I preached at First United Methodist Church \u00a0in Rockwall, Texas yesterday. After the three services, one of the members asked me if I would like some vegetables from their community garden. He held out a box brimming with onions, red, yellow and white. \u201cI got tired of looking at the big expanse of lawn behind the church that wasn\u2019t doing anybody any good. So now we have a community garden and quite a harvest.\u201d<\/p>\n
A good question for our spiritual lives is What are we harvesting each day?<\/p>\n
\u201cFor lack of attention,\u201d writes the English mystic Evelyn Underhill, \u201ca thousand forms of loveliness elude us every day.\u201d (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life<\/em> (New York: Scribner, 1996, 52.)<\/p>\n Macrina Wiederkehr is a Catholic nun,\u00a0 a member of Scholastica Monastery in Fort Smith, Arkansas. In her book A Tree Full of Angels: Seeing the Holy in the Ordinary <\/em>(HarperSanFrancisco: 1990),she uses the metaphor of harvesting crumbs for our spiritual lives. It expresses the habit of looking for the sacred in the ordinary that is what I mean by the phrase \u201cknack for noticing. \u201c<\/p>\n There is a yearning deep in the human heart- so deep it is an ache within. An ache for God! \u2026 The ache in our heart needs to be fed\u2026 Crumbs are those small things that the world would toss aside, seeing little value in them.\u00a0 However, to the one who lives under the eye of God, they are far from valueless\u2026Everything in life can be nourishing.\u00a0 Everything can bless us, but we\u2019ve got to be there for the blessing to occur.\u00a0 Being present with quality is a decision we are invited to make each day\u2026(Wiederkehr, xii-xiii)<\/p>\n \u201cDue to the reality of our terribly distracted, cluttered, and noisy existence, the decision for real presence is not easy.\u00a0 If we can make this decision and live it, it will be a kind of salvation for us. It can save us from many kinds of death: the death of apathy, ..selfishness..meaninglesness.\u00a0 There is nothing so healing in all the world as real presence.\u00a0 Our real presence can feed the ache for God in others.\u201d (xiii)<\/p>\n Macrina Wiederkehr invites her readers to see the holy in the ordinary, to harvest angels out of the crumbs.\u00a0 She believes we live in a world of theophanies.\u00a0 \u201cHoliness comes wrapped in the ordinary.\u00a0 There are burning bushes all around us.\u00a0 Every tree is full of angels.\u00a0 Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb.\u00a0 Life wants to lead you from crumbs to angels, but this can happen only if you are willing to unwrap the ordinary by staying with it long enough to harvest its treasure.\u201d\u00a0 She says that it\u2019s time to harvest<\/p>\n I\u2019m making French onion soup tonight. What are you going to harvest today?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I preached at First United Methodist Church \u00a0in Rockwall, Texas yesterday. After the three services, one of the members asked me if I would like some vegetables from their community garden. He held out a box brimming with onions, red, yellow and white. \u201cI got tired of looking at the big expanse of lawn behind […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":224,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n\n