The daily and the mundane

The Christian creeds used to seem like a ‘grocery list’ to me, and I found them very difficult to incorporate into my fledgling faith, as I made my way back to church after twenty years away. But now I see them as an admirably compact form of storytelling, and this makes me glad, for story places the creeds in the realm of the daily. It is in ordinary life that our stories unfold, tales of conceiving, bearing and giving birth, or trial and death and rising to new life out of the ashes of the old. Stories of annunciation, incarnation, resurrection, and the spirit, the giver of life, who has spoken through the prophets and enlivens our faith.

As wondrous as these mysteries are, Christianity is inescapably down-to-earth and incarnational—I say ‘inescapably,’ as most of us, at one time or another, try to avoid the implications of incarnational faith. The Christian religion asks us to place our trust not in ideas, and certainly not in ideologies, but in a God who was vulnerable enough to become human and die, and who desires to be present to us in our everyday circumstances. And because we are human, it is in the realm of the daily and the mundane that we must find out way to God.

—Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries