Nothing is Ordinary

Many people seem to imagine that the spiritual life revolves around extraordinary experiences. We can find ourselves looking for something dramatic to happen that will confirm we are on the right path and making progress.

Yet both the Christian contemplative tradition and the Zen Buddhist tradition gently point us in a rather different direction. They suggest that the deepest spiritual transformation is not found by escaping ordinary life, but by becoming more fully present to the ordinary life we are already living.

The same wisdom appears in another well-known Zen story. A student asks the Zen master Joshu, ‘Please give me a practice.’ Joshu replies, ‘Have you eaten your meal?’ which in Zen language means, ‘Have you tasted enlightenment?’ ‘Yes,’ the student says, ‘I have eaten a meal.’ ‘Good, says Joshu. ‘Then go and do the washing up.’

Both the Zen and Christian contemplative traditions say that our awakening, our enlightenment, is to be found in the ordinary life we are already living.

My own experience at Prinknash Abbey

When I went to live at Prinknash Abbey aged 19, I was very driven and idealistic and wanted to find enlightenment. And, with great gentleness, my teachers encouraged me to stop looking for any sort of extraordinary experience. Enlightenment, they suggested, is living your ordinary life with a particular quality of open, receptive attention, with awareness, with compassion.

Whatever simple task I happened to be doing, which included a great deal of time working in the kitchen and the gardens, cleaning toilets and polishing wooden floors, I was to practice doing the task as wholeheartedly as possible. I was being encouraged to discover the sacred in everyday life, in each moment.

This emphasis on giving wholehearted attention to each task of the day, to whatever you are doing, is central to both the Benedictine and Zen way of life.

‘Instructions for the Zen Cook’

One place where this becomes especially clear is in the significance given to the role of the cook. Cooking is vital for nourishing the body, mind, and the community. It manifests a particular orientation to life.

There are strong parallels in what St. Benedict says about the preparation and serving of food in his Rule and what the great thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master Dogen says in his Instructions for the Zen Cook.

In his book looking at Dogen’s Instructions, Bernie Glassman, the Zen master who founded the Zen Peacemakers organisation dedicated to contemplative social action, says that living our life well, with wakefulness, is to realise the essential oneness of life in all its aspects – that nothing falls outside the spiritual life. (2)

This way of seeing embraces not only those aspects of our life that might look conventionally spiritual, like going to church, or turning up to meditation practice, but also those aspects of our life which may not look so spiritual at first glance, like sorting out the recycling, or doing the ironing.

Nothing is unimportant

We are invited to see that each moment holds an invitation, that no moment is unimportant. It is a spirituality – a way of seeing and being – which honours each moment, each task, as God-with-us. Nothing is just ‘ordinary’ any more. The ordinary becomes the place of Divine encounter.

In the Gospel of Luke, we hear Jesus telling a parable about praying always and not losing heart (Luke 18: 1-8). Now, depending on what you think prayer is, to be told to ‘pray always’ might seem a very tall order, something that might lead us to end up with a sore jaw, which might very well cause us to lose heart.

Well, if we think of prayer – or better still prayerfulness – in terms of being an orientation to life and God, then we don’t need to worry about having the right words to hand. It doesn’t matter if we have no words at all. We can bring this orientation, this prayerful way of being, to whatever we happen to be doing.

When life becomes prayer

Prayer is no longer something to be added to our life. It becomes the way we live our life.  How we live in each moment can become our prayer. A conversation or meal, a simple household chore or small act of kindness, all these things can become prayer.

From the Christian perspective, this must necessarily involve compassion, because God is the ground of our prayer, its source, its energy and end, and God is love (1 John 4:8). This lovely story about the Desert Father Abba Poemen illustrates the point:

For Abba Poemen, prayer and compassion could not be separated. His compassion was his prayer, his prayer compassion – God compassioning through him.

In meditation, we practice greeting every moment with open, receptive attention, with awareness, with compassion.

Saying our prayer word, following our breath, we see how quickly and easily our attention can be drawn away from what we are attending to, from who is next to us.

And so we practice returning. We return, and return, and return, letting this gentle work of returning bring us home to the present, where our life is, where everyone else is.

Training the mind like this, we cultivate what Benedictines call stability, the ability to stay in this place, to be where we are, to be available – for our life, for the next task, for each other.

The whole point of meditation is the whole of our life…

A student of Shunryu Suzuki writes:

‘I told [him] what I was experiencing, and he said that it was an enlightenment experience, that I’d taken good care of myself – and now I had to take care of everything. I asked what he meant by that and he picked up a pencil on his table and said, “You have to take care of this.” Then he picked up something else and said, “And this.” And he kept picking up things and saying that.’ (5)

The whole point of meditation is the whole of our life.

We are invited to see that each moment holds an invitation, that no moment is unimportant, to allow the ordinary to become the place of Divine encounter.