One of the paradoxes of life is that it is often in the extremes of emotion, in the shock of being physical, that we come very close to the subtleties of the soul. Walt Whitman knew this: “If the body is not the soul,” he sang electronically, “what is the soul?” William James knew: “An entirely different emotion is nothing,” he wrote in his pioneering theory of how our bodies affect our emotions. You and I know it, maybe we know it every day: Few things motivate us more easily than a hot shower.
Having spent most of my childhood without hot water, I have never taken a hot shower for granted, and it is because of not taking ordinary things for granted that we get in touch with miracles – the twinkling improbability of this watery world drifting between the cold depths of spacetime. the right distance from its star to keep it from freezing or evaporating, the unwavering fundamental laws that keep the whole system moving, the wonder of the human mind and its great Rube Goldberg machine of ideas, the thoughts that set thoughts in motion for all life and civilization, to give us the tiles and the electric heater, the pipes and the water pump -hydraulic. There is, after all, no way around John Muir's idea that “if we try to choose anything by itself, we find it attached to everything else in the universe” – the moment we enjoy the smallest miracle, we fully share the miracle. And what better way to start a day, or end one, than to wake up with a miracle?
That's what Brian Doyle, the holy keeper of miracles, explores in one of the short, delightful pieces collected in his book. The Extraordinary Prayer Book: 100 Celebrations of the Miracle & Chaos of the Ordinary (public library).
Under the heading “A Prayer to Celebrate the Greatest Creation of All, the Bad Hot Rain,” he writes:
Oh God help bless my soul is there any joy as artless and glorious and simple and unadorned and productive and restorative as a hot hot shower when you really want a hot shower? When you are not fully awake, when you are wiped out from two hours of hard basketball, when you are tired and speechless after a trip or trauma? Thank you, Inventiveness, for creating a universe where there is water, and heat, and pipes, and towels, and steam, and hair brushes, and razors to cut that line that separates your beard from your chest, and toothbrushes. Thank you very much, Generosity, for the water. A brilliant invention, water. Who would have thought to combine hydrogen and oxygen so sloppily? Not us. But it is all we are. It falls freely from the sky. It carries us along with our toys and joys. It's clouds and mist and fog and snow and breath. There is no better food than this… And so: amen.
A couple with another joy of prayer in simple happiness – Rose Macaulay in the joy of being left alone – then visit Brian Doyle about how to live a miraculous life.
