Becca is Learning

The great spirituality of plodding along. It’s not shiny or glam but it’s real. Sometimes it’s painful, but really I’m just talking about the mundane. Not the highs and lows of life… but somehow meeting God here in life where it’s real.

There’s ironing to be done, sleep to be had, and admin to do. Where is God here? Sometimes I struggle in this place of routine and low drama/celebration. This could be to do with my ENFP personality type… I enjoy deeply emotional experience and depth of experience. However I am also getting old and boring enough to enjoy (or more realistically, long for) quiet evenings and space. And I’m feeling the need to enjoy life without the highs and lows of personal drama and/or conflict.

In the sub-culture of Christian ministry we use inspirational language about spirituality- this is so great and has its place. But where our traditions enable us to meet God in the highs and the lows, it can leave a gap about what we do when life is in the boring middle ground… where household chores meet heaven.

Knowing God is a beautiful and amazing and marvellous experience. But life is not always oustandingly beautiful and amazing and marvellous… or at least not in my experience. I don’t even mean the great hurts or pains that we can (and do) go through. My feeling is that there’s got to be a way of meeting God where life plateaus.

I’m growing in my appreciation for contemplative type spirituality which is earthy and unpretentious and altogether more attainable in the everyday experience. This strand of spirituality seems to reveal a beautiful and marvellous depth to thinking spiritually in the ordinary and everyday. Here we get back to our earthy Hebraic nomadic farming roots, where it all began.

I’m talking silence, making space, and natural rhythms. In celebration of humanness we tend to ourselves and yet at the same time sacrifice hedonistic/consumeristic/materialistic tendancies in the pursuit of the more spiritually real and authentic.

I’ve been trying to put this into practise since the come down of the crazy summer months. Taking time to reflect and pray and document. Taking time to put my chaotic life back into some order. It’s not glam and life isn’t all resolved, but I’m feeling the most authentic version of myself that I have done in ages, and to come at things from what I call the ‘Thomas Merton perspective’, maybe to become myself more authentically is to put myself in a position to be the most like the saint God has intended me to be.

Plus it helps to be a little slower about the place when you have man flu.