The Morning Routine

July 7, 2024

14th Sunday in Ordinary Time

MK 6:1-6

I have a fairly rigid morning routine. When I come downstairs, I make a up of coffee. Then I decide what to have for breakfast. While eating I’ll scan the news headlines. After checking my emails, I play a few card games on my phone. Okay, so it’s actually four different card games, but I like them all. At that point, I usually (but not always) read a reflection and try to see how it may impact my day ahead. Over the years, she has learned its best not to try and have a conversation with me until I have had my coffee.

At least once a week, I make an effort to go outside on the deck to go through my routine. Invariably, something special happens out there. The reflection becomes more important than the card games and my spirit eases and my heart rate slows. I look at the flowers and trees and lawn and realize just how fortunate I am in so many ways. My morning routine becomes a morning ritual of prayer and thanksgiving.

Author Cassidy Hall writes, “My routines become rituals the second I sense an internal bow to the moment’s entanglement with holiness, with mindfulness, with love, wonder and awe.”* A simple act of having a cup of coffee can be a sacred ritual if I am aware of the holiness and wonder all about me. A bike ride around the neighborhood is an opportunity to feel the love of the Spirit blowing on my face. Sometimes, it’s the simplest things that evokes a sense of awe of the love of God.

In a way, today’s Gospel reading saddens me. Jesus’ own townspeople could not understand how one of their own could have such powerful wisdom. They could not see past the fact that they had watched him grow up in his father’s carpenter shop. They recalled the irritating things he and his boyhood friends had done to annoy them all, as all little boys are inclined to do. And so, offended that he appeared wiser and smarter than them, they rejected him.

The people of Nazareth could not get out of the way of their routine. Given the chance to experience God’s grace in a way they could not imagine, they chose to keep doing what they always had done and maintain the roles they always had always carried. Surely they had heard from neighboring villages the works Jesus had been doing. But instead of seeing a miracle, they could only see the carpenter. And, in their minds, carpenters don’t do miracles.

Ah, but they can, and they do. I have known several people who are master cabinetmakers. When I view their work, I am awestruck. In what is just a fun bit of routine woodworking to them, I see God’s hand creating a miracle. Their craftmanship could be a magnificent ritual of praise and thanksgiving.

That helps to remind me to be careful not to take simple things that I experience, see, or hear as just a routine part of my day. If I choose to bow to the sacredness of the moment (and all moments are sacred) then my little routines become sacred rituals. I try to explain that to people as we chat, that rituals of praise do not happen only in churches. (In fact, I would argue that, too often, our rituals have denigrated into mere routines with no sacred or prayerful meaning to them. But that's for another time.)

I try to imagine a world where every routine act, whether it is pulling into a parking space at a store, mowing the lawn, doing the laundry, doing the dishes, having my morning cup of coffee, and so many more – all become sacred rituals as I recognize the presence of God with me as I do these acts.

Every Day.

* Cassidy Hall, Queering Contemplation: Finding Queerness in the Roots and Future of Contemplative Spirituality (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2024), 75–77 as shared in Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations; An Unexpected Sense of Freedom; July 4, 2024. https://cac.org/daily-meditations/an-unexpected-sense-of-freedom/ 

© 2024 by Timothy J. Doppel

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