The Profundity of Small Talk and Equally Small Things

We’ve had nice weather here the past few days. Warm enough for the pool, my shoulders red from a marathon of sun. A sin to eat any meal inside. Today, though, was a bit more grey. Gusty as all get-out! Greedily turning the pages of my book without permission. There was a stray and sudden thunderstorm around three that scared the dogs but not even the smell of rain to show for it.

Six weeks in, and I’ve quite gotten used to making it to the next day. I am not in school, but I might as well be with this made-up curriculum. I go fetch my coffee from the fridge and have spiritual study in the mornings, then I’ll stretch or sweat sometime before lunch, give or take some hours. Depending on what’s tugging at my tailcoat, I’ll read several chapters, or meditate outside, or write my insides to death, or work through a breath prayer, or sleep until we’re called for supper. I’ll sometimes do dishes or help with the food and it’s been good for me to do all this from a posture of prayer and devotion.

I’ve heard a lot of churchgoers say that perhaps these days will thrust us into a sort of continued monastic life, keeping to our solitudinal vows and still steeping in our simple self-disciplines. I hope so. How good it’s been for me to forgo the world and affirm the Word.

But what great a loss it will be if we don’t learn from the life of Rabbi Shimon. 2,000 years ago a sage who retreated with his son twelve years in a cave. For twelve years they studied the Torah and worshipped God every day. The essentials. When they finally emerged from their hideaway, they were sick with rage at the farmers of the field. With disdain, the rabbi wondered how low a person must be to engage in such mundane pursuits when they could be elevated, pondering all the wonderful secrets of scripture! In essence, Rabbi Shimon’s doctrine was, “There is only Heaven and nothing else.” But the voice of God rebutted, as if to say, “No, my dear boy, there is Heaven and everything else.”

I, as much as anyone alive, covet time in either rich communion or alone, uninterrupted. I want the depth of a well, drawing up large and meaningful conversation or striking out happily with none at all. Anything different than that is contaminated, or at the very least inconsequential. But woe to us who return to the real world of errands, who hate it there, and wish not to stay. Woe to us who leave our sacred cell only to turn our noses up at the aproned woman who grates fresh Parmesan over our precious pasta. Woe to us who forget the anointing (that is to say health and comfort) of a market shopper who joins us in fingering the produce and pipes up to admire, “We’ve got some ripe ones today.”

We cannot forgo our neighbors in pursuit of a holy life, we can only esteem our neighbors, knowing that their work is essential and carries with it a delicious degree of holiness. We are not of the world, but we’re certainly in it and the secrets of God stamped clear over it. We can celebrate sound orthodoxy and practice the virtue of silence, but there’s still a chink in the armor of our spiritual formation if all the glorious middle amounts to nothing. If it’s beneath you to carry on with talk about the weather (it was for me for most of my life), then you’re too high up. How it would have blessed me this morning to cling to the company of a pure stranger — gathering strewn hair from our faces — and to consecrate the space between us, “That wind just doesn’t quit!”