All human effort is navigation. Human striving—confronted by the wreckage of the past moment, the state of the soil, the demands of both—finds orientation from a compass with two arrows: moral and physical. I was always interested in ethics, but it took a while for me to notice that the moral spins out from the physical more often than the reverse. “Each of us is made by—or, one might better say, made as—a set of unique associations with unique persons, places, and things,” writes farmer-poet Wendell Berry. “The world of love does not admit the principle of the interchangeability of parts.”

My sister and I adopted two children several years ago. Their parents emigrated from the Marshall Islands, where navigation is a precious and guarded art, to the United States, where the tools and know-how required to survive were different enough, at least for them, to prove incompatible with parenting these particular kids. There’s a whole world of emotion, and a lot of scars, behind that sentence. Sometimes our kids ask us, “Who is my mom?” To which we’ve found that the best and most understandable response is, “You’ve had many.” It helps all of us to find our way together. “Mom” is not one landmark but several. For the first two years they lived with us, I found it easier and less fraught to give them kisses by kissing my palm and touching it to their heads. Sometimes it’s hard to claim the role that failed them.

So it bears repeating: The world of love does not admit to the principle of the interchangeability of parts. Our reality is not mechanical, with parts traded in and out to improve functionality, but a living organism or sea that we voyagers traverse using homemade charts of sticks, shells, and coconut fibers.

Where the present landscape presses too much upon you, you can escape into the virtual, the apparent, but this only lasts so long until you crash into what Heidegger called a “moment of resolution”—a moment in which the specter of death confronts your immersion in everyday life. You’re forced at that point to acknowledge that the project of possibilities that makes up your life will end someday.

For me at least, that’s the moment when religion and my Christian heritage comes back to confront my otherwise fully humanistic life. I can easily immerse myself in my work, in the history of religion, which threatens to become the art of studying trees to avoid the forest. Ironically, for most people who study the Bible or early Christian history, observes Maia Kotrosits in Rethinking Early Christian Identity, such study “is not simply a strategic cultural or political intervention or an antiquarian fascination, … it is work fraught with deep affective entanglements, threaded as the Bible is into so many other attachments and burned injuriously into so many folks’ skin” (8). Bringing us still closer to the threat and promise of religion, Karen Armstrong writes in Fields of Blood, “Ancient philosophies were entranced by the order of the cosmos; they marveled at the mysterious power that kept the heavenly bodies in their orbits and the seas within bounds and that ensured that the earth regularly came to life again after the dearth of winter, and they longed to participate in this richer and more permanent existence” (6).

Here is a place where everydayness can take on a profound light. Confronted by the inevitability of death and lesser losses, we can immerse ourselves in the physical world around us, in the physical care of our loved ones, in planting and caring for plants, and so on—not because we’re lost but because we know exactly where we are. We’re leaving our mark in the most concrete terms possible. By immersing ourselves in it, we become so familiar with the landmarks that, in moments of danger and confusion, we can recover our orientation and put down roots in the right places. Ellen Davis in Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture writes:

[In Hebrew] ‘-b-d is the ordinary verb equivalent to English ‘work,’ and it normally means to work for someone, divine or human, as a servant, slave, or worshiper. Much less frequently, ‘-b-d denotes work done on or with some material, and in all cases but one, that material is soil. … The wider usage of the verb suggests that it is legitimate also to view the human task as working for the garden soil, serving its needs. … While biblical religion clearly forbids divination of the earth, one might recall that the English word ‘worship’ originally meant ‘to acknowledge worth.’ In that sense, Hebrew wordplay translates will into English. The soil is worthy of our service. (29)

This rings true for me. Is digging in the backyard a mundane, everyday task? The trees I planted will outlive me, all forces being equal. When a seed sprouts, I’m grateful. When the crows build their nest in our backyard, as they did this spring, I’m grateful. When I kiss my child on the cheek, I’m telling you I’m grateful. The gratitude I feel for the response of the world to my small, cumulative actions is the only emotion I can rightfully call spiritual.

The thanksgiving of the human who reaches you
is this alone:
that we know you.
… O womb of all that grows,
we have known you.

—The Prayer of Thanksgiving, Nag Hammadi
ANNT trans. vv. 6, 8

Cassandra Farrin is the Marketing & Outreach Director for Westar Institute, home of the Jesus Seminar. A US-UK Fulbright Scholar, she has an M.A. in Religious Studies from Lancaster University (England) and a B.A. in Religious Studies from Willamette University. She is passionate about books and projects that in some way address the intersection of ethics and early Christian history.