I simply get to work on ordinary things.
This is all I know to do when I don’t know what to do.
We go for a walk in the Saturday morning’s cold. We pay attention to the snow dusting the tops of the mountains to the north and to the east of us: look at that, I say to the tinies in their toques, isn’t it beautiful? We pass a bit of time with neighbours as we run into them. We can see our breath so we turn for home sooner than we planned. We draw pictures at the kitchen table after a lunch of grilled cheese and tomato soup.
I make a plan for the week’s meals and then a list for the grocery store, carefully grouping each item by section. I load up the tinies and we go to the store, pushing the cart up and down aisles, piling in food for the week ahead. One tiny in the cart’s little seat, one on my back, another holding to the side of the cart, we negotiate in the aisles over bags of chips and cereal boxes. Older women stop me to say, “you sure have your hands full,” with a smile. I always smile back and nod, “yep, three in four years,” I say. We drive home and unload the groceries. I slice their green grapes in half and give them each a plastic bowl. They plop their little bums on the floor to eat their snack.
Then, the baby back on my back in the baby carrier as usual, I get out the vacuum, and I drag it over the floor, sucking up every crumb and oops, a few stray Lego pieces. The tinies go outside to putter in the yard with their dad, digging in the dirt and pulling up logs and filling old sand buckets with worms. I move around our house, picking things up and putting them back where they belong: socks, books, more Lego pieces, permission slips, empty cups, inside-out shirts, toys, shoes, soothers.
One after another, everything is restored to its place and order slowly returns to this ordinary house. The sun is sinking earlier and earlier with each passing day: today, I turn the lamps on at 4 o’clock. I get supper started and then when they come back inside, I huff at everyone about tracking in all that yard dirt on my clean floors. The sky is pitch dark by the time we sit down to eat as a family, just a regular old meal of burgers and oven french fries.
After supper and clean-up, I dance the baby around the kitchen while the kids are dancing in the living room. We’re spinning to something happy by Taylor Swift and yet, I’m wiping away hot tears while they twirl.
Happy children, happy children, God please, everyone should be happy children dancing in safe kitchens.
We measure them up against the wall, they’re growing by leaps and bounds, I’ll never be able to keep them in jeans. There is a bin of broken crayons in the basement and there are clean sheets on the beds. Then everyone has been scrubbed and lotioned and combed, now smelling lovely and getting sleepy. Warm babies in a warm home. I’ve clipped thirty tiny fingernails plus thirty tiny toenails now hiding in footie jammies. Hockey Night in Canada is on mute and I’ve got the baby down for her first shift of sleep, so the tinies get out their battered board books. They turn pages by the lamplight of their own little routines and the glow of the hockey game on tv.
I don’t know what to pray and I don’t really know what to do.
The world seems like it’s crashing around us, from all four corners of the world and right next door, too. We are afraid and we don’t know what to do so we are turning the news on and off, scrolling constantly, pacing our minds. We are pontificating on social media and we are writing letters or emails. We are showing up for protests and demonstrations and vigils. We are getting mad at each other for all the ways we’re all doing it wrong. Donating money, writing letters, feeling futile.
I don’t know what to do.
I’m lighting candles now. Each time I do, I pray about this world. It seems useless, but I keep doing it.
I show up here with intention and I try to notice my own life a bit more. I consecrate the ordinary work, I tell myself this matters too. Wendell Berry once said, “There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.” I figure that if the world is being so desecrated the least we can do is try to love all of the sacredness that remains still around us and in us.
So I notice things like the old-man-pine trees with their stooped and swayed boughs, I notice the pink streaks of the sunset. I laugh at the jokes my tinies tell me, and I put away the phone while I nurse the baby in order to look at her quiet face. I bake bread. I stop my husband to thank him for how hard he works and I hold on just a bit longer when he wraps his arms around me: stay with me, I say, just for another minute, I love to be here with you. And he holds on with me.
I am not that powerful and I’m certainly not important. I feel like there isn’t much I can do about the fact that the world seems to be ending every Saturday night. I write letters to politicians with my suggestions for improvement. I skipped the vigil because of the baby’s bedtime, holding my own at home during the small hours of the night when I’m up again and again and again to nurse her. I send some money to people who seem like they can help people caught in the middle. I’m thinking of the mothers with babies like mine a lot. And I pray. I pray while I work.
That’s what my ordinary work has become for me, an embodied prayer. It is one way of holding space for all that is broken while my hands work towards creating a bit of cleanliness, a bit of order, a bit of beauty around me. I feed people, I clean, I walk, I keep working, I even sing, and the whole time just under the surface, my soul is crying out to God in braided grief and hope and longing: Show us we belong to each other. Blessed are the peacemakers. Help. I’m holding onto the hem of God’s garment, asking, clinging.
I keep calling down fire and love, justice and peace like falling stars. I even pray for the courage to crack open my own life to receive their burning clarity.
Hi friends,
I originally wrote that essay above a number of years past (hence, the references to our babies/tinies who are now teenagers). I was reminded of it as I’m somehow again turning to ordinary work here at home, even as the crisis in the Middle East enters another heavy week. I imagine I’m not alone in feeling pretty powerless, angry, sad, and longing right now.
I am certainly not a foreign policy expert (apparently I missed the seminar where one becomes an expert in complex issues simply because of a homemade job oversharing on the Internet), so I’ll spare you my opinions beyond this: please continue to reach out to our governmental leadership1 to call for an end to violence, the protection of civilians - especially the children, and to advocate for relief and humanitarian aid. And don’t forget the importance of prayer2 in your own way, bearing witness, learning more, holding onto your compassion, and grieving with those who grieve.
As Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg said, nobody’s children should be killed, nobody’s. I keep praying The Prayer of the Mothers she included in that post, but now it’s just groaning for peace peace peace for our children, all our children, please.
Here we are, bearing witness. Trying.
Love S.
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And in case you missed these recent Field Notes:
When hope and love don't feel like enough: And starting to wrap up Evolving Faith 2023
What have you learned about yourself through your own experience with an evolving faith?: Wisdom from the Field :: A Community Conversation
We become a parable of untamed grace: If Jesus lived today, we might be surprised by how often he uses the ordinary metaphors of our lives to repair our imagination about God.
👀 Book Cover Sneak Peek: Preorders are open for "Field Notes for the Wilderness" now!
Fellow Canadians, you can find your MP here. You can also write to our Minister of Foreign Affairs, The Honourable Mélanie Joly here.
I appreciated this Prayer for Peace from the United Church of Canada. Sometimes, when we don’t know what/how to pray, we can rest and join in the prayers of others instead.
Beautifully said.
When there are no words, your words help. Thank you.