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Finding Holy Ground in Dull Terrain

By Karen Case-Green.

I write this having just dropped my children off at their respective schools on the first day of term. The house seems eerily quiet after the cacophony of the summer holidays. It’s a near-forgotten luxury to nurse a cup of coffee and a train of thought without being interrupted by the need to dress a Barbie, save a stickleback from death by overfeeding, or rescue a child from a tree. I’m savouring the silence, but it’s not without regret. 

It happens every year. After the initial panic over how on earth I will stay sane and entertain my children through the long stretch we call the summer holidays, I begin to actually enjoy them. I find (always to my surprise) that I enjoy  being at home without the mad rush from one activity to the other, without the agenda that focuses each day, and without the routine that hems us in. During the summer holidays, days just ‘happen’, and they often turn up some real surprises. During the term time we are driven by routine. You may have felt the same as you returned from holiday this summer to yet another year of late night meetings, mission statements and endless emails: that ‘here we go again’ sinking feeling as you enter the enclosure.

Pinned to routine

In The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock, T S  Eliot captures this sense of the unheroic nature of our routine lives, and describes the spiritual exhaustion it incurs:

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

We can feel enclosed - ‘formulated’ - by the situations we face returning from holiday. Driven by routine, our ears quickly become dulled to hearing and our eyes dulled to seeing God at work in the daily. We can quickly forget what we learned to see in the space of rest - that, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning captures so beautifully:

Earth is crammed with heaven

and every common bush afire with God

But only he who sees takes off his shoes;

the rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

One default position is to try to ‘fast-forward’ our dull routines until we can reach the ‘real’ living. Stephanie Merritt writes very honestly of feeling trapped at home during her maternity leave, and admits to “counting the hours, always counting the hours down to a reunion with life”.[1] Some routines are so habitualised that we can’t even remember whether or not we’ve done them (or am I the only one?)! Something in us just switches off. We fail to see the holy ground - “every common bush afire with God”.

Christians are not immune from this. Ian Stackhouse writes that the notion in Luke’s gospel of taking up your cross daily refers not so much to “being eaten by the lions; in one sense that would be easy. Rather, it is more like being trodden to death by a flock of geese.”[2] Many of us would rather opt for the big, one-off sacrifices, if given the choice. They are costly, but at least they are heroic! The sacrifice of serving in small, unnoticed ways - day in and day out - whether it be in a boring job, a demanding ministry, or a difficult marriage, seems harder. And so we seek escape from the enclosure.

Church can actually be seen as one such escape route. The church service gives us an opportunity for a  ‘reunion with life’. And this is as it should be. We are re-centred, our perspective corrected, our spirit strengthened. But how many of you have heard people say (often with regret) as they leave a church service, words to the effect of “Well, that was nice. But now back to reality”. And there is a danger when we settle for a dichotomy between our experience of God’s presence on a Sunday, and our experience - or lack of it - during the rest of the week. Why is that a danger? Because church will just become our ‘never-never land’, and, like Peter Pan, we will never grow up.

The cloister

I’m no stranger to this desire to escape. Recently, I sought refuge with some friends in the beautiful monastery of Douai Abbey, situated amidst lovely countryside outside Reading. The visit was partly fuelled by my curiosity to see how the monastics found stability within such a rigid ‘enclosure’. For, as Esther de Waal points out, “monastic stability means accepting this particular community, this place and these people”[3] - for life! Not surprisingly, some monasteries experience a drop-out rate as high as fifty percent among their novices. But I have to admit that I was also looking forward to a restful retreat from clock-watching, and had a romantic notion of leaving my mobile phone and all concern about time-pressures at the gate.

Imagine my surprise when I was greeted by a monk whose first question was whether I had a good mobile phone signal! Apparently I would need it to contact my friends in case they were late. He then thrust a timetable of the daily offices into my hand, which made my daily routine in Guildford look like a holiday. I was struck by how routine-driven the monks’ day actually was: it is punctuated by the five daily offices which start at 6.30am and end with Compline at 8.00pm. You could just be settling into one task when you’d be interrupted by the bell for the next office! And once you’d gone to sleep you were onto the next day of the same routine.

I wasn’t alone. Henri Nouwen struggled with the sameness of routine during his stay at the Trappist monastery of Genesee. He wanted to “be different, to attract attention... to make some new contribution, but the monastic situations was calling him to be the same, and more of the same.”[4] Isn’t this what we struggle with sometimes in church? However, while staying at Douai Abbey I felt great admiration and gratitude for these communities who are living faithfully in the enclosure, and who humbly offer themselves to God through the very sameness of each day. When I did finally pluck up the courage to ask one of the fathers what had kept him faithful to this enclosed lifestyle for fifty-four years, his reply was: “Community... and routine”. I left with fresh resolve.

So while the enclosure of routine and the commitment to a particular community/ family may seem to imprison us, could it be that they are also the very things God uses to anchor our faith? Don Columban Byrne expresses his initial frustration with the enclosure of monastic life. He saw it as a “relentless enemy; frustrating my will, hindering my lawful entertainment...the monastery as a prison where everything I hold dear...finds a grave.”[5] But he came to recognise the enclosure as “the anchor that holds me in a restless sea” ... and the thoughts of escape came only when he was tired of facing himself.

When my children were very little and I was struggling with the dull terrain of sleepless nights, colic and endless washing, I found Alie Stibbe’s book, Barefoot in the Kitchen, a great help. In it she turns to the monastics to learn how to find God in the daily grind of life. She writes very honestly of feeling “cloistered” in the ordinariness of her domestic role while mothering four young children. She was drawn to the life of Brother Lawrence, who would take his shoes off and walk barefoot in his kitchen because he saw it as holy ground. She learned that doing everything in God’s name, for his glory, applies as much to stacking the dishwasher and taking out the rubbish as it does to leading a Bible study or helping at church.[6] Metropolitan Anthony Bloom once said:

“You will find stability at the moment that you discover...God is here, and if you do not find Him here it is useless to go and search for Him elsewhere because it is not Him that is absent from us, it is we who are absent from Him.  If you cannot find Him here you will not find Him anywhere else.”[7]

This has helped me during the many daily routines that form the fabric of my life - walking to school, preparing the dinner, reading bedtime stories - to pay attention to this present moment, no matter how many times the action has been repeated in the past. As Seamus Heaney’s poem, Rain Stick, so beautifully expresses, the sound which comes from upending a rain stick yet again “is undiminished for having happened once,/ Twice, ten, a thousand times before.” He asks:

Who cares if all the music that transpires

Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?

You are like a rich man entering heaven

Through the ear of a raindrop.  Listen now again.

We are all liturgical

So rather than fight against these routines, maybe we should embrace them. This applies also to the way we do church. I came from a non-comformist background where the word ‘ritual’ was followed by a sharp intake of breath. But, as Jason Clark points out in his article, The Rediscovery of Ritual in the Emerging Church: “We are all liturgical, in that we all have formularies for how we organise our lives, around our beliefs and practices.”[8]  So why not honestly appraise the liturgies we use?

While working for The Navigators in Peru some years ago, I attended our local Catholic church. Initially this was a strategic choice: to help identify with the Catholics whom we were trying to evangelise and disciple. However, to my surprise, I found myself growing to love the rhythm of the liturgy each week, and the attention to the church calendar each year. I felt ‘earthed’. This was partly why, when we returned to the UK, I attended a women’s group at our local Anglican church for several years. I had grown to cherish the rhythm and confines that I had never really found in my own church.

You may feel bored by the predictable rhythms of your own church service. You may suffer from accidia, otherwise known as “the noonday demon”, when the routines just stretch before you endlessly. But just such routines in a church service can catch us, even when we thought we were beyond catching. In The Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris writes of a time when she was plagued by accidia, when “the rhythms of daily life, and of the universe itself, the everyday glory of sunrise and sunset and all the ‘present moments’ in between seem a disgusting repetition that stretches on forever.”[9] One week she visited her family in Honolulu and was feeling particularly low. She dragged herself along to church. During the service they sang, “Spirit of God, Descend Upon My Heart” - “I ask no dreams, no prophet ecstasies, no sudden rending of the veil of clay, no angel visitant, no opening skies; but take the dimness of my soul away”. She realises with some surprise that she is praying for the first time in days - and that it’s working. “Here in this ordinary church service, I have gained the strength to live this moment, the present moment, for the first time in days.”[10] So be encouraged.

Absconditus Deus

You might argue that the monastics chose to accept their enclosure, while we may find ourselves in situations we never sought. Taking up the cross daily with a debilitating illness, for example, can leave us feeling grudging, not joyful. We know that “he who endures to the end will be saved” (Matthew 10), but it is difficult not to develop a hard shell in the process, a stoicism that depends less on God’s spirit than our own strength of will. 

In God on Mute, Pete Greig writes honestly about the pain of unanswered prayer during his wife’s illness. He wrestles with the fact that, as C S Lewis wrote after his wife’s death, God can seem “a very absent help in times of trouble.”[11] Or as Martin Luther termed it - absconditus Deus - “the God who goes missing.”[12] But Greig reminds us of those tender words that God speaks in Isaiah 49.14-16, words that have the power to melt our hardened hearts:

But Zion said, “The Lord has forsaken me, the Lord has forgotten me.”

Can a mother forget the baby at her breast

and have no compassion on the child she has borne?

Though she may forget, I will not forget you!

See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;

your walls are ever before me.

It is good to remember, when our enclosures seem very painful, that our ‘walls’ are ever before our God.

A mountain stepplod

When I was 19, I woke at 4am and walked from Aguas Calientes to catch the sunrise at the Inca ruins of Macchu Pichu. While the road carrying all the tourists meanders from one side of the mountain to the other, our path cut straight up the centre on a vertical line. I carried five months of luggage on my back. In retrospect, the breathlessness and exhaustion that kicked in after half an hour were probably due to altitude sickness. I honestly thought I would die if I took another step! It was torture. My (now) husband cajoled me up the hill with the helpful adage: “No pain, no gain!” He was lucky to make it up alive himself - carrying my rucksack was his saving grace! Every time I looked up and saw yet another ruin-less incline, I felt utter despair. But in the end I stopped looking up, and just kept my eyes glued to the ground, putting one foot in front of the other. And when I finally sat overlooking a silent, mist-hung Machu Picchu, it was worth it.

In his book, The Quest, Eugene Peterson looks at Jeremiah’s long-persevering pilgrimage and notes that there are eleven instances of the word ‘persistence’ during the book. He quotes Baron Friedrich von H?gel, who wrote in 1933:

“You want to grow in virtue, to serve God, to love Christ? Well, you will grow in...these things if you will make them a slow and sure, an utterly real, a mountain stepplod and ascent, willing to have to camp for weeks or months in spiritual desolation, darkness and emptiness at different stages in your march and growth. All demand for constant light, for ever the best - the best to your own feeling, all attempt at eliminating or minimising the cross and trial, is so much soft folly and puerile trifling.[13]

And while we stepplod up the mountain, where is God? Is it just me or do others feel that the longer we walk with God, the more he makes us wait for him? For anyone who has trouble sleeping, you will know how time seems to crawl to a standstill during the night hours, and you may have experienced the relief of seeing light creeping into the sky at dawn, as the watchmen do in Psalm 130:

I will wait for the Lord, my soul waits

and in his word I put my hope.

My soul waits for the Lord

more than watchmen wait for the morning.

My soul waits for the Lord

more than watchmen wait for the morning.

It is in the waiting, the “camping for weeks”, the repeated telling of your soul to wait for him, and him alone - that we can grow up.

His smile’s not wrung

Thankfully, those times of desolation - of absconditus Deus - do not last forever. God’s smile cannot be forced from him, and when it does come, it comes often like the ‘unforeseen’ light in the following poem. As Hopkins “tells his soul” in the aftermath of his own wrestle with God:

...call off thoughts awhile

Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size

 

At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile

‘S not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather - as skies

Between pie mountains - lights a lovely mile.

                                  My Own Heart

 

God’s smile, when it comes, has the power to shower beauty on our dullest routines; to “light a lovely mile”.

Well, it’s twelve o’clock and time to collect my daughter from pre-school. My coach is about to turn into a pumpkin. Routine calls!

[1] Stephanie Merritt, 2008, The Devil Within, Vermilion, p. 176

[2] Stackhouse, I. 2008, The Day is Yours, Milton Keynes, Paternoster, p.27

[3] De Waal, E. 1999, Seeking God, Norwich, Canterbury Press, p.41

[4] ibid, p.45

[5] ibid, p.41

[6] Stibbe, A. 2004, Barefoot in the Kitchen, Oxford, BRF

[7] De Waal, E. 1999, Seeking God, Norwich, Canterbury Press, p.49

[8] Clark, J. 2008, “The Rediscovery of Ritual in the Emerging Church”, The Bible in Transmission, Spring 2008, Bible Society

[9] Norris, K. 1996,The Cloister Walk, New York, Penguin, p.131

[10] ibid, p. 134

[11] Grieg, P. 2007, God on Mute, Survivor, Eastbourne,  p.256

[12] ibid, p.251

[13] Baron Friedrich von H?gel, 1933 as seen in Peterson, E. 1995, The Quest, London, Marshall Pickering, p. 109