Mundane comes from the Latin mundus meaning “world.”
Webster’s defines it as common, ordinary, banal, unimaginative.
But really what is common or ordinary about our world? Our life on planet earth? Isn’t it amazing that every day the sun rises
and we get to start anew? Twenty-four hour
cycles of trying and doing and failing and loving and sharing and reflecting
and resting. The entire range of human
life and emotion there in every moment, every breath.
Perhaps one reason we run from mundane is another M word –
mortality. From our day of birth,
there’s only one direction possible for our lives – towards the terminus. Chasing bigger, better, brighter may help us
to forget that fact, but at the expense of the present moment. Stop right
now. Wherever you are, whatever you are
doing. What do you hear? Listen deeper. What do you see? Feel?
Know to be true? The sacred is in
the secular. Eternity is in this very
moment.
Let us not then confine the sacred to a place and time, or
the joyful moments of life to those outside of our mundane existence. But let us see all of life as mundane
beauty. After all, this world is the
only world we have at the moment. While
some may aspire to transcend it, most of us are right here, two feet planted on
terra firma. Louis said it best - what a
wonderful world.
Or put another way: “While man cannot live in a continual
Sabbath, he should not resign himself to a flat two-dimensional life from which
he escapes on rare occasions. The place
of the sacred is not a house of God, no church, synagogue, or seminary, not one
day in seven, and the span of the sacred is much shorter than twenty-four
hours. The Sabbath is every day several
times a day.” (Walter Kaufmann)
Nothing common, ordinary, banal or unimaginative about that.
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