06 Dec The Sacredness of Common Spaces

Last weekend we decorated the house for Christmas and as we unwrapped the porcelain figures of our Peruvian nativity scene I notice that a few are cracked from chubby little fingers eagerly unwrapping them (and dropping them) over the years. I can’t help but smile because something about this just seems so right.

Everything about the Christmas story presses forward the truth that God visits broken people in broken places. He sees the unseen. The King of Kings chooses to manifest His glory to the outcast and the ordinary. In his birth there is a prophetic foreshadowing of a veil that would tear 33 years later at his death – a veil that divides the sacred from the secular, the holy from the common.

We see this thread woven throughout the pages of Scripture – Jacob and his stone pillow, David and his “few sheep,” Moses and his bush, Ruth and her sheaves. The Spirit of the living God breathing the fire of His mighty presence into the ordinary details of human life. The God of the universe born in the dirt and mess of a stable.

Is it always this way?

And my neck bends towards the words framed above my desk to read the wisdom of the poetess who would say it is so: “Earth’s crammed with Heaven and every common bush afire with God, but only he who sees takes off his shoes; the rest sit round it and pluck blackberries” (Elizabeth Barrett Browning).

And I remember that I don’t have to go to the top of Sinai or through the parted Red Sea or walking across the Sea of Galilee to encounter God this Christmas. I just have to take off my shoes right where I am and acknowledge His presence in my life here, my life now.

My life with the constant banter and child-quarrels. My life with the interrupted prayer times while I tend my little flock. My life with the hum of the dishwasher and the “choo choo” sounds of the metro train nearby picking up its first passengers in the early morning hours.

And do I see Him there? For He is there – as I agonize long over the keys, pounding out words that form to become a lesson to teach the children. And He is there, as I jog in the mornings past my neighbor’s houses, breath lighting up the cold almost-winter sky with visible steam.

And He is there as my seven year old daughter, the one with a mane of gold, begs to light the first candle of Advent, her hand steady with the match that bursts wick into flame, fire reflecting in her eyes, a promise of hope for the future.

And He is there in the groan that rises from my soul when I get the phone call of my father with hard news of a loved one in the hospital – in the poignant stall of time when the knowledge of another’s suffering shatters the beauty of the children’s laughter beside me – and paradoxically hallows it all the more.

And I know that the question is not – “Is He here?” but rather, “Do I acknowledge His presence?” The question is not “Is Aslan on the move?” but “Do I have eyes to see where and how and through whom He is moving?“

And am I willing to take off my shoes and stand barefoot as an act of reverence – a declaration that I see not only that the holy has invaded the common but the common has been, miraculously and supernaturally, set apart as holy now – unto Him?

I pull the trash can to the curb, steadying the weight of a week of living, sloughing off the callousness of endless plucking – and lift my eyes above to the sky where stars are tossed like confetti – miraculous balls of fire held in place by his command alone. And I marvel.

“What is man that you are mindful of him? The son of man that you care for him?” That you would leave a heavenly throne to inhabit the weakness and frailty of flesh and blood?

And I know that the answer is love alone, which compels me closer. And so I come barefoot to the floor of a dirty manger at Christmas, seeing when I get there that it leads straight to the Cross, where dying is gain and darkness becomes light. But it doesn’t end there – this love leads me on to see a world redeemed – every wrong made right – a Second Coming.

Do you hear the whispers of His grace, speaking hope and love to you in the common corners of your life? Can you see the glimpses of holy fire in the ordinary moments? 

May your Christmas season be filled with holy, sacred, beautifully-ordinary moments of His extraordinary love. And may we all have eyes to see and ears to hear the sacred in the common.