Advent 2: Quotidian Mysteries

I struggled to know what to write this week.  Nothing interesting seems to have happened.  I’m just trying to survive life.  I’m just trying to make it to the end of exam week (in two weeks).  But I am trying to write something weekly as an Advent discipline.  

And then I remembered the book I read yesterday, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and “Women’s Work” by Kathleen Norris.  Quotidian means “occurring every day; belonging to every day; commonplace, ordinary” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, quoted in The Quotidian Mysteries).  The premise of this book is that all of our ordinary activities—washing dishes, doing the laundry, cooking, and cleaning—give a necessary rhythm to our lives.  Like liturgy, we sometimes do them by just going through the motions.  Norris says that “both laundry and worship are repetitive activities with a potential for tedium, and I hate to admit it, but laundry often seems like the more useful of the tasks.  But both are the work that God has given us to do” (pg. 29). 

I am prone to forgetting that the laundry, the dishes, cooking healthy foods, and other quotidian things are part of God’s calling on my life.  It isn’t only writing sermons and papers, working on group projects and trying to catch up on reading.  Norris also says that “workaholism is the opposite of humility” (pg. 25).  Workaholism and perfectionism tell me that I must do everything I possibly can.  And I must do it to the very best of my ability.  My ability, because it is all about me.  But this is all the opposite of humility, of quietly depending on God.    Of being humble enough to trust that God will provide; it isn’t all up to me.

And so this week, my prayer is that I will be humble, not a workaholic.  That I will worship even if I don’t feel like it.  And I will attend to the every day necessities, because they too are part of God’s work for me.  In all of this, and in all parts of my life, I pray for wholeness and integration in all parts of my life.