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Holy Ordinary
A good friend and I were driving across Indiana on a recent fall day when she looked out the window and asked, “What are you seeing?” On another, earlier trip she’d asked that question while we were deep in conversation about landscape and light. I’d waxed eloquently about the qualities of light that lit the fields filled with corn stubble and soft contours of Midwestern rolling ground. Eloquently enough, at least, that she seemed to enjoy the conversation and my view on things she didn’t seem to see with her hillier, woodier New England eyes.

But this time her question stopped me cold. I looked around. I saw a not too unusual cloudy Indiana day in the middle of harvest. Some fields were picked. Some weren’t. I wondered why I couldn’t see the same way I did on our earlier trip. Then it hit me. I wasn’t paying attention in love to the landscape. Instead, I was paying attention to my friend and our conversation about books and writers.

Paying attention in love was something I’d been thinking about. It’s an idea I first encountered in the writings of a fellow named Belden Lane, a humanities professor in the theology department at Saint Louis University. Lane talks about paying attention in love because he believe that doing so allows anything, even ordinary things, to become a way of glimpsing the profound. He quotes the Psalmist as asking “Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” and responds, in essence, “There’s no where, God is everywhere.” Once we focus our attention in love on the holy ordinary, Lane maintains, it’s hard for us to ever again see the people and things around us as anything but gifts from God. Our lives then no longer move between the two camps of the secular and the sacred – all is sacred.

The idea of discerning the Divine at work in the everyday speaks to my heart. My friend Carrie Newcomer crafts wonderfully sensitive spiritual songs. One of my favorites is “Holy as a Day is Spent” that talks about the holiness of dish and drain, soap and sink, busy streets, check-out girls counting change, hymns of geese flying overhead, familiar rooms and quiet moments in the afternoon. Her song ends:

Holy is the place I stand
To give whatever small good I can
And the empty page, and the open book
Redemption everywhere I look
Unknowingly we slow our pace
In the shade of unexpected grace
And with grateful smiles and sad lament
As holy as a day is spent
And morning light sings providence as holy as a day is spent.

Newcomer’s song reminds us that God is the God of the daily and the daily reveals the deity. Learning to perceive this leads us into a new way of seeing, a way of seeing the invisible hand of God in all with which we have been blessed.

It’s like when I see the Shaker box in our kitchen. In silence, I notice its simple beauty and remember the day I watched Charles Harvey making it. I remember his care. I see him hunched over his workbench, shaping the wood, setting the copper nails, and then signing his name and date to the bottom. Instead of just seeing a simply elegant oval box, like our friends and family do when we’re all gathered in the kitchen, I also see the trip that took my wife Nancy and me to his shop in Berea, Kentucky. I bask in the love of that trip and meeting this artisan. I rejoice in Charles’ handiwork and the blessing his work is in our lives, even a decade later.

Paying attention in love helps us stop and sense God, the Creator, present in everyday life. When we do that, we begin to see that the poetry of the Psalms may be more than poetry: “Then the trees of the forest will sing, they will sing for joy before the Lord..., Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever.” Singing trees, jubilant fields seem like poetic language. Trees don’t sing and fields don’t rejoice. Or do they? Could it be that the golden light that transforms field trash into something of beauty is a way the fields are being jubilant, reflecting God’s light back to heaven? Could the graceful, waving naked limbs of trees be hands uplifted in praise to God? Maybe that’s all bit a mystical, yet we each could use a bit more of the Divine mystery in our lives.

This appreciation for the divinely mysterious presence of God all around us helps us slow down and appreciate God’s goodness to us. It enables us to see the Divine mark upon all of life’s goodness, from maple Shaker boxes to fox squirrels in the maple trees.

Perhaps that’s why an English Quaker named William Littleboy once wrote:

“God is above all the God of the normal. In the common facts and circumstances of life, He draws near to us, quietly. He teaches us in the routine of life’s trifles, gently, and unnoticed His guidance comes to us through the channels of ‘reason [and] judgment’...we have been taught by Him when we least suspected it; we have been guided...though the guiding hand rested upon us so lightly that we were unaware of its touch.”

God’s guiding hand resting lightly upon us is best felt when we learn to pay attention in love to the holy ordinary surrounding us.

 

Conversation with Brent Bill

Lydia Talbot: Welcome again, Brent.

Brent Bill: Thanks for having me.

Talbot: What a rare blend you are of visual and religious sensibility. It’s amazing you can see things through a sacred lens.

Bill: Thank you. I think some of that has to do with the training I had as a photographer in college. But I do think it has something to do with this Quaker idea of spirituality, of paying attention. Since we worship in silence we’re often called to pay attention to what’s going on around us. And certainly, when we learn to do that in love, it’s much easier to see God’s presence all around us.

Daniel Pawlus: I wonder if you could speak about that more, Brent, because the more I read about Quaker spirituality the more I’m interested in this value of silence in your spiritual practice. Just a little explanation of how that’s important in the Quaker experience.

Bill: The silence of the Quaker spirituality is less like a Zen silence or some other religious silences, in that it’s not just being quiet to empty ourselves, it’s actually getting quiet so that we can hear the voice of God or perceive God around us. I think that’s one of the unique things the Quaker silence brings to us. It’s saying: Pay attention! Where is God in this moment? Where is God? If it’s a group worshiping in silence, where is God in the silence of this group? Is it in a baby crying gently or in somebody’s cough? Or if it’s in the silence we carry inside us—a stillness in our hearts as we move through daily life—perhaps we see God peeking at us over a shoulder in a check-out line at a grocery store or just in the beauty of the trees’ naked limbs uplifted in the fall shed with light.

Talbot: That’s a beautiful statement on spiritual silence. I’m going to play devil’s advocate here with you for a minute, because most Quakers I know are very noisy on questions of peace and justice!

Bill: Yes.

Talbot: After all, the Quakers are part of a historic peace church. You actually went to Washington, D.C. and demonstrated against the war. This is all part of what you feel God is calling you to do?

Bill: Right. I think part of that paying attention, the silence, is not meant to be a silence that is inactive. It’s to be a silence which is active. Inactivity often grows out of the silence. If we’re listening for God, then we have to begin to ask those sorts of questions that are too complex for a little bracelet that says, “What would Jesus do?” It’s a deeper question: “What would Jesus have me do?” What am I called to do? What does the Gospel teach me?” So how should I act towards war and conflict? How should I act towards inequality of the races or genders? It leads us to activity. So it’s a silence which is soulfully satisfying but ultimately it calls us out into the world.

Talbot: We have to talk about light.

Pawlus: Absolutely! You’ve written a wonderful book, “Mind the Light.” Can you explain for us a little bit about the Christ light within that you talk about in the book and how that’s important in this process as well?

Bill: Certainly. The Quakers began calling themselves the “Children of Light.” It was one of their phrases. “Quakers” was a derogatory term that somebody else gave to us. Our official name is Religious Society of Friends. But one of the reasons they called themselves Children of Light was seeing Christ as the Light of the World, as Jesus refers to himself in the Scriptures. And so it was believed that that light—since Jesus said, “I’m the same yesterday, today and forever”—is available to us today. The phrase, “mind the light,” which is the title of the book, is an admonition to pay attention, to heed the light. In its most spiritual sense, it means the light of Christ. But I think we can expand that theme to say if God created light—which we read in Genesis, the greater light and the lesser lights—then there is light all around us that we need to be paying attention to, both God and Christ’s Holy Spirit within our lives, guiding and illuminating our lives, calling us to action. But also, the light that’s around us and how it influences how we see things, how we see people and how we respond to them.

Talbot: You say in the book that all of God’s creatures are pulled toward the light and you talk about inner light, outward light, artificial light, translucent light. I want to hear the story about the light that came about when you took your grandson to Washington, D.C. to see the art museum, the National Gallery, and what happened when you both looked at Chardin’s painting of the fruit and the jug.

Bill: Well, it’s amazing. We take our grandchildren when they turn ten on a train trip to Washington, D.C. over 4th of July. We never know how they’ll respond to different things and we let them pick where they want to go. We went to the National Gallery. We always do because I want to go there!

Talbot: You were an art major undergraduate.

Bill: I was an art major. And this one child, this 10 year old, Austin, is a very bright kid and a very busy kid so I didn’t think he’d handle the art museum well. But when we got to that painting, I tried to explain how real it is, how he played with light. Austin was just dumbstruck, too. He just took my hand and he goes, “That’s amazing!” I mean, the translucence of that painting and how the painter worked with art. He said, “It’s so real. It’s so moving.” So we stood there in gratitude to the gift of God to that artist.

Talbot: And then you said his response was, “It’s cool!”

Bill: It’s cool!

Talbot: And he moved a little closer to his grandfather.

Pawlus: Talking about light again, you talk about us seeing it as Christ in our lives, but also seeing it in other people.

Bill: Right.

Pawlus: Can you speak about that, about actively looking towards that and paying attention with love, as you said, to get to that place?

Bill: One of the Quaker hallmarks has been a statement by our founder, George Fox: “to look for that of Christ in everyone. Walk cheerfully over the world.” So to look then and realize that other people are as loved as we are. That may be hard for us to take at one level because we like to think we’re the favorites. But it changes how we respond to people if we’re looking. We begin to move beyond these surface things that annoy us: the person who cut us off on the interstate or jumped in front of us in line at the grocery store. We begin to think, “What’s going on with their life? What is God doing with them? What is this moment in their time?” And as we begin to do that, I think we become much more sensitive to our commonality and not the differences. One of my favorite new friends is the bag boy at the grocery store who discusses philosophy with me!

Talbot: And you give homeless people rides in your car.

Bill: Which everything tells you not to do that!

Talbot: But you see the face of Christ in all God’s children. I want to ask you about your amazing literary usage. You read widely and use amazing literary allusions in your book: from Goethe and the light, who talks about light and the holy; the spiritualist Hildegard of Bingen and the splendor of light; and your favorite hymn. Talk about light as silence.

Bill: “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise,” with that wonderful line, “as silent as light,” which we all sing. We may sing it frequently but do we realize, what does that mean, that God is silent as light?

Talbot: I was alone when I was reading your book and I just lit up when you referred to my favorite poet, Emily Dickinson. Talk about the context of her words connected with the grief that was yours over your friend Greg.

Bill: Well, I think that we assume that when we talk about spiritual light that it’s always uplifting and it’s always strongly sensed. Yet there are those times when the light seems dim as we’re trying to make our way. When my friend Greg and I were both 20, he killed himself at my house. Lots of folks came with encouragement or what they thought was encouragement, but the friends who spoke most to my soul or my condition were the ones who had been through situations like that and didn’t say anything necessarily. They sat. And I think they showed the words of Dickinson, as when Jesus speaks about himself as grief. Then we listen because that is something we’re acquainted with. So there’s a trust of the common experience and friends can share light in those darkest experiences when they don’t have to give us easy answers. It teaches us we don’t have to give easy answers. We just have to be with them and be God’s light reflected.

Talbot: And you see that through poetry and music.

Pawlus: We’re so glad that you’ve joined us today and your wonderful book, “Mind the Light.” Thank you.

Bill: Thank you.

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