Linoleum as Hallowed Ground
Photo Credit: Ammar Rizwan
Note: This piece was published at Calla Press here.
How lovely is Your dwelling place, O LORD of hosts!
My father-in-law Girma enjoys watching preachers on the television. He was watching one that day in the living room. Perhaps it was Pastor Yohannes preaching to an auditorium full of Ethiopians transfixed, seated somewhere far beyond their white plastic chairs. Settled in his foam slippers, Girma embraced his Bible within his left arm, like a hymn book. I sat on the floor, listening to a sermon spoken in a language I did not understand, but finding rest in its rhythms. My almost one-year-old Jeremiah was playing in the center of the room, maybe pressing his finger to the bright images (a bird, a pear, a lollipop?) in one of his books. Evening light hushed through the curtains’ gauze; spices bloomed over lit burners in the kitchen. The aura of content, of communal reverence felt familiar.
God dwells here, I thought, in this home.
The felt, near presence of God had transformed an ordinary room into a kind of sanctuary. But even if a sermon isn’t pulsing through the television, even in the rhythms of everyday, ordinary existence in our homes, God continually offers His preternatural presence.
I wonder: what if I saw my home as a dwelling place of God? How might my words and actions and interactions with others change? How might my attitude, especially my attitude towards daily rhythms (the ceaseless spin of text messages and meals) change?
As a mother who works from home, I pour a significant portion of my daily hours out over the kitchen stove and sink preparing and cleaning up after breakfast-lunch-dinner-breakfast- lunch-dinner-breakfast… (not to mention snacks!) Sometimes I try to imagine God beside me as I saute onions and whip eggs. I imagine Him upholding my arms to wash yet another (and another) sinkful of splattered pots. I talk to Him, as I would a friend mincing garlic beside me. I ask for His help for my wounded family and friends. I thank Him for the fruits of the earth He has so bounteously spread over my counters. I confess my broken places. These acts of imagination are not mere vain dreaming; they are a spiritual practice: envisioning a glorious reality I cannot yet see.
My kitchen communings with God were inspired in part by missionary Frank Laubach, who would play what he called “the game with minutes:” living every minute in conscious awareness of God, actively listening to His voice. In inviting Him into every banal and beautiful moment, Laubach’s life transformed. In Letters by a Modern Mystic he writes, “Oh, this thing of keeping in constant touch with God, of making him the object of my thought and the companion of my conversations, is the most amazing thing.” When I open my heart to the reality of Emmanuel, God-with-us, the table and the couch, the front porch and the toy-speckled floor can all become places of meeting with God. What if I stepped over my hardwood and linoleum as if over hallowed ground?
The other day, we invited a neighborhood family over for lunch. While the two lovely children joined Jeremiah in joyous play–bouncing balloons and opening books and giving life to a little toy hippo–the parents said with some disbelief, “They have never felt comfortable this quickly in a new place. We don’t know what it is about this home.” Again and again they said, there’s something about this home. Dagi and I just smiled.
But maybe enjoying God’s presence in my home (while pouring a glass of orange juice, while running water for a bath) is much more than my efforts to invite God. Maybe it’s accepting an invitation He has already given, and will give every moment of every day. Henri Nouwen writes that each moment God offers an opportunity to invite Him into every part of our being, every part of our lives. The question is, will I choose to accept it? “As often as we make that choice,” he writes, “everything, even the most trivial things, become new. Our little lives become great–part of the mysterious work of God’s salvation.” Every act, from slicing Gala apples to slipping socks onto my son’s feet can be transformed into part of a grand, divinely-wrought reality expanding beyond the narrow frames of our comprehension.
How profoundly humbling, that the Universe-Maker seeks to dwell with, reside with, tabernacle with humans of muscle and bone! And in our own homes of studs and concrete, nails and carpet. Though God calls His people to continually seek Him to find Him, His presence is ultimately not something I can create or conjure. It is a gift of grace.
Recently I listened to an episode of a French podcast about a mother who gave birth to a child with a rare debilitating condition, one she chose not to name. When she spoke with the host about the presence of Christ in her life, she said words that continue to hum in my mind: He is nearer than we know.
Her words remind me of Saint Patrick’s prayer: “Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort me and restore me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.”
Christ in sweeping floors. Christ in stirring soup and folding sheets. Christ in spaghetti-dinner conversation. Christ in my kisses. Christ in my hands when my son runs towards the electrical outlets (again). Christ in my face when I greet my husband arriving home after work. Christ in my first thoughts when I wake up, in my half-dreams before sleep. Christ in all things.
He is nearer than we know.
He is nearer than we know.
He is nearer than we know.
This essay is part of a series called “Dwell,” which meditates on the spaces where God dwells with us.
