Morning Liturgy.
Every morning I follow roughly the same routine. I am woken between 5-6am by my daughter who arrives at the side of our bed and whispers politely “would you like to come downstairs now?” ‘Now’ being the operative word in that statement. My slumber laden body is soon wrenched into reality, because within 30 seconds of that initial question - having exhausted the small reserve of patience that 2-year-old’s have - she is pulling me out of bed and demanding her bowl of Cheerios.
About an hour later, we’ve been joined by my son who was woken up by the 2-year-old’s now high volume demands, I've prepared the kid’s breakfast in zombie-mode, and I’m just beginning to muster the energy to think about coffee, my first “proper” thought of the day. I’d like to say my first thought would be a pious one, but having small children I am forced to trust and lean into the particular grace afforded parents of young children in Isaiah 40:11. On my better days I can just about manage to pray, “This is the day that the LORD has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118:24).
When it comes to coffee I am a self-confessed nerd and a snob (a snerb?). I avoid instant and cheap supermarket brands at all costs, preferring instead freshly roasted beans from a local independent roastery, often from a single origin, particular lots from particular farms and all that jazz... I perform the same liturgy each time; folding filter papers, pre-heating brewers, weighing and grinding beans, setting timers, stirring grounds, steeping for what seems like an age, drawing down, pouring, waiting some more (to cool to optimal drinking temperature), before sipping that deep brown elixir deep down into my soul.
Sonder.
The day begins in all its snerberry. But this isn't all about taste. For all the pomp and circumstance that surrounds my morning coffee ritual, it also serves as an opportunity for gratitude and sonder.
Sonder is the notion of awakening to the reality that each of the 8.1 billion people on this planet is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, every single one playing their own part in the grand narrative of time and space. Every one an intricate network of relationships fuelled by unique desires, ambitions, woes, and joys.
That first sip of coffee reminds me of the multitude of lives connected to me that have made my moment of morning time luxuriating - a distinctly western phenomenon - what it is. I am at once reminded of my own place in the world as a white, middle-class, educated, cis-gendered, heterosexual man, one who by the world's standards is living in the top percentile of wealthiest people on the planet. I am reminded of my own power and privilege, and am confronted with my use, my misuse, and my abuse of it.
More than that however, I think of the hundreds of hands that have led to the small roasted seed of the coffee cherry ending up in my cup in England. Other than the benefits of a delicious caffeinated on a tired Dad-bod, this is why I try to pay attention to how I brew my morning coffee; I want to do justice to all of the hard work that has gone into getting it into my kitchen in the first place. My precision in coffee brewing is an act of gratitude. First and foremost, I think of the coffee growers themselves, people from war torn countries like Yemen and Ethiopia, and others such as Guatemala, or Rwanda, or China, or Colombia, or Indonesia, and the myriad countries producing coffee on the world’s “Coffee bean belt.”
Coffee is most often grown south of the equator in temperate mountainous regions. Coffee producers - farmers, pickers, processors - work tirelessly all year round to produce their crops. They often begin work before sunrise and finish after sunset; pruning, weeding, picking, transporting, and processing the coffee cherries. Pay in many coffee producing regions is minimal. A 2017 study showed that for all their strenuous work producing coffee, Kenyan coffee farmers did not earn enough to live on, let alone support their families. Coffee pickers in Colombia leave their families for months at a time, to hike up mountains in all weather conditions, for the harvest season. It is intense, often oppressive work, and like the tea industry, it is a business which is riddled with corruption and abuse. These conditions - these discrepancies in the human experience, the flagrancy of injustice and economic disparity - there are the conditions that undergird my life. To be ignorant of them is to be something less than human.
Every drop of coffee in my morning brew represents a person, who represents a family, and a community, an entire network of complex lives and loves, joys and losses, sorrows and dreams.
Interdependence.
No man is an island entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,
as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were;
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.
- No man is an Island, John Donne
We are all of us dependent on an entire host of lives, most of which are hidden from view or simply unknown. Every bit of our lives is dependent on others, whether they be as close to home as our own parents, or as far away as a coffee farm in Costa Rica, a tea plantation in India, or a sweatshop in China (I'm always struck walking round the supermarket at how far some of the produce has come, and often wonder “Who was the Peruvian farmer behind that raspberry?”). Our lives are an intricate web of dependencies and interdependencies. As Sam Wells put it,
“My existence depends not just in its inception but at every stage of life on the ministrations of others, present or at a distance.”
To be anything like a mature adult in the world is to recognise these dependencies and contingency of our lives; it is every day to be aware of them. We might be the Western duck appearing to float gracefully above the water, but we are entirely dependent on the network of crucial contributions given by the multitude of people that constitute the fervid paddling of the feet below the surface, without whom, our smooth glide would not be possible. Again Sam Wells writes,
“Life isn’t just for living - it’s for realising how many people it takes to make it possible for you to live.”
In the West we predicate our lives on the myth of autonomy and “free will” - the notion that we can exist in individualized independent bubbles of our own choosing. This is ignorance; an ignorance which often leads to blind indifference or wilful acquiescence when faced with the plight of our neighbour. The opposite of that ignorance is a choice, it is to choose gratitude. When we choose to acknowledge that nature of contingency, our dependence on our global family, when we perhaps attempt to change the narrative for the betterment of our neighbour, we are living lives of gratitude.
Gratitude is the opposite of Ignorance.
All God’s creatures…
But our dependency extends beyond just humanity. We, along with all of God’s creatures, are here only by the grace of God. People often try to draw a false distinction between “Science” and “Religion”. But these are asking fundamentally different questions. Science seeks to answer the question of how creation is the way it is, such as how evolutionary processes can facilitate or limit diversification in a species. But “Religion”, broadly speaking, does not answer the question of “how”, but “why”. The most basic question being "Why is there something rather than nothing?” Theories of the “big bang” can attempt to answer how, but never why. Conversely, the creation accounts of Genesis are not answering the question how - when we head down that road, we turn the Biblical creation narrative into an idol that cannot be questioned, such certainty is dangerous territory at odds with faith.
The only answer we have to the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is grace. The first line of the Bible corroborates this.
In the beginning, God…
- Genesis 1:1
Before anything else… God. Before we had said or done anything… God. Before there was even a grain of sand… God. Before any of the stars in the sky ever twinkled… God. God is before all things. The Church has long maintained that God created everything ex nihilo - which means “out of nothing”. There was not some kind of chaotic primordial soup existing alongside God from which he brought forth creation. That would make creation somehow eternal and equal to God, and we’d all be in a constant battle over which we should worship. No, we aren’t all pagans here. There was nothing, a nothingness which is not a thing, but no thing. There was only God, in all his light, his love.
There was only God, Father, Son, and Spirit, in fellowship with Himself who lacked nothing. God had no “need” of creation. He didn’t create because he was bored or lonely, after all, the God who is three-and-one, one-and-three, is a completely self-satisfying relationship with Himself. Creation doesn’t fill in the “empty hole” in God’s yearning. God’s desire and yearning is fulfilled in and of Himself. So, creation need not be. It is not a necessity. It may as well not exist.
But it does… and because it does, we can confidently proclaim that Creation is grace. It is an unearned, unmerited, unconditional, incongruous and lavish gift. Creation is God’s gift, His grace, His benefaction. All of creation, from the highest mountain, to the sub-atomic particle, the deepest sea, and the smallest insect, the great expanse of forests, and the dry desert plains, every creature, including us, is therefore a parable of God’s grace. Everything is a gift.
Our lives depend on that gift as much as they depend on each other. Our own bodies are “shared, rented, and occupied” by an innumerable score of tiny organisms without whom we would be unable to “move a muscle, drum a finger, or think a thought” (the words of biologist Lewis Thomas). Zen Buddhists have probably grasped this better than most Christians these days. The Vietnamese Buddhist Monk, Thich Nhat Hanh (an associate of Martin Luther King Jr. and Catholic mystic Thomas Merton in their days), posited the notion of “interbeing”. Interbeing is the idea that,
“Everything relies on everything else in order to manifest.”
- Thich Nhat Hanh
The Christian would simply qualify that with the insistence that everything that manifests does so because God the creator wills it, or speaks it, so. This is not a notion which is an any way alien to Christianity, far from it. From the earliest days the people of God understood the land, creation, as God’s gift, borne not out of violence (as other ancient near eastern cultures posited) but out of love. Thich Nhat Hanh coined the term “interbeing” during the Vietnam war, in the midst of unimaginable suffering, violence, trauma, and destruction. His call for peace was predicated upon the notion that all beings are interconnected, interdependent, friend and foe alike. This same reality applies both to our attitude towards our fellow creatures, as well as creation.
Creation has just the right conditions for life to flourish. The right conditions for cultivating coffee; the right conditions for the diminutive sparrow to fly, and the great sperm whale to dive; the right conditions for humans to be born, to grow, mature, fall in and out of love, to worship, and to die. The air we breath and pollute; the land on which we walk, fertilize, farm, enjoy and abuse; the animals we partner with and the ones we sacrifice to our greed; the seas we sail, and fish, and in which we deposit our waste; the oils and ores that were laid down in the mists of time which we start wars over - these are all, accepted or abused, God’s gift. To be ignorant of this grace is to claim that we ourselves are gods, that the earth is ours to exploit, that preserving our own island of autonomy is of greater importance than recognizing and loving our neighbour. To be ignorant of this grace is a fundamental failure to recognize the contingent nature of our creaturehood, and instead to posit ourselves as creator.
To live a life of gratitude, on the other hand, is to live in response to God’s gracious gifts of creation and our fellow creatures. It is to live in response to the fact that Christ died not just for me, but for the stranger half way across the world, he died not just for the church, but for every person whom he has ever granted breath. Likewise, Christ died not just to redeem humanity, but to redeem all of creation. To recognise that is to experience sonder. It means recognizing that we exist in an interdependent web of labour and love between creator and creatures which makes life possible. That’s what it means to be one of God’s creatures.
Great post. Got me thinking, got me challenged and got me wanting to be different. “Life isn’t just for living - it’s for realising how many people it takes to make it possible for you to live.”.... Beautiful.