Everyday Ecstasy

Third Sunday after the Epiphany

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31; Luke 4:14-21

We had a great discussion at Coffee Table Communion this past Friday.  We talked about our gifts, and about what gifts we needed from others to really exercise our own.  It takes a lot of courage and humility to really name our gifts, to acknowledge that we have something others need.  It makes us responsible, somehow, for using them; we can’t hide behind the pretense that we don’t have anything to offer.  We left more united, more inspired, more grateful.

But I don’t really want to write about the readings today, as good as they are.  Go read them, and ask yourself about your gifts and your needs.  Ask yourself what the Spirit of the Lord is trying to accomplish through you.  Then come and sit down with me for a bit.

I’ve been pondering ecstasy.  I’m an ecstasy freak, really.  Not the drug, Ecstasy, but the state.  Of course, this is a common symptom among addicts and alcoholics; we love the big high, the intense moment, the “grand gesture” as someone recently put it in a retreat.  We - I - love the feeling of being swept up into the cosmic swirl of Being.  When I stopped drinking, I thought I would never have those moments again.  I’d be condemned to a mundane, boring existence.

Now, thirty years later, my life is nothing but boring.  But it can seem pretty mundane.  One of the jokes of our monastic life is that it looks so quiet on the outside, but inside it offers all the intensity and ecstasy I can handle.  It takes time and space to listen for that cosmic swirl, so our daily life includes times of prayer and silence, times of work, times to eat and relax, all on a schedule that would drive some people crazy.  And inside that schedule is ecstasy.

These days that paradox feels especially strong.  Ever since our long retreat two weeks ago I’ve felt called to a deeper, wilder relationship with God.  I don’t know what it means, what it will ask of me exactly, but it scares me.  It will for sure mean letting go of some parts of me that I have cherished, and risking new territory.  It will mean facing some old fears.  And, at the same time, I’m needed by my community to focus on the everyday tasks of organizing, walking with our new Covenant Companion candidates, preaching and teaching, writing plans and structures, keeping in touch with the news.  I’m needed to cook and clean in turn.  So the ecstasy that is surrounding me is jockeying with the everyday.  I think that’s what it is to be human, to be incarnated spirit or inspirited flesh.

I don’t know if this lands for you.  Maybe you don’t have the ecstasy gene.  Maybe you don’t have the everyday; maybe someone else takes care of everything for you.  Maybe you find your ecstasy in the everyday.  But if you’re like me, if you’re pulled in two directions at once, at least know you aren’t alone.  I don’t have an answer.  I have a condition.  If you do too, maybe we have the beginnings of community.

Be blessed this weekend.  God breathes love all over you, and through you.  Amen.