On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing
there, he cried out, “Let
anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink.
As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow
rivers of living water.’
--John 7:37-38 NRSV
How many times have you
washed your hands today?
In these days of
pandemic, maybe you have lost count of how many times you have moved to a sink,
gotten soap from a dispenser or a bar of soap and washed your hands. Did you wash your hands for 20 seconds as
health experts recommend? Maybe you sang “Happy Birthday” to ensure you washed
long enough?
I confess to still
viewing hand washing as a chore. I’m
doing it, but I don’t like it. My habit
of washing my hands obediently yet begrudgingly goes way back long before the
days of COVID-19. I was a boy after
all. I dislike making generalizations
about gender, but many boys seem genetically predisposed to resist washing
themselves. I was especially terrible as
a teenager, and now raising two teenage sons I’m experiencing payback for what
I put my parents through. My house
smells more like a high school boy’s locker room than I care to admit. As I try to enforce basic hygiene, I try to
remember I was once that way too.
I certainly never thought
there was anything spiritual about washing my hands. I grew up among “free church” Christians, the
type of Protestants that includes Baptists, Christian churches (of which
Disciples of Christ belong), Congregationalists and others, who originated as
dissenters from official state churches that were most commonly Anglican or
Roman Catholic. In these traditions, rituals
and traditions are viewed with suspicion.
After all, Jesus criticized the Pharisees for their empty rituals (such
as washing hands!), so we were to avoid them too. Never mind that we had our own unconscious
rituals and traditions in how we did church.
Faith was a thing one
believed rather than experienced.
Finding God in nature and every day activities seemed to err into the
territory of the New Age movement.
Strict boundaries between what is spiritual and what is “worldly” were
necessary. In hindsight, I wonder why we
talked so much about God being omnipresent, while at the same time we acted as
if God was only present in the church building or at sacred spaces like church
camp. We missed out on a lot of
opportunities to experience God in the ordinary moments of life.
Maybe God is present in
the ordinary “rituals” of life, even in the ones we’d rather not do. Maybe God is to be found especially in the
moments when we do the necessary chores of life. In seminary, I was assigned The Practice
of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence, a medieval monk who was famous
for saying, “God is among the pots and pans.”
I’ve been wondering lately if I’m missing out on experiencing God’s
presence among the many inconveniences of life during the Coronavirus, such as
the times when I wash my hands.
I came across the following prayer from
the spiritual writer Gunilla Norris and it caused me to think differently about
this oh so common activity of washing hands.
Inside, my body consists mostly of water, the way the globe,
too, consists mostly of water. I came to be within the waters of my mother’s
womb. So when I wash I like to remember that I am in my element…Your water…Your
living water. Help me scrub my face free of its masks so I can return to the
true self You gave me.
The prayer from Gunilla’s book Being
Home inspired me to look her up. On
her web site, she shares about writing the book. I love what she says.
When I published Being Home
in 1991 I did not know that I had begun a series of books on what I now call
household spirituality, or the practice of spiritual awareness in the most
mundane and simple of circumstances. Together these books seem to me to be like
a crystal with many facets. They are part of one thing and yet shed light from
different perspectives on the humblest of our day-to-day tasks. It has always
been my understanding that when we are really present in our daily activities,
our lives become more luminous, filled with love and grace.
Whether we are living in the present
days of confusion brought on by COVID-19 or some blessed future post-vaccine
time, our ordinary day-to-day tasks, even the ones we may grudgingly do for our
health and the health of others like washing hands, contain the possibility of “our
lives becoming more luminous, filled with love and grace.”
May your daily “rituals” be filled with
the blessed presence of God.
Grace and Peace,
Rev. Chase Peeples
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