I recently returned from Texas, a state that is new to me. Our family traveled there for the holidays to see our daughter and our new son-in-law. They live in a cute little house, and just behind their neighborhood there is a winding river through a forest. Each morning, I walked with their dog, Saydie, through a Texan forest. The almost balmy 60 to 70 degree weather was delicious.   
Saydie and I visited a white egret each morning, who seemed to quietly wait for us on the river bank, or perched high on a particular dead tree branch.

The dropped pinecones and needles of the evergreen trees were fragrant in the warm air. And the lines etched in the tree bark created dark designs on the trunks where the bark peeled off. On my walks I began picking up various things along the trail, so striking to me was the difference in geography from my Ohio home. One of the beautiful pieces I carried back was a piece of tree that resembled turquoise coral, but was instead a fungi moss that grew on the trees in large spores and fuzzy, soft feathery blue-green wisps. I also discovered a single, large, brown and black feather-- possibly from the wing of a hawk.

We had departed for Houston from Cleveland on Christmas day. I was uncertain at one point whether we were going to be able to go at all, after my mother-in-law had ended up in the hospital. Daily updates and visits on my mother-in-law’s health finally reassured us enough to get on the plane.

The Christmas celebration had eluded us in the midst of such uncertainty and anxiety. Christmas is one of the biggest Christian holidays of the entire year, and yet it is no longer celebrated as such by a good deal of the population. I had hoped to do be mindful, conscious, and quietly reverent of the birth of Christ, yet I had walked right past the manager.

I married into a family who celebrates Christmas with large family get togethers, generous amounts of food, and gifts and decorations, but the spiritual component is very much an individual and private matter-- if it is happening at all. It has created for me a wide chasm between my expectation and the reality of Christmas. I struggle to find a bridge across this divide.

Yet, I did find a bridge, walking with a dog in Texas. God surprised me, showing me without fanfare, His presence.  It had not come at Christmas. It had not come with family. It had not come at home in Ohio, or in Church. I was alerted to a different perspective in a line I read in a book on the plane.

In “An Altar in the World”, by Barbara Brown Taylor, Taylor states in the introduction, “There are no spiritual treasures to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth. My life depends on engaging the most ordinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them.”

If we are not paying “exquisite attention” we will miss the spiritual treasures in our ordinary human life. I had been closely attentive to disappointment, anxiety, and my expectations; virtually blind to the bodily experiences of my life in front of me. Attentive to the ordinary physical activities of walking, eating, sleeping, laughing, or crying in the presence of my family, or alone on a walk had unearthed the spiritual treasures right in my midst.

It was on my walk that I began paying attention again to the beauty of God –abundantly poured out all around me. And I discovered it again walking back into my daughter’s house. My daughter Tegan had welcomed us in every way—with attention to details; baking the magic cookie bars her and I use to make together, placing beautiful long branches in the vases on top of her entertainment center just like the ones I use to cut in the winter from our backyard, placing photos and a candle in the guest room, making up the bed for my husband and I with new linens. I was attentive to the look her husband gave her while they cooked in the kitchen together, and the way she greeted him when he walked in from work.

Taylor says, “The whole world is the House of God” *and “People can learn as much about the ways of God from paying attention to the world as they can from paying attention to scripture.” *

We are born with this wonder and reverence for the things and experiences of our world. Being small dependent creatures that are curious and sensual, we learn our way in the world from the vast bodily experiences of moving and living in our world.  But, we must be counter-cultural to be contemplative, to celebrate the spiritual, to not be rushed passed that which evokes wonder and reverence.  I dare say that there is not much in our world of technological, pleasure seeking, addictive and increasingly violent society that challenges us to tune into this rich and beautiful spiritual treasure.  

Yet, contemplation and the exquisite attention and presence to our ordinary human life will challenge this mainstream thinking, this way of being. We have come to mistake glamor for beauty, material consumption for richness, fame for importance, narcissism for self awareness.  Happiness is not on the fast road most of us travel, it is on a “narrow path”, a very different road, and one which we must make a conscious effort to slowly and attentively walk.  

Reverence begins with something greater than ourselves.  Pay attention, exquisite attention to your life. We do not know the hour or the day when there are no more days to begin this practice. How often I have known someone experience this gifts, after a diagnosis of a terminal illness, they  become keenly attentive and reverent to each day, each moment.  Reverence is a patient and attentive attitude.  It cannot be discovered on your Blackberry, the internet, the mall, or in between moments of manic activity. “Consider the lilies” ---much of Scripture asks us to pay attention, to treat life, others, and creation, with profound awe and respect.

Is your life a sacrament? I do not believe that if we seek beauty, we can be filled with anything but gratitude. To become fully attentive to the the moment and discover beauty, wonder and awe, whether on a walk, in a person, in a gesture, or even in a situation that initially gives us no pause for reverence, is  to mine spiritual treasures, to discover the birth of the Christ child in a lowly manager.

I returned home rather reluctantly. January in Cleveland is hard to get excited about and I missed my daughter, miss all my kids being … well, kids! I forced myself outside for a walk in the late afternoon of the next day. The air was biting cold and the landscape was the muted shades of winter with barren branches jutting into a grey sky. The sun began to dip below the belt of steely grey snow clouds and as it did the entire sky lighted up in a panorama of brilliant pink. I stopped. The wind was biting my cheeks, and even my bones felt cold, but I beheld God’s beauty for a moment.

That evening as I was preparing dinner my husband came in from his long day at work. I stopped and looked into my husband’s tired face and  beheld God’s beauty there too. That evening, as we sat down for dinner together I discovered again that my life depends on “engaging in the most ordinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them and that the whole world is the house of God.”