The Sauntering Pilgrim

When she was a child, writer Annie Dillard would occasionally hide one of her precious pennies for someone else to find. She would cradle it in the roots of a tree or in a crack in the sidewalk, and with a piece of chalk draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. She’d label the arrows “surprise ahead” or “money this way,” then she’d run home without waiting to see who would find that free and unconditional gift from the universe.

Years later she wrote, “The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But – and this is the point – who gets excited by a mere penny?” She called it “dire poverty” when we’re so malnourished and fatigued that we won’t stoop to pick up a penny. “But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity,” she wrote, “so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple” (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek).

Yes, it is that simple. Keep your eyes open for the little things in life, the remarkable, ordinary blessings that are studded and strewn through all your days but seldom noticed. Notice the blessings you take for granted every day without ever really seeing them for the blessings they are.

Six stone jars, for example: fairly large; impervious to contamination, unlike earthenware jars that would have to be broken if they became ritually unclean; necessary equipment, if people were to maintain the tradition of the elders to keep their relationship with God alive and healthy. So familiar, people hardly thought much about them; dependably there for when they would hold the water that would cleanse and make pure. Six stone jars, empty and waiting.

And he said, “Fill the jars with water.” Ordinary water drawn from the well at the village center, where everyone else got their water: water that cooked food and quenched thirst, that washed clothes and bodies, that soothed fevered foreheads and cleaned newborn babies and prepared the dead for burial; water that prepared hands to receive food, the gift of God, the fruit of the earth that human hands prepared.

And the water came, not easily as from a kitchen spigot, but laboriously, bucket by ordinary bucket, carried by ordinary household servants. And they filled those jars to the brim. Six stone jars, filled with water, ready and waiting.

Then in the space between a period and the beginning of the next verse, as the story is written – in the space of half a breath as it played out that day – the water became wine. No incense or whispered incantation; no holocaust or atmospherics; only a disappointing moment when the party seemed ready to end too early. An ordinary moment, ripe and pregnant, and the presence of God-with-us, and the water became wine.

No ordinary wine, mind you, but the best wine, wine that if anyone thought about it would conjure Isaiah’s vision of the feast of heaven, “a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear” (Isa. 25:6). Six stone jars, their time at hand, now filled with water, now filled with the vintage of heaven itself. And the kingdom of God had come upon them; the reign of God had begun.

Not everyone saw it, of course. Most, if they said anything at all, said simply, “This is good wine!” Most simply went on with the party and then with their ordinary lives, back to their ordinary household chores and their ordinary jobs and their ordinary relationships. And what most of them tasted that day, what warmed their bellies and their spirits, soon became merely a story to tell, and then a memory that stirred only when the pictures were passed around at the anniversary dinner, and then became hardly remembered at all.

But some saw. Those who followed him closely, who shared his life most intimately, his disciples saw and believed in him. The promise of God that called them to this wandering rabbi suddenly began to take shape and became real. They experienced something they’d only heard him talk about, something that moved them from hope to trust. The new Jerusalem, the one that was to come one day on the clouds, was suddenly all around them. They walked its streets, dazzled by its splendor; they drank deeply of its new wine, every moment a found penny.

Like that moment during rush hour in Midtown Manhattan when I heard a passerby ask himself or ask the heavens, “Where’s everybody going?” and the whole crowd became a procession of saints – oblivious to the ordinary blessings studded and strewn all around them but saints nevertheless, every one a child of the universe, every one a penny to be plucked from the sidewalk, every one a stone jar holding water that at any moment would be transformed into the best wine, every one a manifestation of something divine.

Every small moment is a vessel of God’s most enduring gifts. When we pursue the unusual and sensational in our quest for fulfillment, we put ourselves in danger of passing by the pennies that contain the true meaning of life. But if we accept each moment as a gift from God’s hand, we may sometimes hear a voice softly whispering, “Open it.” God of all mercies, give us eyes, make us aware: we walk in Gift today.