Pilgrimage through the Mundane

Here I am the day before Holy Week ironing pillow shams that Linda has sewn for the couches in the reception area of the new church. Ashley’s helping to cut out the fabric. Grant’s gathering up the week’s trash.

The chores are the same, but the tone is different than on other Saturdays. The phone is ringing with family making arrangements to join us for church and an Easter meal. Linda’s reminding us that she wants to have the pillow done by Easter. Grant’s looking over his work schedule for the Holy Week. Hope’s texting about when to be picked up from college for the holy days. The preparations are making the coming week less a matter of daily chores than one where the daily chores are becoming a pilgrimage, a ritual, a purpose.

We might have any number of activities that flow into our holy days. They seem to put some continuity to the passage of time, and separate the mundaneness of life from itself. Maybe that is why Moses read the law to the people on regular intervals, and the history of the Jewish people was (as still is) rehearsed every year, and why we let the otherwise mundane chores of what would otherwise be just another week begin to tally a new meaning. It’s a pilgrimage, a passage. Let it live in its fullness all the days of this week.

Water to Wine

It was a bit strange this morning. The deacons who were to prepare communion took ill and couldn’t make it in. Some other’s stepped in, did the bread dicing bit (a sanitary way of sharing the “body of Christ” during a noro flu outbreak), but couldn’t find the juice for the communion cup. With twenty-minutes to spare there was barely time to make it to Cumby Farms and back.

W.W.J.D.? (What Would Jesus Do?) He was in a similar predicament at a wedding. “Nearby [to Jesus] stood six stone water jars. Jesus said ‘Fill them with water. Now draw some out and take it to the banquet.’ They did so ... the water turned into wine.”

Don’t think it didn’t cross our minds to try the same trick. What if, what if, what if we actually had filled some empty jars with water, brought them to the banquet table of communion, and found it has turned into wine? That would have knocked a few socks off, eh?

Jesus and the water-to-wine thing was awesome. My brother-in-law always brings out a pitcher of water at family dinners and asks me to do the same thing. Of course I can’t.

Truth is, we are who we are. We’re not Jesus. We are children of God with specific abilities in an unambiguous time and place unique to us. We so often strive, however, to be more than we are, like some superhero. If we didn’t, Marvel comics wouldn’t exist. It a bit harder being who we are than fanaticizing about what we are not.

It would have been awesome to have pulled off that stunt this morning, but we didn’t have to. In a strange way, Jesus did the water-to-wine thing. Our attention was soon directed to the bottom shelf of the kitchen cabinet where we found the extra supply of communion “wine.” We just had to look a little harder to see the miracles blasting out

Punxsutawney Phil says, "No surfing yet!"

Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow on February 2. I guess that means I can’t start waxing my surf board until March 16.

The weird Groundhog Day event seems to have grown out of an ancient February 2nd European festival known as Candlemas that celebrated the day Mary and Joseph presented their baby Jesus at the Temple. Clergy in Europe would bless household candles marking the growing light of our Lord that would illuminate the darkness of the home just as the light of Christ would illuminate the darkness of the soul.

The Germans had evidently blended the Candlemas festival with some Teutonic legends to conclude that if the sun made an appearance on Candlemas Day an animal would cast a shadow and dive back into its hole predicting six more weeks of bad weather.

Here we are centuries later, a continent away, and a little groundhog is Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania has cornered the market on Candlemas since the first Groundhog Day of 1886. I guess that doesn’t really matter anymore. Who lights their homes with candles anyways, and there’s something about blessing a compact fluorescent that just doesn’t seem to convey the same ardor.

What does pique my curiosity is that the ancients seemed to have a sense of harmony with nature. Cows lay down before a storm. The brown strip of the woolly caterpillar gets longer. Elephants head to higher ground before an earthquake. Researches simply understand that animals have a keen sense of their surroundings and react to nature’s anomalies long before our busy minds human minds can.

A little Punxsutawney Phil every winter might reminds us that there is a lot going on around us the close our eyes to. And when we do, we may be missing some of the greatest displays of God’s creation. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness there of.” (psalm 24)