Once, we trapped an oriole in a net.  The strawberries were ripening red in our raised bed.  He and his friends wanted to eat them.  We did too.  So we stretched a net over the bed, and one morning, we discovered a tangled oriole.  I carefully snipped the net, unwound his stick scaly legs, and cupped him in my hands.  I released the oriole in a flare of orange wings, and he was gone.  It was a beautiful something.  We didn’t get a video.

Here we are in this moment, in this particular here and now.  I am, and you are too, whatever that moment is—a terrible and beautiful something, maybe both at once.  We work at life and family and church as a problem and a project.  But always there is more, spirit refusing to be reduced, a flare of orange wings caught up in the net of this morning’s worries.  Do we see it?  

I aspire to practice the presence of God.  I keep learning to praise God in the everyday.  Pay attention.  Listen.  Breath prayers exhaled throughout the movement of life.

This seems like the biblical way to me.  God is beyond the world, yet present in and to it.  Says Moses: “acknowledge today and take to heart that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other” (Deuteronomy 4:39).  “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” Jacob discovered by night (Genesis 28:16).  The whole earth is full of God’s glory (Isaiah 6:3).  All creation is held together in Jesus the origin and eternal Word (Colossians 1:17; John 1:1).  Shouldn’t we expect to encounter something of God in the everydayness of our lives?

Encountering God in the everyday can become a bit of a down-market trope, the sort of thing people say about sunsets and rainbows and very tall mountains.  Something like: we see God in nature (whatever “nature” is), a motto usually paired with “and not so much in the church.”  But in my experience, the awe-inspiring aspects of God’s creation are hints of something greater and more wondrous than we have known, but not the great wonder of God’s glory itself.  When the prophet Isaiah hears that the whole earth is full of God’s glory, it’s in the context of the eternal worship that surrounds God’s throne.  It’s when he’s standing in the temple in worship.  It’s sort of like mushroom hunting.  You have to “get your eyes on” and start spotting the standout wrinkles amongst the curling tree roots.  You can’t perceive the invisible God in the visible world without first getting your eyes on and seeing God in the worship of his people.

Praising God in the everyday is about cultivating an awareness of God’s presence in any moment of our lives, inside and out.  It’s learning to do what spiritual writer Frederick Buechner called “listening to your life.”  Buechner said that if God was involved in the world and cared about us as much as we claim that he does, “then surely one of the most powerful ways God speaks to people is in what happens to them.”  

This is also what St. Ignatius of Loyola taught in his Spiritual Exercises.  Ignatius saw his task as helping people grow in awareness of God’s presence and prompting within them. Ignatius’s “Principle and Foundation,” the starting supposition of all the rest of his work on spiritual discernment, reads: “All the things in this world are gifts of God, presented to us so that we can know God more easily and make a return of love more readily” (contemporary version rendered by David Fleming).

Because Jesus is the living heart of God whose life shows us who God is and how we are to respond to him, praising God in the everyday won’t be limited to bright and beautiful things.  There’s a cross in everything.  God spoke to Job out of the tornado, and in my experience, that’s often where the flare of God’s goodness and peace and love and joy and deeper, starker, brighter beauty will appear.