We simply know that our daily round is how we live.
How we hold the simplest of tasks speaks loudly about how we hold life itself.
How then do we “come home” spiritually and dwell there? In my own life I have found no better way than to value and savor the sacredness of daily living, to rely on repetition, that humdrum rhythm, which heals and steadies. Increasingly it is for me a matter of being willing “to be in place,” to enter into deeper communion with the objects and actions of a day and to allow them to commune with me. It is a way to know and to be known … to surrender my isolation by participating in the experience as it happens. And it is a struggle! So often it is said that we teach what we want to learn. I want to learn this very much.
All of us have some kind of daily round. As human beings we have a strong intuition that deep within our dailiness lies meaning, a huge dimension.
Personally I have been eased by using the simple word You when addressing the awesome mystery within and beyond my life.
In my own life, I discovered that certain moments in my day held meaning for me. I began to linger around them, to dwell with them. That is when I discovered that I was somehow praying. But I didn’t know that before. I would return again and again to one task or moment until I could hear that prayer that was there. Then I would focus on some other moment. Over time, my tasks have slowly begun to recall me into living consciously more of the day. They are becoming my teachers.
You may want to choose one of these prayers and stay with your experience of the same activity in your life for a week or a month until something yields itself in you. Then you can add another activity until it too has become a prayer within you. Slowly, the most ordinary of days will start to become transparent, to shine with meaning.
Often the prayers are wordless. They are simply a kind of awareness, a return to gratitude, or to conscience, or to praise. Over time this way of linking what is at hand with what is in the heart can recall us into communing with the wonder and gift of the Presence in the present.
For me the orientation that I want to embrace more and more is toward receiving my life, toward a continual intention to make room for Mystery’s way within me. I don’t think we can go deeply into ourselves—but Life seeking itself can go deeply in us. We can be infused, loved, and fathomed by it. And when we are, we cannot help but sing out our joy. We need that activity in us to be ourselves.…
References
Norris, G., & Sibley, G. (1991). Being Home: A Book of Meditations. Bell Tower.