I heard this expression recently and for the life of me can’t remember where. As per usual, however, I wrote it down hoping I could flesh it out in a column. I thought it a fitting title in this season – and life – of Advent.
Nevertheless I felt anything but holy the other evening while preparing two dinners, which needed to happen in an equal number of stages due to my modest cooking “equipment.” During the first while I was predictably yet unwisely trying to multi task, I heard a crackling noise in the kitchen. When I went to investigate, I discovered the pan containing coconut oil was fully a-flame. Instead of smothering it with flour or a towel (as one is taught to do with all oil fires), I poured water into the pan which only made matters, well, worse. But no harm done, thankfully – I just had to start that process over and begin another.
While chopping tomatoes I did not pull my fingertips IN as I was taught (repeatedly) and swiftly sliced one of them with an exceedingly sharp knife. The cut didn’t seem that bad except it wouldn’t stop bleeding for what seemed like forever. I recalled my limited first-aid and thought: elevate “limb” above heart, apply pressure – and if appropriate, Krazy Glue – which comes in handy when you would like to avoid stitches. Believe me, I know.
The first dinner was due elsewhere by a certain time, and the clock was ticking. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t handling these…delays with shall we say, grace and found myself stomping around my rather small kitchen and talking – or more accurately muttering – to the refrigerator.
Old habits die hard.
While I “exited stage right” to deliver the first dinner, I asked my children to clean the kitchen. Now I am a messy cook on an ordinary day but this time the kitchen was a bonafide disaster. Upon my return, not only was the kitchen spic and span but the second dinner was nearly finished and the table set – complete with a wooden, candlelit carousel which, as good fortune would have it, had not caught on fire too. Everyone exhibited great concern over my “flesh wound,” and they were not only attentive but calm and completely in control, quite unlike the example that had just been set for them.
What was a comedy of errors which I hadn’t found particularly amusing turned into a high, holy moment. I did not miss it.
This got me thinking about what we consider holy. An ornate cathedral? A solemn monastery? A simple church? Before my private blog became a column, I wrote in a piece entitled “Church is a Bummer” that I’ve found the “supposed to’s” and “American narcotic of busyness” as present in the church as anywhere. But holy? Sometimes, sometimes not.
Author Frederick Buechner likens The Church to a dysfunctional family and calls it to be more like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. He writes that AA groups “have no rummage sales, no altar guilds…no preachers, no choirs, no liturgy, no real estate. They have no creeds. They have no program. They make you wonder if the best thing that could happen to many a church might not be to have its building burn down and to lose all its money. Then all that the people would have left would be God and each other.”
Recently I found “just” God and His people – about 12 of them curiously – in a tiny church deep in Appalachia which had none of the “trappings” of a modern day church. These simple people, absent a preacher at the moment, worshipped the Lord with everything they had – including a lone banjo, much to my delight – and they took care of each other in word and deed. And not just on Sunday.
What do you consider holy? A cold mountain stream, a star studded sky, a quiet snowfall? Uncontrollable laughter…or tears? A crucial, precious, unrepeatable moment with a family that looks nothing like the one you dreamed of? An old barn…or a manger? Buechner has the most wonderful definition of a holy place I have yet to come across: “It is a place though which God uses to send His love.”
And that, my friends, can be anywhere. Even and perhaps especially in our own broken hearts. Although it started in a manger, it doesn’t end there. On the journey that leads us Home… Bethlehem is only the beginning.
– Caroline Watkins
