Daily Reading for July 16

As a human being, Jesus Christ was as subject to the daily as any of us. And I see both the miracle of the manna and incarnation of Jesus Christ as scandals. They suggest that God is intimately concerned with our very bodies and their needs, and I doubt that this is really what we want to hear. Our bodies fail us, they grow old, flabby and feeble, and eventually they lead us to the cross. How tempting it is to disdain what God has created, and to retreat into a comfortable Gnosticism. The Christian perspective views the human body as our God-given means to salvation, for beyond the cross God has effected resurrection.

We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing and even ecstasy, but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are, not where we wish we were. We must look for blessings to come from unlikely, everyday places—out of Galilee, as it were—and not in spectacular events, such as the coming of a comet. The best poetic images, while they resonate with possibilities for transformation, are resolutely concrete, specific, incarnational. Concepts such as wonder, or even holiness, are not talked about so much as presented for the reader’s contemplation.

From The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s Work” by Kathleen Norris (Paulist Press, 1998).