the mundane miracle

At the emergence conference, the last question the panel was asked was, “what hope does the emergent church have to offer.” “That is a puzzling question,” I thought to myself. The super spiritual me was thinking something like, “only Jesus really offers hope, we merely (trying to find the right word) sloppily participate in that hope…but I’m not sure we really offer it to anyone.”

The last thing I said, and this might be bold to speak on behalf a church community, is that we help people find beauty in mundane life of the Wendell Berry World. I read Jayber Crow some years back now and was struck by how both incredibly boring his life seemed and yet how incredibly sacred it seemed.

I just finished Anne Lamott’s book and I would argue that her book belongs to the canon of the emergent manifesto, though I’m not sure I can use that term since Doug Padgitt and Tony Jones edited a book called the Emregent Manifesto, but you know what I mean. Her work seems to be a cornerstone of identity for those who just can’t seem to find a home anywhere that even remotely smells of traditional.

On the cover the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle remarks, “Anne Lamott is proof that a person can be both reverent and irreverent in the same lifetime. Sometimes eve in the same breath.”

We’d love to say that our lives are something like Frodo’s…that we participate in this almost transfinite narrative, but the truth is our lives are a lot more about changing dirty diapers, doing the laundry and attending funerals. They just don’t seem like Frodo’s, but they do seem a lot like Jayber Crow’s. And some nights when I tempted to long for Frodo’s story I think of Lamott who reminds me that there is incredible meaning in the dirty diapers, laundry and funerals. Almost can we say, transfinite meaning.

But still…I think about Jesus and I see leapers healed and food multiplied and surely that world must be more exciting than this one. Lamott’s life…my life are just a sequence of messy moments riddled by grace. God walking after us with a dirty dishrag soaked with sin. Then one day I notice the lens through which I see “miracle” has been refocused, and I realize that the changed heart and friend offering forgiveness truly are more miraculous than the cancer that was eradicated and the spine that was straightened.

I guess God’s interested in the mundane miracles.