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The sunlight catches the flow, striping it amber and brown and black as it falls to the earth and streams in the cool morning air. With his face to the morning sun, he pours and speaks into the stillness, “Here’s to the gods of Tahawus.” The stream runs down over smooth granite to merge with the lake water, as clear and brown as the coffee.
… As he called out the names and offered a gift, the first coffee, he quietly taught us the respect we owed these other beings and how to show our thanks for summer mornings.

In spiritual direction, I often (like, very very often!) end up supporting people through the questions: How do I pray? Do I pray enough? Am I praying correctly?

These are questions I have asked, and continue to ask myself, because I can tell someone else “there is no correct way to pray!” every day, yet still hold myself to the task of answering a question I think has no validity. I say this to say: it’s fair that we ask, and if you’re asking these questions too, you’re not alone.

I’ve landed on some sort of answer for myself, an answer that reminds me the question has no validity. To find it, I began to think about Jesus and the disciples. In my faith, this is the lived image I’ve been given of what it means to be in the presence of divinity.

I figured, the disciples literally lived in the presence of Jesus, and if I wish to cultivate a life of living in the presence of Jesus, I can find wisdom in how they lived. And, regardless of your religious beliefs, I think this relationship—of shared community and how we exist alongside the presence of divinity—could still be helpful.

The disciples, as far as I can tell from scripture, did not necessarily wake up every morning and kneel in front of Jesus. Not saying they have never knelt before Jesus, but I’m not sure they woke up every morning and had a proper way to posture their bodies before him, in order for it to “count” as being in his presence. Can you imagine if your roommate did that when you woke up? Sounds extremely awkward.

As best I can tell, the disciples worshipped and followed Jesus by… being with him. Living in the same home as him. Traveling with him. Breaking bread with him.

I still believe in the power of corporate worship, and the beauty of the prayer book will always inform how I believe and pray. But when the beauty of the prayer book begins to feel like an assessment of my worth, I bring to mind how the disciples worshipped Jesus.

And I’ve decided that if this is the way the disciples worshipped God, certainly this is a way I can worship God.

Ceremonies large and small have the power to focus attention to a way of living awake in the world. The visible became invisible, merging with the soil. It may have been a secondhand ceremony, but even through my confusion I recognized that the earth drank it up as if it were right. The land knows you, even when you are lost.
… Ceremony is a vehicle for belonging — to a family, to a people, to the land.

I encourage my spiritual directees, and myself, to picture this: Jesus wakes up, to see the disciples bringing out breakfast foods. He woke up later than some, but they have saved him a cup of coffee. Later, there is silence in the home, as they are each doing the various tasks they need to do that day. But they’re still with him. They aren’t necessarily always talking—the same way we can be with each other and be silent at the same time—but every now and then they catch one another’s eyes, break from their work, and smile at each other, a recognition of their shared presence. At the close of the day, they figure out how to move together through a small kitchen, carrying foods to the table, where they dine together. Certainly, they went to temple, and studied Scripture. But they were also just… together.

In the mornings, I have long curled up on my sofa, beside the large window, with a cup of coffee. I tend to stare out the window, take in some of the sun, and just say: Thank you for this day. I know I am with you. I like the way I can drink my morning coffee and not see it as a time when I “should” have been praying in a certain way, and instead bring my awareness to how the presence of God is with me. How, were we to be together in body, I would have happily saved the last cup of coffee for Jesus.

So, it will not surprise you that I loved this section of our reading.

“I’ve been thinking about the coffee and how we started giving it to the ground. You know, it was boiled coffee. There’s no filter and if it boils too hard the grounds foam up and get stuck in the spout. So the first cup you pour would get that plug of grounds and be spoiled. I think we first did it to clear the spout.” It was as if he’d told me that the water didn’t change to wine — the whole web of gratitude, the whole story of remembrance, was nothing more than the dumping of the grounds?
“But you know,” he said, “there weren’t always grounds to clear. It started out that way, but it became something else. A thought. It was a kind of respect, a kind of thanks. On a beautiful summer morning, I suppose you could call it joy.

I chuckled in reading this, because I’ve been in just enough liturgical chit chat to see the crestfallen faces of those who have heard the less spiritual take on why we do what we do in worship.

My mind first goes to incense. Incense is one of my favorite things about worship, hands down. I love the way it brings me into a sensory experience of God, how the scent lingers on my hair even once I’ve left the sanctuary.

We know incense has been used in ceremony for a very, very long time. So, it always acts as a connection to ancient liturgies of different peoples across the world. But I’ll never forget the first time someone said: “Oh, incense has spiritual connections, sure, but practically it helped them get the stink out of the church. We haven’t always had deodorant, you know. Incense was an effective way to clear out the BO.”

I didn’t need to be told that one of my favorite things about worship acted as an ancient anti-perspirant.

But, the more I dwell on it, I see how this doesn’t strip the ritual of its significance — if anything it connects us to the reality of how spirituality meets us. It doesn’t necessarily take us to a transcendent plane unlike what we know, but it certainly lets the transcendent meet us where we are, odor and all.

That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mingled with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist.

I hope today that you can begin to take note of your ceremonies, your offerings, how the sacred meets you in the mundane. May you notice how the spiritual mingles with your humus, transforming the reality of your life into the sacred revelation of God.

What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.

I hope you are enjoying Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Here’s the reading schedule in pages, by the week:

Week of…

January 16 — 33-59
January 23 — 60-97
January 30 — 98-117

February 6 — out of office
February 13 — 118-201
February 20 — 202-240
February 27 — 241-276

March 6 — 277-300
March 13 —301-347
March 20 — 348-384

Please note: I am offering this book club to all subscribers. Only a few chapters in, she talks about a gift economy, and I felt inspired by her to offer it this way. Book Club will later go back to being a paid opportunity, but I felt compelled to let this be a gift. Please know that your financial support of my work means the world to me and I’m deeply grateful for it. <3

out of office

I will be out of office February 6-10. For this reason, I won’t have posts for that week, and I have combined some reading for Braiding Sweetgrass. This is reflected in the adapted reading schedule above! Thank you so much for understanding. <3

gather the inklings

ceremonies (erin jean warde)