Pizza, Wine and Holy Rest
“I want to tell her that to hear God you have to be willing to experience what’s holy in places many people don’t deem to be sacred.” ~Ameena Brown in A Rhythm of Prayer
When we think of holiness, I think most of us conjure up images of large cathedrals, or stained glass, or standing at the ocean edge looking out at the vastness of God’s creation. I think of the towering Red Woods in Northern California or the sight of Mt. Rainier looming large over downtown Seattle. The big, grand, majestic and ancient. Holy things. Yet the entire title of this blog is dedicated to finding the holy in the small, the here and now. An Altar at my Kitchen Sink. I so often forget to look and then the kitchen sink remains just the kitchen sink. I blaze through life, running from one thing to the next, unending tasks to be completed, a pile of never ending needs to be met. So I miss it, I miss the ways God is showing off God’s holiness, God’s love and God’s goodness every single day.
For the past few weeks, throughout Lent this year, since reading Amena’s poem, I’ve been looking for the holy, asking God to catch my attention with the small, ordinary things that are actually sacred, and here’s what I’ve discovered. The holiest moments of my life lately actually aren’t when I’m standing in worship with my arms raised. Does God meet me in worship? Absolutely. But when I look at the list I’ve been keeping in my journal nothing on there has anything to do with an actual worship service. Instead the holy has snuck up on me in places I never expected. When I look at this list I’ve been making this month, the single moment that sticks out to me more than any other is the kneading of the pizza dough I make every Friday afternoon, the pouring of the glass of wine on Friday evening as I begin to stretch it into it’s rectangular shape and spread the toppings on it. It’s the signal to my brain and my heart that the week is over, God has provided, and now it’s time to enter into two days of rest. It’s time for lazier mornings, reading while I sip coffee and the boys get extra Saturday morning TV time. We’ve never been awesome at a strict sabbath routine or sabbath keeping, yet this Friday ritual of mixing up a batch of pizza dough in the afternoon and gently shaping it Friday evening has impacted me more than I think I realized.
When I began trying to make homemade pizza back in August I just liked the idea of having pizza on Friday nights while we watched a movie and ordering pizza every week gets expensive! So I started experimenting with recipes. And week after week as I stirred the flour and yeast together before leaving to go pick the kids up from school I found myself realizing it had become so much more than that. The scent of the yeast in the warm water became the signal to my brain it was time to exhale. To close my day planner, put aside the to do list from the week and prepare to be present with the people in my home without the distractions of a schedule to keep. When Covid shut down schools and we were all together for weeks and weeks on end last spring, I got into the habit of making Friday morning my housecleaning day. I would work for several hours cleaning the entire house from top to bottom—tackling bathrooms, putting everything away in it’s place, changing sheets, washing towels, vacuuming all the floors and wiping down surfaces. It helped keep me sane, knowing with everyone home that at least one day the whole house would be clean all at once. But when school started back up in the fall I kept my routine, I’ve cleaned the house every Friday for over a year now and the very last thing I do in my Friday routine is prepare the pizza dough for that night. In the Jewish faith, from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday is the Sabbath, a day when no work is done. They spend the few days prior to Friday evening in preparation of this 24 hours of intentional rest, preparing food ahead of time, doing their cleaning and washing, tying up loose ends at work, ready to practice the gift and art of resting when the sun sets on Friday evening. This Friday routine of cleaning, preparing our space and pulling the canister of flour and the package of yeast out of the pantry is my own little way of welcoming the weekend, a day of rest.
“To hear God, you have to be willing to experience what’s holy in places many people don’t deem to be sacred.” Now that I’ve been looking for it, the holy is right here, in my freshly vacuumed living room and this bowl of dough rising on the counter. It’s in the glass of red wine I poured as I began chopping onion and bell pepper to top the crust. And it’s in the faces of those who gather at my table when the sun begins to sink on Friday night, hot pans being pulled from the oven and the pizza slicer rolling triangles across the top of the bubbly cheese. Finding the holy in places we forget are sacred. Where in your life does the holy show up? What do you find yourself missing as we race through our days? May you encounter the beauty of God in the everyday pieces of life this weekend.
