Standing at the Gap: Reading Classics and the Practices of Everyday Life

The Desert Fathers are more interesting than the laundry. That's a simple truth, no matter how eloquently Kathleen Norris describes the parallels between liturgy and laundry. I delighted in Norris' Madeleva lecture, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and Women's Work when I first discovered it. She muses about the holiness of the ordinary, comparing the life-affirming, care-taking repetition of doing laundry to the doing of liturgy in Benedictine monasteries. Finally, here is a refreshing affirmation of a domestic spirituality, I thought. Here is one key to understanding the spirituality of the everyday, the spirituality of working women.

And yet the laundry piles high in my house and today looks particularly daunting. The children have been sick and it is filled with sheets and clothes that desperately need new life. In the bedrooms sit three baskets of clean laundry waiting to be put away. They got their dose of resurrection but now lay wrinkled rather than risen.

The pile of laundry should remind me of the incarnation. Instead, I close the doors, baskets out of sight, and head outside to write.

Why is it so difficult to articulate a spirituality of everyday life? Or, better, why does that gap between the spiritual classics and the quotidian persist, despite eloquent writing such as Norris'?

I am convinced that the gap between the traditions of Christian spirituality and the realities of contemporary lay life is dangerously vast. We need to counter a false understanding of holiness as "out there," somewhere else, amidst the spiritual giants of the tradition, the ones who levitate and sit on top of pillars and pierce the cloud of unknowing with their dart of love, casting everything of the world aside. That spirituality is real, I think, but it overshadows the more quotidian, hidden paths of so many ordinary people.

Perhaps I stand at the gap more than most. A professor of practical theology and Christian spirituality, I am also a lay Catholic woman and mother of three young children. I love what I teach. To venture out with Abba Joseph as he stretches his hands to heaven and becomes all flame . . . to journey with the pilgrim through the Russian steppes, seeking to learn how to "pray without ceasing" . . . to imagine what Teresa's "rain" must feel like. And as a practical theologian, I constantly do the mutually critical conversation between these historical figures, texts, traditions, practices and the realities of contemporary practice. We see what wisdom the traditions might speak today. We pose those difficult critical questions back to history. We envision creative ways to be faithful, new practices, fresh visions of spirituality that emerge from the back-and-forth dialogue. It all seems so stimulating in the classroom. Even the idea of connecting monastic liturgical practice to the everyday routine of doing laundry seems invigorating—a key point of connection.

Save Our Soul © Gil Gautier

Back here, though, in my own space, the laundry is the laundry. It smells. It piles up faster than we can say the divine office.

We need to work harder at articulating and practicing Christian spirituality that does justice to the realities of everyday life, including and particularly the work of women. I think this is a question of formation as well as conceptualization. It is vital to continue the important work of recovering marginalized voices within the traditions of Christian spirituality, especially drawing out and renewing the wisdom that speaks to the holiness of everyday life. We also need to study more how spiritual theory relates to spiritual practice. Indeed, spiritual classics do not spring from a vacuum. They are deeply related to contexts of practice. Practice and theory are deeply intertwined. How does the spiritual knowing of the tradition shape (or fail to shape) contemporary practice? How might the practices of contemporary laity in turn contribute to that body of spiritual knowing?

I don't know how much time I have to write. The phone may ring saying that my daughter is not feeling well at school...