Ordinary life

Review: An Incremental Life

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Cover image of "An Incremental Life" by Luci Shaw

An Incremental Life, Luci Shaw. Paraclete Press (ISBN: 9781640609792) 2025.

Summary: Poems celebrating the daily moments offering glimpses of joy, growth, insight, and the quiet presence of God.

There are an abundance of ordinary moments between the “life events” we post on social media profiles, and celebrate with family colleagues, and friends. Much of the substance of our lives is found in the ordinary. Noticed and meditated upon, these become a rich tapestry that we call a life. But it is also in these moments that growth in character, and increasing “God-likeness” occurs.

Luci Shaw’s latest collection of poetry, An Incremental Life invites the reader into Shaw’s own practice of noticing and meditating upon the “moments” or “increments in her life. Reading a poem aloud with one’s eggs at breakfast is “Nutriment” for the ears, the voice, and the mind. Polishing a napkin ring with the initials of her father recalls his embrace, smell, and love for God. A return visit to the Grand Canyon reminds her of the Colorado River’s once raging torrent, now reduced to a trickle by “our consumer generation.” In “Estuary,” Shaw and her husband visit a newly formed tidal estuary. Then she reflects on the tides that have poured in and out of their shared lives. She describes “our old eyes viewing a celestial transaction as if for the first time.”

Many of her poems are filled with observations from the natural world. In “Garden Work” she considers how garden work continues when her work for the day is done. Thus, it is a blessing which may fill our lives if we recognize and receive it. “Ambush of the Heart” captures how both simply beauties and unearthed memories may ambush our hearts with wonder. In “Refresh,” a barefoot walk in the grass becomes an immersive experience of the blessing of God.

Other poems mark passages of seasons and the advance of years. “Coda or End-of-Summer Blues” reflects on hoped-for summer plans unfulfilled, regrets failure in the vegetable garden and the life of prayer, rejoices in the flourishing of love and family, and God who ever waits for our attention. She likens herself in one poem to an old cardigan, somewhat threadbare. She acknowledges her want of vigor, sapped of energy by pain and her fights against it. Finally, she fastens it to the shoulder of God. Despite her vibrant faith, in “Mortality” she asks (as have many of us), “Tell me, how may I delay my dying?”

As in other collections, some of her poetry is on the making of poetry, including “How It Happens.” She writes of her aspiration to pen “Edible Words” “rinsing away/falsehood and injury.” She describes how “The New Poem” takes shape through writing and revision as she will “smooth stuttering rhythms.” And then comes time to “blow it a fond, farewell kiss.”

Shaw captures how, as we age, we may both live in the present moment, and re-live the events of our lives, bringing those increments together into a richer synthesis. Our failings and frailties, increasing with the years, may also bring increasing awareness of the presence of the One on whom we depend. And somehow, in all of this, there is the hope of incrementally growing into God’s purposes, even in the face of our own mortality.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: The Remarkable Ordinary

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The Remarkable Ordinary, Frederick Buechner. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017.

Summary: A collection of essays drawn from two lecture series, focusing on our attention to the ordinary around us, and in so doing becoming attentive to our own lives and the working of God in them.

Frederick Buechner gave two sets of lectures, the Norton in 1987, and at Laity Lodge in 1990. The essays here are drawn from these lectures, sharing a common theme of stopping and listening to one’s life. Buechner invites us to pay attention to the ordinary, noting that this is the beauty of haiku. It doesn’t mean something. In a few words, it notices the beauty in very ordinary things and occurrences. He proposes that this is much of what it is to love. Loving is taking the time to really see another. In seeing, love emerges and grows.

He spends time in these essays sharing how he has listened to his life. He recounts sharing a platform with Maya Angelou and the idea of the place of worship as the laughing room, a place where we stop amid our rituals and just laugh at ourselves, which is probably what God is doing. He also recalls their connection as she insisted that though they appeared nothing alike, they were. Both had wrestled with how one becomes a human being and struggles to have faith in a world that makes that hard. He writes of his own struggles with the church, and of his religious con man character, Leo Bebb, and the subconscious connection between Bebb and his own life. He “discovered cracks in the ground of my life through which I was able to glimpse the subterranean, life-giving grace of God.

He remembers the day his father committed suicide and how this had marked his life, and how fifty years later, he was finally able to weep for his father. He recounts seeking out a priest after returning from military service, when his earlier carousing no longer filled his life. The priest, who said little because of a stroke invited him to confess his sins, and then told him, “You have a long way to go.” And so do we all, he suggests, as he describes his own journey. He recounts his encounter with Dr. George Buttrick and his decision to go to seminary, escorted to Union Seminary by Buttrick, meeting Tillich and Niebuhr, teaching John Irving at Exeter, and being prayed for by Agnes Sanford, one more step in healing.

He recounts his daughter’s anorexia and realizing the ways he was also sick within. He writes of his journey of therapy and a significant dream of his mother shortly after he died, of the unhappy rules he had internalized and inflicted on his daughter. He concludes he is “better than I used to be but far from well.” And then there is the dialogue during therapy through a crayon held in his left hand, with the father who had committed suicide, where he finally listen’s, whether it is to his father’s voice or another’s, and finds peace, discovering that he is held by the everlasting arms of God.

We spend our lives learning to become human beings. Buechner invites us to listen to the beckoning of our own sin-sick souls and the longings for something more. We often run from our own stories instead of deeply listening, where light can shine through the crack, the light of God’s grace. Yet by learning to listen in the ordinary, the prosaic moments, we learn to go where we can hear what God would say to each of us, to discover our own belovedness, and the deep joy of being carried and cared for by the Beloved. As Buechner recounts how he has listened to his life, we find ourselves invited to listen to ours…

Review: Liturgy of the Ordinary

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liturgy-of-the-ordinary

Liturgy of the Ordinary, Tish Harrison Warren (foreword by Andy Crouch). Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2016.

Summary: Walking through the common events of an ordinary day from waking to sleeping, Warren explores how we encounter in these ordinary things the Christ we worship each Sunday.

I work with people in a university context who struggle to connect the Christ they worship each week with the seemingly ordinary, and often repetitive tasks that make up their days–answering emails, running experiments, attending committee meetings, preparing lectures, holding office hours, and grading papers or exams. In many cases, this occupies the most significant part of their waking hours. And for the ones who are followers of Christ, they often wonder what any of this has to do with the Christ they worship, and are attempting to follow. Time spent in a soup kitchen, a prison ministry, a mission trip–that seems closer to the real deal. Some wonder if they should even be doing the stuff that makes up most of their weeks.

There are others who think even the life I’ve described sounds “cutting edge” compared to spending much of their days feeding, cleaning up after, diapering, entertaining, putting down for naps and getting up again infants and toddlers. Or they work in some form of unskilled or repetitive work. And no matter what our work is, much of life involves a daily round of self-care, home care, and meal preparation, and a host of routine activities–every day.

Let’s face it. Much of life is lived in the ordinary and it is to this that Tish Harrison Warren addresses herself. Her book takes the tasks of the “ordinary” day and reflects on how we are met by and may be transformed by the Christ we worship each Sunday. She explores activities like waking, making our beds, brushing our teeth, losing keys, eating leftovers, fighting with our spouses, checking email, getting stuck in traffic, talking to friends, drinking tea, and sleeping. She connects these with the liturgies she participates in each week as an Anglican priest. She writes:

“And every new day, this is the turn my heart must make: I’m living this life, the life right in front of me. This one where marriages struggle. This one where we aren’t living as we thought we might or as we hoped we would. This one where we are weary, where we want to make a difference but aren’t sure where to start, where we have to get dinner on the table or the kids’ teeth brushed, where we have back pain and boring weeks, where our lives look small, where we doubt, where we wrestle with meaninglessness, where we worry about those we love, where we struggle to meet our neighbors and love those closest to us, where we grieve, where we wait.

And on this particular day, Jesus knows me and declares me his own. On this day he is redeeming the world, advancing his kingdom, calling us to repent and grow, teaching his church to worship, drawing near to us, and making a people all his own.

If I am to spend my whole life being transformed by the good news of Jesus, I must learn how grand, sweeping truths—doctrine, theology, ecclesiology, Christology—rub against the texture of an average day. How I spend this ordinary day in Christ is how I will spend my Christian life. “

She connects waking and baptism, as Lutherans often are taught to do in making the sign of the cross and saying, “remember your baptism” upon waking. Making beds reminds of the rituals that form a life. Brushing teeth represents all the embodied tasks that make up our day, and how we meet Christ through the bodily acts of standing, kneeling, and bowing. I particularly loved the chapter on sending email, and the blessing and sending that is part of our worship, and that may be implicit in our responses to our inboxes. She makes drinking a cup of tea a reminder of the enjoyment of all that is good in the sanctuary of God.

She concludes the book with a chapter on sleep, reflecting on the gift of sabbath and our struggle with lives of activism, and a resistance of sleep that may reflect a fear of dying. She poses an interesting question:

 “What if Christians were known as a countercultural community of the well-rested–people who embrace our limits with zest and even joy? As believers we can relish sleep as not only necessary but as an embodied response to the truth of Scripture: we are finite, weak creatures who are abundantly cared for by our strong and loving Creator.”

Warren writes with an unvarnished realism about her own life, and yet there is also this sense of stepping back from the whirl of ordinary life in the various moments of the day to remember, and listen, and reflect on how Jesus as the Incarnate One brings his shalom into the whirl of the ordinary–whether it is a fight with a spouse, lost keys or a traffic jam. Warren’s thoughtful reflections help us move to that same place, a kind of center of quiet where the new creation life of Christ can enter into the ordinary spaces of our days.

This is a book I can give to those wondering if there are greener pastures of Christian activity than the everyday circumstances they find themselves in. It is a book that makes the connection between the extraordinary things we preach and pray and participate in each Sunday, and the ordinary realities of each week. From when we first wake until we lay down our heads at night. And all the spaces between.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher . I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.