The Journey of the Soul in the Vale of Ordinariness

“I discover the holy . . . [by] peering under the edges of the ordinary.”

One of the great challenges of faith is wedding the spiritual to the ordinary. It’s not just the old matter of finding the transcendent within the immanent. That’s hard enough, but since the immanent world about us is often quite fascinating, the challenge is really greater than that. (Gerard Manley Hopkins saw God in the swooping hawk and the beautiful dappled things without any problem.)

I think the greater challenge is to see God in the humdrum things–the really ordinary, every day grind of one’s life. I know some people with the gift for this (Hopkins could see this as well), but it’s not something I’m good at. And yet I’m sure it’s a requirement for a healthy holiness. (Holiness being something practical we should desire, not a rare quality of the few.)

I commend to you a book by Belden Lane called The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. It’s all about the desert and silence and emptying and the quieting of the chatter of the mind in one’s quest for God. For that matter, it’s about ceasing to quest for God at all (seeing God as another “experience” to add to one’s collection) and just being very still before God (not simply thinking about God). It’s an ancient tradition.

Lane is the source of the epigraph above. He also says, “Spirituality is not the sublime transcendence of everything trivial and matter of fact. In the Western spiritual tradition, the journey of the soul in the vale of ordinariness is an equally good, if not surer, route to holiness. This is the way of being wounded, of being committed to the concrete, of being bound to the familiar.”

I like that phrase “the vale of ordinariness” and the idea of the soul as journeying in it. Keats referred to this world as “the Vale of Soul-making” in his letters. And I think that it is the ordinary, rather than the extraordinary, events that shape our souls most of all. What we do and how we think and feel repeatedly, day in and day out, shapes us more than the dramatic events that come now and then. We talk about “turning points” in our life, but I think most turns we take are one degree at a time over long periods.

Which means we should consider how to experience God, the holy, meaning, grace, and so on in the kitchen and at the desk and sweeping the garage and changing the diaper—lest we miss the holy that is all around.