For most of 2014, I lived in a co-living house in San Francisco, inhabited by about 25 people. I took on the role of “Community Facilitator,” trying to bring to bear a vision we had to make the house greater than the sum of its parts.
Residents shared with me lofty goals: they wanted the house to be a place where, simply by virtue of being within its walls, you couldn’t help but be a better version of yourself. They wanted the place to be spoken of in textbooks and biographies fifty years from now as the place where all the great minds in Silicon Valley met and shared ideas. They envisioned a house where, walking in, you’d be met with the blindingly brilliant chatter of minds in sync, where all your projects would find understanding mentors and helpful critics.
Great, I said. Let’s get started.
But as I set about “facilitating,” I ran into a lot of resistance, all of which boiled down to: “This is boring, quotidian nonsense. When do we get to do the real work, have the real fun?” Members wanted to plan exciting events, creative parties that would gather artists and geniuses from around the bay. But they couldn’t agree on a calendar system to schedule these parties. Folks wanted to see their specific vision enacted, but they didn’t want to attend the meetings where we’d hash out the house goals.
“This is all a waste of time,” they complained. “I wanted to talk about innovation, about enlightenment, about the purpose and future of mankind. Not pointless nonsense like chore rotations and calendars.” They wanted to spend their time thinking up great ideas and tinkering new technology into existence - and this precious time was being wasted by reading emails about upcoming events.
I don’t live there anymore. Let’s just say it wasn’t a great fit. Because I believe - and this belief of mine is centered in the Gospels - that there exists no lofty, abstract, idealistic vision without the day-to-day work of our hands, our bodies, our dirty dishes and cluttered inboxes. Annie Dillard tells us: How we spend our days, is, of course, how we spend our lives. The New Monastic Christian intentional community movement tells us: “Everyone wants a revolution. No one wants to do the dishes.”
In today’s parable, Jesus first gives us the image of a seed and a sower. We all love seeds. We love the image of a tiny embryonic plant, curled inside a protective shell, clothed in soft nutrients. We love the springtime image of buds bursting forth from the ground. We love the autumn image of the bountiful harvest, fields of wheat, orchards full of fruit. Maybe some of us grew little beans in styrofoam cups as a first-grade project.
But Jesus reminds us that the seed isn’t the whole story. It doesn’t grow in an empty vacuum, floating as a beautiful little seed, blossoming into a plant all on its own. Seeds need dirt. And not just any dirt - good dirt. Rich soil. And soil is made up of things we find a lot less lovely than green sprouting plants: Decay. Fungus. Worms. Manure. It’s easy to love a harvest. It’s harder to love what makes the harvest happen.
Jesus likes to talk in short, admittedly confusing, parables - but the point he’s making here is also brilliantly, though much more verbosely, made in a book by by Tish Harrison Warren called Liturgy of the Ordinary. In it, she goes through the routine of an average day - waking up, brushing your teeth, eating lunch, sitting in traffic, checking email, etc. - through a liturgical lens. She points out that there is no distinction, in the Christian life, between the sacred and the mundane. She tells us that “Our task is not to somehow inject God into our [daily] work but to join God in the work he is already doing in and through our lives. Holiness itself is not an abstract state to which we ascend but an earthy wisdom and love that is part and parcel of how we spend our day.”
Warren is not the first person to recognize this often startling, difficult-to-remember truth of the Christian life. Saint Teresa of Avila, a mystic of the 16th century, wrote that “God walks among the pots and pans.” Brother Lawrence, who worked as a cook and a dishwasher in a monastery in the 17th century, wrote that “it was a great delusion to think that the times of prayer ought to differ from other times.”
So many people, so many explanations and re-explanations of what Jesus Himself tried to tell us with his parable: no matter how healthy a seed is, it must fall on fertile soil. It must meet a foundation of nourishment and preparation. The most powerful Sunday-morning worship; the most fervent prayer; the most Spirit-led Scripture reading - none of it will bear fruit if it has nowhere to land.
What the people in my old community house didn’t realize was that there is no way to get to the lofty, abstract, visionary life without first going through the drudgery of regular life. They wanted seeds without dirt. We don’t live in ideas - we live in bodies, bodies that move through moments. Just like you can’t grow a seed on a bare rock or a dry, dusty ground, you can’t build a life of creation and innovation if you don’t have a good night’s sleep and clean dishes. Seeds can’t live without soil.
So how do we prepare our soil? How do we tend to our hearts and our lives such that the seeds of the Gospels can sprout? I think the first key is recognizing and honoring the importance of the soil, of the daily grind, of the mundane and easily ignored. A farmer who spends all year collecting the best seeds and neglecting the land in which she’ll plant them will reap nothing. The soil must be tended to. We must attend to the soil of our lives with as much passion and dedication as we bring to the seeds.
Our day-to-day, our email inboxes, our hours spent in traffic, our dandruff shampoo, our unfolded laundry, our sneezes, our lost car keys, the twenty-four hours of every plain and normal day - this is the dirt on which God’s seeds fall, to either take root or wither and die. We till the earth of our lives when we lift up the whole of ourselves to be sanctified and redeemed. We must make our everyday life as relevant to our identity as people of the Gospel as the ninety minutes we spend in church on Sunday.
It’s tempting to envision a “more spiritual life” or a “closer walk with God” as a matter of more effort, more time spent doing holy things like praying and reading the Bible and being in church. But you can’t grow a seed simply by paying tons of attention to it. The fact of the matter is that seeds live in dirt, and we live in days, often mundane, boring, stressful, or not-very-sacred-feeling days.
It is not a matter of carving out more “holy time” - it’s a matter of seeing the holiness in all of our time. Brother Lawrence tells us that “our sanctification does not depend upon changing our works, but in doing that for GOD’s sake, which we commonly do for our own.” Luther wrote that “God himself will milk the cows through him whose vocation that is.”
It can be embarrassing or uncomfortable or inconvenient to draw close to God in a context of runny noses and snarky coworkers and expired coupons. I think that’s why Jesus uses the metaphor of dirt - to remind us that the work of kingdom-building can be messy work, thankless and less-than-glamorous work. But important work. Holy work. We till the earth of our lives when we lift up the whole of ourselves to be sanctified, when we live and act and breathe and identify as God’s people everywhere and in every moment.
The psalms remind us: this is the day the Lord has made. Not the theoretical future day when we’ve made time for a contemplative retreat or a daily prayer practice. Not next Sunday, when we sing the hymn you know all the words to. Today. Jesus, in today’s parable, calls us to meet Him in the dirt, to honor the sacredness of the mundane, to prepare ourselves, through minutes and hours and days lived in the presence of God, in preparation for and participation in God’s kingdom. He promises us the seeds, and asks of us a well-tended soil.