out this morning for a walk in the woods near my house before I found myself in the midst of yet another scorching, humid St. Louis summer day. The temperature peaked at 108 the last few days, and more of the same is promised for today.

I was accompanied on my walk this morning by the music of singer-songwriter-teacher-activist Carrie Newcomer, with whom I have had the pleasure to work and learn a few times. As I entered the canopy of the woods, I was greeted in my ear buds with Carrie’s beautiful hymn to the sacred all around us, “Holy as a Day is Spent,” a song that never ceases to make me stop and consider where I am and how I’m taking up space on the earth at the moment. More than anything else, though, the song asks us to see the sacred in the ordinary, beautiful things of daily life. Near the end of the song, Carrie sings:

Holy is the place I stand
To give whatever small good I can
The empty page, the open book
Redemption everywhere I look

Unknowingly we slow our pace
In the shade of unexpected grace
With grateful smiles and sad lament
As holy as a day is spent.

And so I slowed my pace in the shade of the woods and in a moment of unexpected, unplanned, unbeckoned grace. I sat on a bench made for someone’s Eagle Scout project, thankful for a place to sit right there and then. I brushed a spider’s web from my face, no longer irritated but instead all the more aware of the night’s work that went into that web. And I wondered what the remnant of my work might be and if and when and where it might ever brush across someone’s face unexpectedly, at just the moment they might need it most. Perhaps that’s a good vision for the work of a writer.

I thought of ordinary moments of the past few days that might still hold a glimpse of the divine and the holy if only I took the time to name them as such.  For this is my calling, and it might be the calling for us all if we’re willing to listen for it. Once again, the words of the poet Mary Oliver spring to my mind:

Let me
keep my mind on what matters,

which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.

(For some earlier thoughts on this same topic, see my earlier post.)

It’s so easy to go through life not astonished because we don’t look and listen for these sideways glances into the mind and heart of God. They are there, ever present, like their creator, but it’s up to us to look, see, note and name them.

Yesterday, Sue and I visited the Ferguson Farmer’s Market, despite the heat, working our way from stall to stall and going home with local farm fresh cheese, tomatoes, green beans, sweet corn and cucumbers, and refreshing ourselves along the way with homemade all-fruit popsicles (blackberry for me and watermelon/mint for Sue). On first glance, this is just a trip to a store that happens to be outside. But looking closer you see something more. Something holier and more important. A place where commerce and community come together in a way that is so old and simple that it’s new all over again. Holy, because we name it.

A little five- or six-year-old girl stood ready to help us bag a few ears of corn from her family’s farm. She’s proud of her work, you can tell, and she will know the land and the source of her food far better than I ever will because she’s there every day, running through the rows, learning to judge the seasons and the weather and the readiness of the crops. Sacred, because we’ve seen it.

In the afternoon, I visit my 98-year-old hospice patient, listening again to her stories of old North St. Louis, of skating on the lake at Fairgrounds Park, of being the only girl in the “boy’s territory” of upper-level science classes at Beaumont High School in the early 1930s, of dropping out of college, despite her obvious promise and potential, because her family could not afford it, of finding herself so lost in books she couldn’t hear her father calling her to dinner, of dancing and playing bridge and remembering her mother’s laugh. Sacramental, because so has been her life.

Later that evening, at home, we prepare the beans and boil the corn, all the more aware that food doesn’t really come from supermarkets. We know that, of course, but don’t often enough stop to consider it until something brings us up short, like a smiling, dirty-faced little girl who’s been working side by side with her family all morning. We clean and cut and cook and eat and clean again, aware of the fecundity and frailty and joy of daily life. We eat a meal that has become sacramental and sacred because we have been reminded that we need community to eat and live. Blessed, because we realize it.

Again, Carrie Newcomer’s words echo in my head:

Holy is the dish and drain
The soap and sink, the cup and plate
And the warm wool socks, and the cold white tile
Showerheads and good dry towels

And frying eggs sound like psalms
With a bit of salt measured in my palm
It’s all a part of a sacrament
As holy as a day is spent.

So here is my challenge to you today: Tell me where you saw something holy and sacred, where you least expected to find it.

——————–

(For the full lyrics to the song, as well as music samples and even guitar chords, visit Carrie Newcomer’s website. You can also buy her CDs direct from her site. This song is from the album “The Gathering of Spirits.”)