Morning Thanks -- What it is I believe

a winter sparrow

The Puritans, who talked more about work and vocation than almost any community before or since, articulated a helpful idea that Eugene Peterson later termed "vocational holiness." The idea is that we are sanctified--made holy--not in the abstract but through our concrete vocation. 

That's from a book titled Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, written by Tish Harrison Warren, who happens to be an Anglican priest, someone you may know, either by her books or by the fact that she contributes regularly to the op-ed pages of the New York Times.  

We're reading Liturgy of the Ordinary, together, not because it's number one on some evangelical book circuit, but because it was, well, around. I'm not sure who of us picked it up. It's seven years old, so it's not hot stuff anymore, although I'm quite sure it was when it was published. Neither or us remember buying it, but, for sure, both of us could have.

Christian holiness is not a free-floating goodness removed from the world, a few feet the ground. It is specific and, in some sense, tailored to who we particularly are. We grow in holiness in the honing of our specific vocation.

The "message" of the book--it is a "message" book, even something of a how-to, is that being a believer means tuning the liturgy of your life--your work, your leisure, even your petty burdens--into ever ready Godliness. What it seeks to devour among believers--and this is a believers' book--is the idea that Godliness is basically the province of the church. All of life is religious is the sermon she's honing throughout.

We grow in holiness in the honing of our specific vocation. We can't be holy in the abstract. Instead we become a holy blacksmith or a holy mother or a holy physician or a holy systems analyst. We seek God in and through our particular vocation and place in life. 

As we were reading this just last night I stopped right there and told my wife that I knew all of that and believed it--knew it and believed it for a long, long time, for most of my life, in fact. I don't remember learning it. I can't point to day or a week or a college class and say, "That day--that day in catechism I came to understand the truth of "holy vocation." I just know it, and when I read it last night--I mean the paragraph I just quoted--I was struck with a sense of the fulness of a blessing. 

There are scribblings in the book, markings from my pen and Barbara's pencil; but it's clear that neither of us ever finished reading Liturgy of the Ordinary. It's our book, and it somehow simply showed up so we decided to read it, and it has been good, maybe because we so heartily agree with what she says, maybe because her dogged determination to make brushing her teeth, reading her e-mail, even arguing with her husband into vital "spiritual" work is often, well, entertaining. It's a book that makes you smile.

But this morning as I move ever closer--two weeks away--from my three-score and ten + five birthday, I just want to repeat what I told my wife-of-50-years last night. "I know all of that," I said, and this morning I'm thankful that I do.

This morning's thanks is for nothing more or less than a worldview, something really, really basic that's forever in me, something I learned somewhere along the line, something I've come to believe, heart and soul and mind. It's who I am.