Hidden Holiness

Image source: http://www.adventure-journal.com/

"'Spiritual path' is the hilarious popular term for those night-blind mesas and flayed hills in which people grope, for decades on end, with the goal of knowing the absolute. They discover others spread under the stars and encamped here and there by watch fires, in groups or alone, in the open landscape; they stop for a sleep, or for several years, and move along without knowing toward what or why.
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The planet turns under their steps like a water wheel rolling; constellations shift without anyone's gaining ground. They are presenting themselves to the unseen gaze of emptiness. Why do they want to do this? They hope to learn how to be useful." - Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard has such a way of saying things. If you haven't ever read any of her writing, stop reading my blog right now and go to the store (or other places on the internet) and get one of her books. I highly recommend For the Time Being, from which the above quote comes, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won her a Pulitzer Prize and is another great book, or An American Childhood, a memoir of Annie's childhood in Pittsburgh.

Anyway.

Last Sunday our church celebrated Compassion Sunday. (I just Googled "Compassion Sunday" and the internet says the official date is May 4th, but I guess we celebrated it yesterday.) I'm not sure if Compassion Sunday was started by Compassion International or if it's a real thing in the church calendar. Regardless, our pastor preached a stirring message asking the question, "Where is love leading you?" and urged the congregation to consider sponsoring a child through Compassion International.

Mike and I do sponsor a child through Nazarene Compassionate Ministries. (Incidentally Nazarene children are cheaper than Compassion children.) And according to a June 2013 article in Christianity Today, child sponsorship really does make a difference in the lives of the children and their families who are sponsored.

But, I left church not quite sure what to do with myself. "Where is love leading you?" Well, love led me to marry my wonderful husband. Love leads me to feed and clothe the baby. Love led to the baby in the first place. Love led me to spend three hours shoveling snow over the weekend so my poor, sick husband could stay home and rest.

But I want to do more. I want to be, as Annie wrote, "useful." I want to not kill time or spend my time willy-nilly joining and quitting clubs and activities. And I want to do things that I'm actually good at. Or get good at something that matters. I want to do something that requires more skill than is possessed by the average teenager. But what? Where is love leading me?

I was encouraged when Annie went on in For the Time Being with these words:

"But what distinguishes living 'completely in the world' (Bonhoeffer) or throwing oneself 'into the thick of human endeavor' (Teilhard), as these two prayerful men did, from any other life lived in the thick of things? A secular broker's life, a shoe salesman's life, a mechanic's a writer's, a farmer's? Where else is there? The world and human endeavor catch and hold everyone alive but a handful of hoboes, nuns, and monks.
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We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious--the people, events, and things of the day--to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color."

Maybe that's part of the answer. It's not about pursuing holiness; it's about seeing how holiness is pursuing me. It's not about chasing down love and tackling it; it's about following love wherever it goes.

I was told once that the reason there are no straight roads in Indiana is because they follow wagon trails, which followed walking paths, which followed animal trails. Maybe I should stop trying to build straight roads and just follow the meandering path before me.