EVERYDAY HOLINESS

It is the rich beginning of a new season.  Some mornings bathed in sunlight, some gray, mild and rainy.  We have no idea how each day will unfold, whether it will become an integral part of our Spring story or a day we barely notice, that passes us by for reasons we soon forget.  On the whole, it's up to us how the day expands.  

For Christians, we have recently finished Holy Week, the week between Palm Sunday and Easter, when Lenten devotions culminate in the institution of the Lord's Supper on Maundy Thursday and the crucifixion on Good Friday.  An emotionally intense week.  But as it's past, I'm wondering if every week isn't Holy, if every day shouldn't be.  Every week we have millions of moments to spend with people we love.  I spend each day and night with the person I've loved since I was 19.  That's a long time ago.  I spend time with grandchildren, family and friends.  Every day has moments when we can look at the sky, feel a sweet breeze, smell the rain or curl our toes in the sand.  Every day we watch our plants grow, pick parsley from our garden, eat a ripe strawberry (almost time).  These days, this week, seem Holy too.  

You know how when someone is dying, we hang on their every word?  We'd give anything to spend just one more day in their living presence.  What if we realized that now?  What if we become people who recognize what they have before it is threatened?  People who see the sacred in the everyday.  Many days we are like that.  We wake up and go into the baby's room where that little hungry, crying person does indeed bring all that's good into our arms.  Or we wake to our lover's touch, or to an aging parent nearby whom we are caring for.  People who we know love and depend on us.  Those are holy times. 

We use words in the Christian faith that may be called terms of art.  They have special meanings.  Grace, holy, sacred, mystery, and others less spiritual like discernment or more technical like Triune God.  Some days I would just like to look at how I live and what's outside my door and say,

Thank you, God, for this holy day.  Thank you for the mystery of the seeds growing in my garden.  For the mystery of my mind and body.  And for the most mysterious of all--the fact that I am loved, by others and by Your Sacred Self.  Thank you for the grace of Your forgiveness of my careless sins that I fail to notice but others may.  Thank you for love and birth and life itself.  May I appreciate all that will someday turn to dust before that day is near.  In the name of the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  AMEN

Nina Naomi