Joy In the Mundane

The Joy of the Mundane

Matthew 15: 1-9

Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, ‘Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands before they eat.’ He answered them, ‘And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said,“Honour your father and your mother,” and, “Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.” But you say that whoever tells father or mother, “Whatever support you might have had from me is given to God”, then that person need not honour the father. So, for the sake of your tradition, you make void the word of God. You hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied rightly about you when he said: 
“This people honors me with their lips,
   but their hearts are far from me; 
in vain do they worship me,
   teaching human precepts as doctrines.”

Remember the long summer day as a kid?  The absolute ocean of boredom.  Remember that?  The type of day where the sound of the ice cream truck was like the trumpet blast of Jesus’ return, only better.  For life wasn’t over, it was just beginning.  True, there was the panic of where would I find a dollar, but the possibility of delight was coming down the block.

O Summer day of languid posture, of having nowhere to be except waiting your turn to roll the dice and move the car or the shoe or the top hat around the monopoly board.  The board where jail was a bother not a threat and you could get a card enabling your freedom, for free! 

Perhaps this is not true, but I believe the long summer day of profound boredom cuts through class and caste, income and neighborhood; structures of socio-economic reality are defied by any twelve year old boy or girl with a book.  Anyone, anyone I believe no matter where can find his or her first novel and dive into the time, the long time it takes to turn page after page and be enraptured by a story.

There is something magical about life when your world is determined by a bicycle or a pond or movie theater or grandmother who needs to watch her soaps in the afternoon once you have fetched hamburgers and fries from Burger King.

I am no longer twelve years old, so I must seek out such days, plan them, budget them, try to make a reservation to rest.  Do you feel so harried, so drawn to book a flight, to rent a car, to weave your way through traffic so you can sit beside an ocean or a pool or gaze at a canyon only to find you are so weary or frazzled when you get there you need to rest so you can rest?

I was in my forties before I regained the joy of the mundane.  I am not sure when I laid it aside, put it away, locked it up and forgot where I put the key.  But at some point, some godforsaken day, I did.  I became convinced I must work and work harder and keep going and be serious.

The joy of the mundane, when silence persists, when tasks and schedules of the day are yet to be determined for weeks at a time, a true sabbath or sabbatical where you realize you are lord of the sabbath, you can lord over time because you a child of God, which is merely someone who is in awe of life, this joy, the joy of the mundane is the intent of creation, woven into the cosmic fabric of the universe; the joy of the mundane is always at hand, but so often perceived as out of reach.

I have a friend who comes to my office and paces back and forth examining all the books.  He searches until he finds a tome whose title belies content so esoteric, so obscure, so removed from anything practical it can be deemed as preposterous.  Once he has found such a book, of which there are many to choose from given my penchant for poetry and the ancient world, once he has his victim in hand he will declare, “you read this?  I pay your salary so you can read this?”  Although possessing a proclivity to grace with most people, with this friend I offer only wrath, “that one I have read twice.”  With this verdict he howls and replaces the book and commences his speech about the impracticality of pastors.

I am not sure if the joy of the mundane needs to be the absence of work.  In fact I am convinced it is the key to enjoying life, finding the joy of the mundane in toil, in work.  There is something so wonderful in life when you don’t wait for the weekend to be happy, to be delighted to be in awe.  In western culture you can find books that seek to make this point, articles calling for parents to structure free play into the schedule of their children.  The essays and clarion calls for prescribed boredom all fall a bit flat for me.  There is something wrong in a scheduled break.

What bothers me in this is the attempt to control time, to fix a certain time, this disallows boredom, true boredom where you languish and walk without a destination or deadline, where you live embodied with the pull of the moon and the spin of the earth.  The summer day that can occur in February.  To plan this is to ensure it never happens.

This sort of nonsense is essential to the joy of the mundane.  I overheard such talk, such nonsense when one Buddhist monk chided another for failing to find freedom in washing dishes.  The chastising monk told his friend, what a waste if you simply complete a task.  So much beauty is squandered if you fail to find the art of the moment in washing dishes.

What seems so odd to ears entuned to a ticking clock, to the stopwatch, to the timer is that time in a kitchen late at night after the dinner guests are gone and the piles of plates and stemware and pots and pans with whisks and baking sheets are heaped and scattered covering every inch of counter top, what is unknown to some is that this chaos can be the most glorious moment of the day.  To scrub and rinse and wash and dry and return all things to their place, to bring the chaos of the kitchen yielding the courses, to bring this place back to what it was before you began, this is a moment where the joy of the mundane is the true meal, bread and wine for the soul.

I am fairly certain the Pharisees and Sadducees who came up from Jerusalem and tracked down the wandering peasant who was causing quite a stir, I am fairly certain they considered Jesus, looked at him, appraised him, categorized him as foolish, frivolous, certainly someone who was not to be taken seriously, and most definitely not as someone to be honored.  This man was no prophet, far from worthy of such esteem.  They looked down at Jesus; they dismissed him out of hand.  “Your disciples don’t even wash their hands.” 

One of them must have said, we came all this way, ventured outside the city to this wasteland, have slept in less than fabulous places and eaten such rough cuisine so we could talk to him?  Jesus must have been a great disappointment to those who made their way, who walked all that way from Jerusalem to Galilee.  Here with Jesus, beside the sea, surrounded by the rabble, immersed in the persistent stream of sick and lame, standing with Jesus and his “band of unschooled fishermen” the leaders of the holy city must have lamented, must have grumbled to one another that Jesus was just not fabulous or impressive.  He was, well, mundane.

The response of Jesus to the dismissal of the Pharisees and Sadducees, for they were dismissing him as someone far below them, as someone who was unworthy of consideration, what Jesus says to them is this: you confuse tradition with truth, you exchange true glory for an imitation, you make religion a rule with no joy; goodness and beauty are far from you.  Mostly, you seek to control life, to determine how and who and what and all the while you miss the possibility of happiness.  Your fulfillment is emptiness.

I am not sure when I laid aside the joy of the mundane, but I do remember finding it once again.  I was sitting on a deck looking out at the water of Lake Ontario; it was breezy, about four in the afternoon.  There was something in the air, in the light, in sounds of water and the gulls, something uncovering me, removing the heaps of promises and purposes and plans and challenges, something simply pulled them aside and uncovered a treasure I had buried and forgotten.  There on that deck on that day, on the seventh day of creation, I could taste beauty and I was twelve again.

It wasn’t that my life was terrible or that I was a wreck or a wretch.  Indeed for all intents and purposes I was to be esteemed, to be honored, to be reckoned as one who did things, knew things.  And it wasn’t that I had never had a day off or had never experienced joy or yet to know pleasure and happiness.  No.  I was okay.  I was okay, but, I had just forgotten what it means to live in the freedom of purposelessness, of having no direction, no destination, no task, no role.  I had buried the joy of the mundane and then I found it.  Once again I was sitting with my grandmother watching All My Children enjoying a hamburger without need or haste or worry other than who will Erica Cain marry next.

The Pharisees and Sadducees were serious people, powerful people.  They got things done; made decisions; influenced the course and cost of life.  They had the power to crucify the Jesus.  Pilate wielded the power, but it was the Pharisees who guided Pilate.  In some ways the Pharisees and Sadducees are simply what happens to us when we obtain power, when we seek to control life and people. 

Too often when we are in control, we become prone to the sin of seriousness.  Right?  We call it responsibility or role or occupation or title, but in the end each of these is a cover, a burying of something wonderful.  The sin of seriousness is held in high regard.  Serious people reject the frivolous, the ridiculous, the people who cannot even wash their hands.  The sin of seriousness is what we exchange for the joy of the mundane.  We are too often blind to how poor is the trade, how little we gain in the exchange.

Many years ago, I believe it was on Thursdays, Jean Bach would come and answer the phones at the church.  She was in her eighties, she had lovely daughters who had lovely children.  Jean always had a novel with her.  On Thursdays as Jean turned the pages of her novel the secretary would be finishing the bulletin, I would be trying to write a sermon or change the course of the world so the kingdom of God would come to earth and all children would hold hands and sing songs of peace longer than 30 seconds in a Coke commercial, on Thursdays just before lunch I would always stop and talk to Jean.

She was a delight.  Our conversations had no purpose, no agenda, no communication strategy.  We simply chit chatted.  I love the word chitchat.

On one Thursday she handed me a book, called The Art of Leaving things Undone.  It was an old book, written about a century ago, by a Confucious scholar, someone who paused to consider life without the need for purpose or completion.  Jean said, this book was given to me as a young mother and it changed my life; I want you to have it. 

After reading the book, a book my very serious friend would certainly lament as terribly impractical, after reading the book I realized how important, how necessary it is to not worry, to lay things down, to be able to remember the endless summer day of throwing a baseball back and forth, back and forth and then going home at the end of time that has no end.  If you can remember, reach back inside of you, you may recall life is for the tasting of beauty found in the joy of the mundane.  Amen.