Confession

By Andrea Lingle

Merciful God, we confess that we have lost interest in the daily landscape of our lives. You have painted the sky with vermillion sunsets, and we have not bothered to look up. We long for our lives to be more lyrical, but we refuse to hear the poetry of the passing seasons. 

To say the things around us, the things we do habitually, and the tasks that fill our days are imbued with the Divine nature is easy. All I had to do was start typing. To believe such a thing, even a little, even as much as a mustard seed is harder. In fact, I have very little luck reasoning my way into belief. Belief comes with practice. Belief comes from waking up 14,782 days in a row with the sun rising in the east. I believe it is going to come up in the east tomorrow because that is my practiced experience. 

So how do we go from saying that the mundane is sacred to believing it? Practice. Practice waking up welcoming the day. Practice smiling at your spouse or child or co-worker as if they were the face of God. Practice remembering that the laundry is an invitation to prayer. 

Merciful God, we confess that we have filled our souls with gibberish, bickering, and comparisons. We bemoan that we have lost ourselves in the chatter. Teach us that you have given us the ground to stand on, tasks to quiet our minds, and enough love to meet each moment.

For the last several weeks I have been standing at my sink scrubbing spoons coated in peanut butter and muttering, “God, inhabit our moments.” While I have yet to see any headlines that declare that my efforts have reversed global warming or eased the plight of the refugee, I can feel my body ease as the words replace despair. Despair might seem dramatic, but that is what the mundane can do. It can creep in and turn the saturation down on life. The prismatic world that you were born into fades to a thin washed out rendering. You find yourself standing at the kitchen sink meal after meal at a complete loss. When did despair replace joy?

What does a Liturgy of the Mundane do? It recalls us to joy. To greet the day with a welcome is to find something different to say about the same thing. For me, getting up will never be easy. Ever. I hate it. I will never be happy about getting out of bed, but I might be able to receive joy with practice. Wiping down countertops doesn’t seem to extend beyond a fruitless repetition, but what if it could become the practice of three deep breaths we need to hear the song of the Creator once again? 

This week, let’s add three deep breaths as we wipe the counters. Nothing spectacular. Just being recalled to life and joy by the mundane.