Memorize this...

Making Holy

“To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger—these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone to bend, reach, chop, stir. Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy.”

                            Barbara Brown Taylor (An Altar in the World)

When I was a kid, my family went to a little Methodist Church in Chattanooga. Every week in Sunday School we had to stand up and recite a Bible verse by heart. I was absolutely terrible at this because from one Sunday to the next, I utterly forgot the assignment. My memory would return the at moment I walked into the class. Somehow, my teachers had it in their heads that in order to be godly, we had to know scripture by heart—a least a few lines of it. Every Sunday I would say, 'God is love' or 'I am the light of the world' or 'Let the little children come unto me'. I never knew where the line came from, or whether it was really part of a hymn and not scripture at all. Clearly, I was not a godly child.

When I read the Bible now, I see that for the most part, Jesus told his disciples and the people who gathered around him, to look to the world and to one another to see God. He never expected them to memorize scripture. Instead he pointed to the lilies of the field, the sparrow in flight, shepherds and their sheep, women sweeping or making bread, seeds being sown, the harvest being gathered in and said 'the kingdom of heaven is like this.'

We have a tendency to put our spiritual practice into a box called 'religion' and practice it only in prescribed ways—like memorizing scripture, or reciting the Nicene Creed or the Lord's Prayer. We hang it with platitudes like we hang icicles on a Christmas tree, but it stays a head-exercise and never makes down to our hands and feet. What if we were to realize that 'holy' is a verb, and not an adjective. That being holy is a thing we do and not what we are by virtue of our beliefs. What if holy were a way of looking at the world and at our fellow humans? Would we treat one another differently? Would lending a hand become our scripture? Would we memorize the lines on faces and see them as godly? Would the green earth become the kingdom of God?

                                         In the spirit,

                                             Jane