Week 7: How Willful Imagination Heals Us in the Age of Dishwashers
This past May, the parsonage dishwasher broke.
Today, we slid a new dishwasher in its place.
During the summer months between the breaking and the replacing, there were many hours at the kitchen sink– scrubbing and soaking, rinsing and drying.
With three young children, there was never a shortage of dirty water cups, snack bowls dusted in Goldfish crumbs, and lunch box Tupperware stacked beside the sink. Within minutes of cleaning the mass of dishes, a new pile would begin to form in its place.
Over and over and over.
Many evenings after dinner, my husband, Jackson, and I admit that this never ending chore was certainly a problem of the privileged.
(Our son, Benson, often would remind us that “at least we have a kitchen sink and running water.” Benson was certainly right, but his truthful words were like salt in our very shallow, yet quite irritated, wound.
Yah, yah, yah…)
With arms elbow-deep in soapy water, dishrags hung over our shoulders, we would ponder how modern life has adapted in such a way to where these kinds of repetitive jobs feel quite antiquated. We are not accustomed to working at a job that will demand redoing in a few hours. And more than that, the pace of our life does not allow us to slow down for monotonous rhythms. Our lives feel too full to have time for something we will do again and again.
On the counter, the Kitchenaid replaces the rhythmic kneading of bread. The washer scrubs the stains from uniforms, jeans, and soccer jerseys. The dryer keeps the laundry inside instead of on the line out back. The sink pumps endless streams of water (even steaming water!) right into our sink, ending trips to communal wells or outdoor pumps. The list could go on and on.
And while I certainly do not want to refuse my washer or sink or even my brand new dishwasher that I’ve learned to live without, I’ve realized that my cultural moment has left me rhythmically anemic. My will is lethargic, exhausted far too quickly to endure, let alone thrive in, the monotonous and mundane aspects of human life– aspects that are essential for embodiment, family and community life, and even spiritual vitality.
I’ve heard it said that an American’s attention span in 2022 has decreased to a mere 8 seconds.
It's also been said that the average American checks his/her cell phone at least once every ten minutes, almost 100 times a day.
Such staggering statistics reveal that we struggle to sit in the present. Silence and “empty time” are meant to be filled with input. Not only do we resist repetitive tasks, we avoid silence, solitude, and boredom.
Last night, a big group of us went out to eat after our kids’ playoff soccer game. When I shared that I didn’t know if my daughter Olivia would play in the spring, I heard a choir of consensus from my friends. And yet, they argued, “I really want them to do something.”
Something.
Hours of school, friendships, church involvement, homework, family gatherings– all of this is certainly not nothing.
And yet, in our quest to raise balanced children, we even usher our kids into the relentless cultural pace. We inadvertently teach our children to never be bored, to capitalize every moment, to reach all the potential, and to keep up.
And yet, what of the unavoidable rhythms?
What about the essential work that cultivates an organic system? And how does this differ from our highly mechanical perspective?
How do we define what is worthy and worthwhile?
The saints found in the sacramental stream remind us God is found in the repetitive tasks and rhythms of our lives.
In fact, these mundane, ordinary aspects of humanity are essential to salvation– so essential that God embraced them– enfleshed, ordinary, situated. In the Incarnation of Jesus, God even redeems them: “It is a quotidian mystery that dailiness can lead to such despair and yet also be at the core of our salvation.”[1]
The consequence of the mystery of the Incarnation of Christ is even more mysteries– that God can be “everywhere present and filling all things,” as the recurring Orthodox prayer teaches.
And thus sacramental theology is overflowing with meaning.
Every aspect of the sacramental life has meaning because an encounter with God is always and everywhere possible.
This is why the earliest mothers and fathers, such as Athanasius, leaned into their incarnate lives knowing that through Christ, God “enfolded [knowledge of God] in many forms and by many ways.”[2] There was meaning in the doing of every task, with every person, in every place, in each moment.
God was not hidden but rather present here and within.
Again, our Christian mothers and fathers share with us how they find God in the mundane moments and places of life:
Brother Lawrence famously “practiced the presence of God” while washing dishes in his abbey.[3]
John Wesley encountered God in the fields with the coal miners, where the world was his parish.[4]
Dag Hammarskjold found the God of compassion and justice in his longtime work in international relations.[5]
Henri Nouwen found the faithful love of God in the life of Adam and many others with mental and physical handicaps at L’Arche.
Annie Dillard was “struck” by God in the light of the trees in the woods.[6]
Kathleen Norris discovered God, not in her vibrant writer’s community in New York City, but in an inherited home in the harsh plains of South Dakota.[7]
To live sacramental lives, we must live with God in our material, ordinary existence.
And yet, this is not our only definition of sacrament, nor is it our own area of struggle. If we are honest, we are spiritually weak in our worship, too, particularly the sacramentality of our corporate love of God.
Growing up, I was always warned of the dangers of liturgy.
Those people pray prayers and don’t even mean them.
It's just up and down, sitting and kneeling, and nothing even changes!
They just get so used to communion. It doesn’t even matter to them anymore.
As we refuse the liturgical aspects of both our lives and our worship, we are in fact embracing our popular culture of immediate gratification, novelty, and self-actualization.
We weaken our spiritual resilience.
We eliminate mystery.
And we actually place all the making of “meaning” on ourselves.
I need to have this quiet time so that I can find God. I
have to stay focused in worship so I can encounter God.
I have to feel something while I sing to know God is with me. I
have to be completely distraction free during communion or else I receive Christ in vain.
The truth of it is, sacramental worship strengthens our souls, places the work back on our Divine God, and allows meaning to come as the Spirit wills.
As ministers of the Good News, this relinquishes us from the pressures to manufacture, manipulate, or market God or others.
We chose the prayer, confessions, scriptures, and sacramental practices of God’s people because we believe they are infused with incredible grace and meaning for us and for those we lead.
So how do we learn to embrace lives and worship of ordinary monotony
in a modern culture of dishwashers and seeker-friendly worship?
Or, to borrow the language of Annie Dillard,
how do we “see” God in given lives and worship?[7]
The saints well-versed in the sacramental life offer two postures for the renewal of our spiritual eyes:
1.Use Imagination
I love how Brother Lawrence describes the beginning of his friendship with God as an intentional envisioning of Jesus on the cross or being before the Divine Judge.[8] Sacramental imagining makes meaning of what we know to be true by placing ourselves in the midst.
Practices like lectio divina also ask questions that require such a sacramental imagination as the scripture passage is read aloud: Where are you? What does this place or moment look like? What do you hear or smell? How do you feel watching this unfold? Here we find God in our devotional lives and find ourselves in God’s story. This complete belonging leads to finding the divine wherever we go.
We get the sense that G.K. Chesterton also imagines in his ponderings of God and the cosmos. A man with a keen sense of humor and love of fantasy, Chesterton was brought to faith by imagining a universe without intention and consequently brought to the faith the richness of metaphor, story, and delight! One simply has to read Man Alive to hear the vibrato of Chesterton’s imagination and enthusiasm for a life that is simply an “eccentric privilege.”[9] Chesterton’s almost scandalous thought of intersecting divinity and play is put succinctly by Kathleen Norris: “When confronting a sink full of dirty dishes…I admit that I generally lose sight of the fact that God is inviting me to play.”[10]
Tonight, I felt compelled to create space and time to play. Ministry, seminary, family, and community life is actually a lot of work. The proverbial train does not keep chugging along without a conductor. And so when reading Norris’ call to play, I, too, was “struck like a bell” to release and trust God by enjoying the gifts of now. I pulled out my camera to “raise my sights” and change my vision. I painted pumpkins with the kids and kicked a soccer ball with my son in bare feet.
In the midst of it all, I imagined how God must see this church parsonage, my family, even me.
I imagined all the prayers I had prayed for this very life, prayers I had forgotten about and simply accepted the divine answers as a natural consequence for my hard work and good choices.
I imagined, like Wendell Berry, years in this small place, full of ordinary, gritty ministry and lingering friends and corn and dusty porches.
Receiving this material life as a gift brings us into deep friendship, love, and trust of God.[11]
2. Strengthen The Will
We will not naturally imagine and play and find meaning in our lives and worship. Perhaps at first, there will be novelty in simply looking at our lives in a new way. However, this too will wear off, and we will be left with the mundane again.
What do we do then?
Soren Kierkegaard holds this tension well when he describes God as the “unchangeable” One and yet endlessly moveable in love. God is infinite constancy and variety, eternal steadfastness and recreation. And so it is being centered in “the One, who is one thing and who is all” that Kierkegaard prays to. In fact, it is his repetitive cry that our hearts would “will one thing”-- the One Eternal.[12] It was intentional, constant direction and desire that allowed God to be near in all things.
As imaginative as Chesterton and Lawrence were, they too called for willful practice of finding God (and thus meaning) in all places and actions. Chesterton argues that even God was willful in his repetitions. The world was full of miracles and purpose because God had willed all things.[13] Chesterton and Dillard both agree that there is a significant strength in delighting in repetition, a strength seen most clearly in God and children. “Do it again!” is simply not a phrase we are resilient enough to utter. It takes willful effort to strengthen our souls to delight in such depths.
Brother Lawrence willed himself to keep imagining those moments before God, intentionally placing himself before the Lord over and over. He says that “by repeating these acts they become habitual, and the presence of God becomes something that comes naturally to us.”[14] Like the muscle memory of a virtuoso or the instinct of an athlete, those who continually and willfully imagine will become nature seers of God. As we lift our eyes to the dimension of the divine here and now, there is no place where life becomes dull, unexceptional, or less miraculous. It begins here.
We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing and even ecstasy, but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are, not where we wish we are.[15]
Bibliography:
[1] Kathleen Norris, “Finding Faith in the Mundane,” rom Foster, Richard J., and James Bryan Smith, Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups ( San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 363.
[2] Athanasius, “Jesus Christ, the Image of God,” from Foster, Richard J., and James Bryan Smith, Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups ( San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 340.
[3] Brother Lawrence, “An Habitual Sense of God’s Presence,” rom Foster, Richard J., and James Bryan Smith, Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups ( San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 369.
[4] John Wesley was to have written in his journal, ““I look upon all the world as my parish; thus far I mean, that in whatever part of it I am, I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty to declare unto all that are willing to hear, the glad tidings of salvation.”
John Wesley, “Journal of John Wesley,” October 5, 2022. https://www.ccel.org/ccel/wesley/journal.vi.iii.v.html.
[5] Dag Hammarskjold, “To Say Yes,” from Foster, Richard J., and James Bryan Smith, Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups ( San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993),357.
[5] Annie Dillard, “To See Clearly,” from Foster, Richard J., and James Bryan Smith, Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups ( San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 347.
[6] Kathleen Norris, “Finding Faith in the Mundane,” 363.
[7] Annie Dillard, “To See Clearly,” 345-348.
[8] Brother Lawrence, “A Habitual Sense of God’s Presence,” 370.
[9] G.K. Chesterton, “A Magical Universe,” from Foster, Richard J., and James Bryan Smith, Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups ( San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 335.
[10] Kathleen Norris, “Finding Faith in the Mundane,” 365.
[11] This practice comes from Kathleen Norris, “Finding Faith in the Mundane,” 367.
[12] Soren Kierkegaard, “Praying to Will One Thing,” from Foster, Richard J., and James Bryan Smith, Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups ( San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 353.
[13] G.K. Chesterton, “A Magical Universe,” 334-335.
[14] Brother Lawrence, “A Habitual Sense of God’s Presence,” 370.
{15] Kathleen Norris, “Finding Faith in the Mundane,” 364.