Sacred Patterns
The rhythms of our lives might be holier than we'd imagined
“So, how do you like making dinners?” my wife asked as we sat down to plates of linguine, smothered in sausage-and-spinach bolognese. We would have had buttered garlic toast as well, if she hadn’t spied white patches of mold colonizing the crust.
With significant adjustments to our work schedules about six months ago, I took over the task of planning meals, shopping, and doing most of the cooking.
“I like it,” I said. “I like the routine—getting home from the gym, pouring a glass of wine (when it’s not Lent) turning on some music, and cooking.” That night I’d listened to a playlist that my jazz-major son put together, replaying Cannonball Adderley’s rendition of “Autumn Leaves” three times—it’s so good.
I doubt she was surprised to hear this answer, my admitting an affinity for predictable rhythms. She knows me. Give me routine to hold my days, and I’m a happy man.
I that way, I’m not unlike my dad. Here’s a short poem I wrote a few days ago—the initial stab at one at least—that I’m calling “Devotion.” I wrote it about my dad, who died in 2009 at the age of eighty-eight.
He sat at his desk every weekday
well into his eighties.
Home for lunch, a stop at the library
to check the Wall Street Journal
(all the librarians knew his name)
and at the post office, yes,
before returning to that desk
with a paper calendar in the middle.
All those rows of empty squares.
After the service, I found a CD of country hymns
beside a folder of spreadsheets
and in the stereo, to my surprise:
sacred arrangements for flugel horn.
A host of sharpened #2 pencils,
patience with the renters upstairs,
clocking in and clocking out,
coffee endlessly reheated in a Styrofoam cup,
a simple sandwich for lunch, or leftovers—
such love for these ways, such love
for this life—and always a Snickers
in the bottom left-hand drawer.I don’t read the Wall Street Journal, or understand most spreadsheets, for that matter. But the librarians do know my name, and Snickers is my favorite candy bar.
Dad rarely cooked dinner, though sometimes he made pancakes after church.
Church—that was another of his routines, the most social hour of his week. As an usher, he relished seeing his friends, handing out bulletins. He was always first in the car to head to church and last in the car to leave. Dad was a traveling salesman, and when he traveled on a weekend he would bring home the worship bulletin from the Methodist church he’d attended. He went to church religiously, I guess you could say.
There’s nothing particularly holy about a penchant for routines, and yet, again and again through Christian history individuals and communities have found that a life sustained by rhythms of work and prayer can help keep one open and attentive to God.
These people lived by a rule. They followed a rule of life.
The first monastic communities followed a rule. St. Benedict’s Rule (6th century) became the standard for Christian monasticism in the West. It regulated all aspects of monastic life, weaving them into a generative dance of work, study, and prayer. Charles Cummings, a contemporary monastic, writes in Monastic Practices:
The external practices of the monastic life are directly connected with our search for God. These practices—sacred reading, liturgical prayer, work, silence, asceticism, and many others—are concrete ways and means by which we in monasteries seek God. . . . Our monastic life in its outward practices as well as its inward spirit is totally oriented towards seeking and finding God.
History repeatedly witnesses to this: people allowing the routines of work and prayer, rest and play to sustain them in lives that are receptive to the work of God’s transforming Spirit.
Most of us won’t ever have lives so thoroughly ordered to God in every respect. But even if we don’t have a defined rule, we follow a rule nonetheless—an unwritten one. We already have rhythms of work and rest and play that govern our lives. To a greater or lesser extent, we live patterned lives, even if the most reliable pattern happens to be scrolling social media for fifteen minutes before bed.
The question is: to what end do our routines shape us?
When my seminary students are writing their rules of life for spiritual formation class, rules which they will then follow for two months, one of their big questions is about what practices and patterns they are allowed to include in their rule.
Does everything in the rule have to be explicitly “spiritual”? Does the rule need to sound especially pious? Can “exercise daily” be faithfully included in a rule of life? Or “cook healthy meals”?
Because I try to help my students see that the spiritual life is not just a part of life—however good we are at compartmentalizing—but all of life, considered in its relationship to the One who made us, I won’t give them a list of practices that don’t belong.
After all, St. Benedict included in his Rule a reminder for his monks not to sleep with their knives still on their belts. Good advice—but how holy is that?
The students themselves have to discern: to what end? How do I understand my exercise or nightly meal prep as orienting my life more fully to God’s love, God’s ways? How do I consider these practices to be keeping me available to the work of God’s transforming Spirit in my life?
These are the questions any of us—not just students in a spiritual formation class—can ask about the patterns, habits, and routines of our lives.
The season of Lent is the church’s gift of time to do just such self-reflection.
It’s not out of the question, then, that wholehearted attention to a sip of wine while stirring Italian sausage as it browns in a skillet, and timing the plunging of linguine into boiling water just right so that sauce and pasta are finished at the same time and the pasta is perfectly al dente—all of this, done in gratitude for God’s good gifts of sustenance and prepared to delight one’s family and be eaten while enjoying their company—might be very close to prayer. Who’s to say?
So maybe Dad’s routines were holier than they looked. My dad kept up most of them as long as he could. One of these routines was cutting coupons, which he continued into the last weeks of his life. At the time, we had two small boys, and every month we’d receive an envelope in the mail bulging with coupons for diapers, wipes, and baby food.
Whether his routines were turning him more fully to God, I can’t say, but one of the side effects of a rule that orients us toward God is the way self becomes decentered, while concern for others grows.
I saw this in Dad, for sure.
The contours of our lives matter. We can tweak the rhythms, the routines that shape us, in ways that allow them to hold us more fully in the recreating light of God’s love. How to adjust them and to what extent—that’s something to discern prayerfully.
And when we do, we should allow ourselves to be surprised to discover that some patterns and habits we never would have deemed holy—the ordinary routines of work and play that fill our days—might be holding us too, even if without our knowing it, in the refining fire of God’s grace.
"All those rows of empty squares." Such a poignant line. Thank you for this piece.
So good. Thank you!