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    Ordinary Sacred: The Simple Beauty of Everyday Life
    Ordinary Sacred: The Simple Beauty of Everyday Life
    Ordinary Sacred: The Simple Beauty of Everyday Life
    Ebook99 pages1 hour

    Ordinary Sacred: The Simple Beauty of Everyday Life

    By Kent Nerburn

    2.5/5

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    About this ebook

    There is a hidden meaning, a hidden beauty, in life’s most ordinary moments. It is the beauty of the human heart revealed, where what we have in common is greater than what keeps us apart. If we can learn to see the beauty in these moments, whether they are in the light or in the shadow, we become witnesses to the spiritual, testimonies to the sacred. We become true artists of the ordinary, and our life becomes a masterpiece, painted in the colors of the heart.

    A chance encounter with a boy on a bicycle, a young girl’s graduation from eighth grade; these and other small moments are the subjects of this beautifully written collection. In elegant prose, Kent Nerburn uncovers the wonder hidden just beneath the surface of every-day life, offering poignant glimpses into the grace of ordinary days.

    Whether he’s describing a kite’s dance on the winds above the high New Mexico desert, a funeral on an isolated Indian reservation, or a dinnertime conversation with family and friends, Kent Nerburn is among a handful of writers capable of moving so gently over such deep waters. Ordinary Sacred reveals the hidden beauty waiting to be discovered in each and every life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNew World Library
    Release dateJan 31, 2012
    ISBN9781608680788
    Ordinary Sacred: The Simple Beauty of Everyday Life
    Author

    Kent Nerburn

    Kent Nerburn has been widely praised as one of the few writers who can respectfully bridge the gap between native and nonnative cultures. His book Neither Wolf nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder won the 1995 Minnesota Book Award.

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    • 2/5
      Nerburn's theme of a daily journey is echoed in this arrangement of his essays, grouped into sections and stylised first Dawn's Awakening, then Morning Promise and Day's Journey, then Twilight's Veil and finally ending with Night's Embrace. The first and last sections include one essay, the remaining sections no more than four, and the typical essay runs about 10 pages. Each takes an everyday encounter as its departure point, musing on the nature of human interaction and possible glimpses of God in those and similar moments, and builds from them a structure that is meant, I think, to represent an experience common to all of us, and yet all too often ignored or missed. And it succeeds, for the most part, though not particularly forcefully."The Boy Who Wouldn't Leave" is an early essay in Nerburn's collection. Nerburn describes a very brief encounter with a boy from his neighbourhood, circling on his bike while Nerburn is reading on a park bench, increasingly agitated with the mute but quite evident deliberateness of the boy's antics, until Nerburn looks up and says hello. What follows is touching without being overly sentimental; and Nerburn's reflections on his own children, their relationship with him and his wife, as well as his speculation on the boy's life (seen only from outside), is an effective entry into Nerburn's argument that our higher values are always on display, if only we pay attention.Most of the other essays don't quite get there. I think I see what they're driving at, and can admire their separate efforts to wrestle with Truth as well as the specific scenes Nerburn selects as a means of illustrating those truths. But too often, it's a formal, almost writerly recognition: the prose itself doesn't pull it off. Rather, it reveals the architecture, the theme, the principle around which the essay is crafted (without ever using those terms), as though a curtain is pulled back while Nerburn is busy at his desk. What is wanting, I think, is for the curtain to fall back into place, and the essay to put on display its piece of theater, its vignette, but for me that doesn't happen. Partly this results from Nerburn's tendency to tell, not show: most obvious in the essay "The Visit", or perhaps "Two Old Men". Here's a passage from the latter, describing Nerburn's mentor, and contrasting him with an elderly couple with whom Nerburn is also friendly:The other friends who were at dinner are wonderful historians. But they teach history; he embodies it. The passage of time is etched in his face and his memory, and is part of the fabric of his life experience. To understand his past is to understand America. Listening to him is to gain an insight into our world that can be attained in no other way. [84]Descriptively put, and I have no doubt this characterization is true for Nerburn, but he offers no further anecdote or scene for me to see any of the man's experience, to gain insight from it, to draw any parallels to our national character or destiny, or even to know just how the man's face and memory might reflect specific experiences. And so Nerburn undercuts his own essay, as though I'm reading entries from a diary not intended for anyone but himself. The personal conviction comes through, but the impetus for that conviction is absent.

    Book preview

    Ordinary Sacred - Kent Nerburn

    PROLOGUE:

    SASKATCHEWAN WIND

    A divine voice sings through all creation.

    — TRADITIONAL JEWISH PRAYER

    Years ago I was traveling across the great Saskatchewan prairies — a young man, alone, with a love of the road and a dream in his heart. Evening was approaching, and long shadows were darkening the draws and stretching like fingers across the rolling golden land.

    A rancher, passing in a truck, saw me walking and stopped to pick me up. Like many who live in great spaces, he was a man of few words. We rode in peaceful silence until he noticed a break in the wire fence that ran along the side of the road.

    Got to check my stock, he said. Want to come along?

    We walked to the top of a rise and looked out over the blowing amber grasslands. The sky above was fading to evening’s lavender, and the wind hissed and sighed as it moved among the hills and draws and endless sea of tall prairie grasses.

    The rancher turned to me and said a few words, but I could not make them out through the keening of the wind. I smiled and shrugged, and he went back to searching the distant hills for signs of his stock.

    When we got back to the truck, I apologized for not understanding what he had said.

    Wasn’t important, he said. Just making conversation.

    It was the wind, I explained. It was so loud I couldn’t hear you.

    He gave a short, knowing chuckle. Oh, yeah, the wind, he said. I don’t even hear it anymore. The only time I notice it is when it stops.

    We rode on in silence until we came to a rutted gravel turn off.

    This is my road, he said and pulled over to let me out.

    I thanked him for the ride, we shook hands, and I stepped out onto the tiny ribbon of highway that moved, solitary, off toward the west.

    How much, it seems, the voice of God in our lives is like that wind, so constant, so present, that we only notice it when it stops — in times of crisis, the loss of a loved one, a marriage gone bad, a fight with a friend that leaves us feeling misunderstood and unloved. Then we feel the great emptiness around us and reach out for the calming promise that we are not alone in the world.

    But God’s voice has not stopped. Like that great Saskatchewan wind, it has only paused to catch its breath, and to remind us by its silence to listen more closely, and take it less for granted when it begins to whisper once again.

    This is a book for those who seek to hear that whisper — who believe that God speaks as surely in the murmurs of the trees and the laughter of the children as from the pulpits of the churches and the synagogues; who know that a mother tucking a child into bed is offering a prayer of joyful praise as surely as the cantor or the minister or the monk at evening vespers.

    The great Hindu leader Mahatma Gandhi said, It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without heart.

    Jesus, in the Gospel of John, said, The wind blows where it will, and you hear its sound, but know not from whence it comes or to where it is going.

    This book is a reminder to keep our hearts open to the winds of God’s whispers. It is not important that we know from whence they come or to where they are going, or even if we give them a name. All we need to know is that the moments of love, of caring, of the unprotected human heart, whenever we encounter them, are the voice of the spirit, blowing like the wind through our everyday lives.

    Our task in life is to hear that voice, and to make of each day a prayer that bears witness to its presence.

    DAWN’S

    AWAKENING

    The heart knows much that the mind cannot see.

    THE SERMON

    OF THE BIRDS

    We recognize the spiritual in all creation, and believe that we draw power from it.

    — OHIYESA, DAKOTAH SIOUX

    It is 5 A.M. on an early spring morning. I am in a garret on the third floor of one of the colleges at Oxford University in England. The early light of dawn is just beginning to cast a pale illumination on the pitched tile roofs and ancient church spires outside my window. I have gotten up to write because the birds awakened me. They love to nest among the overhangs and high stone chimneys of the red brick buildings of the college, and the promise of spring has brought them forth in full song.

    The birdsong is different here, full of unfamiliar cadences and unfamiliar melodies. These birds are making different music than the birds outside my window in America, and this fills me with wonder.

    I do not often stop to realize how different the music of nature is in each place

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