I’ve been slowly making my way through Liturgy of the Ordinary by Tish Harrison Warren. If you haven’t read it, the book is about how the small things we do everyday form us and how we can better show up to the presence of God at work within them.
Tish is a beautiful writer, and I was feeling the book…until I got to chapter seven. Two pages in, I found myself turning unexpectedly hostile. Tish had the nerve to suggest that email—EMAIL!!—was a spiritual activity that could be approached in a spirit of worship. This was just a step too far.
Email is a hell-beast with an endless appetite for consuming time, attention, and life. I feel strongly about this. My stomach drops when I open the browser for the first time each morning. How many new tasks will have accumulated in the inbox while I was sleeping? What bad news will jump out from behind the bushes, or what fire will have started from what small spark? What company will now require a 50-character password plus blood sample to access my account? Email is a godless wasteland where vocation goes to die.
Thanks for hearing me out on this.
Recently while reading Leviticus, I came upon a set of procedures for dealing with mold in the house (Leviticus 14). This started me thinking about how weird the job of an ancient priest was. He’d burn incense in the temple, lead singing, maybe teach a lesson on why idolatry is wrong. Then he’d check out the rash on Joe’s lower back and poke at the fuzz on Joanna’s walls.
It sounds super strange to modern ears—“Hey honey, call the pastor and get her over here. I think something’s growing in our toilet!” But it didn’t sound strange to the people of Israel. They understood life holistically. Their bodies and possessions did not exist in a separate sphere from their faith and worship. In Leviticus it is one integrated conversation, because all of life is God’s concern. Souls and donkeys and foot fungus and pots and pans are all woven together in one fabric. In all of it God can be honored (or not); in all love can be practiced or ignored; in all the community’s well-being can be advanced or threatened.
Jesus taught an integrated worldview much closer to Leviticus than our own modern divisions of secular and sacred. God, he said, cares about the bedroom, and the birds, and the fight with your brother, and your skin rash, and what you do with those few dollars. How would our daily life be different if we really believed that God might have thoughts about shower mold?
I shut the book on Tish’s chapter on email. But there was a statement in it that I couldn’t get out of my head: “We grow in holiness in the honing of our specific vocation. We can’t be holy in the abstract. Instead we become a holy blacksmith or a holy mother or a holy physician or a holy systems analyst. We seek God in and through our particular vocation and place in life.”*
I think she’s right, darn it. Even on email, I get dozens of chances every day to care for the interests of others. I can make sure that the toilets flush and that people keep their dental coverage. That someone opens the door for the package delivery. That concerns are heard out and addressed. These things aren’t beneath the matter of calling; they aren’t all just the devil’s distractions. They are places holiness, wholeness, love of God and neighbor become real each day…or not.
There is now a refrain, a bit of a mantra, that runs through my head these days: “You have to be holy somewhere. You have to be holy somewhere.” Whether you check walls for mold or toes for warts each day, you might wish to remind yourself of the same.
It’s all God’s. All of it becomes holy ground when we start to recognize it as such. There is a place today where we will be marked more and more as God’s. There is a place today where we will be become a little more practiced in love. And it won’t be nowhere, in our heads or in the fantasy of our idealized life. It will be somewhere, in space and time, within our physical bodies, in the life that we actually have. Even, heaven help us, in our email inboxes.
* (Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, Downers Grover: InterVarsity Press, 2016, p. 94)
