At the utility sink

Photo by Chris Bair on Unsplash

Last night I came downstairs after the kids' bedtimes to hear my husband sighing heavily on the couch.

"What's wrong?" I asked, concerned.

"Oh nothing," he said in the tone that means it's very much something. "Just fascism. It's everywhere."

I nodded once, more brusque than I intended, and headed straight down another flight of stairs to our basement, where I proceeded to bend over the utility sink and hand-scrub fecal matter from my children's poop-encrusted underwear and shorts, with the grim satisfaction that here, at least, was a pile of shit I could resolve.

A few weeks ago, I finished Richard Rohr's book The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage, in which he examines how the Hebrew prophets "reflect the full spectrum of human maturity" as they move from anger to lament to compassion and invites us to contemplate where (and how) "holy disorder" and "universal sympathy and care" manifest in our world today.

From a book bursting with food for thought, one quote has kept turning over in my mind:

"The body of Christ is one great and shared sadness and one continuous joy, and we are saved just by remaining connected to it."

I've been unpacking this brief but powerful sentence since, and it bubbled back up at the utility sink.

I view the "body of Christ" as all of creation—an interwoven, interdependent web of beings, relationships, systems, and mysteries.

Our "great and shared sadness" suggests the human condition—our mortality, our suffering, our failures, our losses, our harms.

"One continuous joy" calls to mind for me a strong, steady current coursing beneath and around our existence, the kind that wears down rocks and finds new runs, stronger than anything we can build to stop it.

Ever the cradle Catholic, I tend to trip on "saved," hearing undertones of evangelical judgement. But in the context of this thought, "saved" feels more literal to me—a life preserver in the fullest sense of the words.

And what brings both the sentence and the point full circle? "Remaining connected" to it all—that is, the universal, mysterious, lavish love that, no matter what you believe its source to be, we all deserve to receive and share.

As I directed my rage and fear toward the dirty underwear and turned over these words, another thought occured to me: For those who do somehow disconnect—whether by choice or accident, with calculation or ignorance, through disavowal or disassociation—what then? Are they adrift from what makes them human? Is it even possible to fully separate from the great, shared sadness and continuous joy? When all other threads seem unraveled, does our breath alone unite us? And is our breath alone enough to draw us back together?

I realized then that, due to the stench of the utility sink, I myself had not drawn a deep breath for 16 minutes. So I stopped my furious scrubbing to do just that. In, out. In, out. The clothes went in the washer. I flushed the drain with baking soda. I washed my hands. This task was done. The greater one, never.

Prayer #413: The Sinker's Hymn

bent over the basin
I question the use
of toothbrush and dish soap
to fight what sticks, stains, recurs

then away from the tub
I question my use
of notebook and keyboard
to write what stirs, swirls, comes forth

but rather than sink
I use my questions
of sadness, of joyness,
to light what makes us alive

Amen. 

 

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Seeking to embiggen your own loving-kindness in the world? Check out the chapter titled "Compassion: How Can I Make My Heart Bigger?" in my book, Amen? Questions for a God I Hope Exists, for prayerful and poetic inspiration.