Book is 'field guide' to seeing sacred all around

Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door by Barbara Mahaney
Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door by Barbara Mahaney

Barbara Mahany sees the sacred almost every time she steps out her door. She finds the divine while puttering in her garden or tiptoeing outside just before dawn to look at the stars before the morning sun burns its way into the sky.

"I think there's something for me about feeling small around this all-enveloping God," she said. "When I go out and stare under the stars I love that feeling of feeling enveloped by the bigness that's beyond me."

In her book, Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door (Abingdon Press), Mahany hopes to inspire readers to pay attention to the divine in their own daily comings and goings. She calls her book a "field guide of wonder and wisdom." It's a collection of essays and meditations divided into the seasons of winter, spring, summer and autumn.

"The sacred is all around," she said. "It's right here in our midst. We don't have to go into a so-called holy place like a synagogue or church."

A former journalist with the Chicago Tribune, Mahany started her career as a pediatric oncology nurse. She said the job honed her natural-born attention to detail. It taught her to pay excruciating detail to every little thing -- to read the patient's face for signs of pain and to listen.

After her father's death she discovered a knack for writing and began a career in journalism and her attention to detail was needed there, as well. But it was when she had her first child 21 years ago that she began to really see the value in slowing down and paying attention to those divine moments in life. Her editor let her work at home for 15 years, and when the boys were off at school she found the quiet.

"There would just be this quiet and in between stories I would step outside into this crazy garden I have or be in the house and have things slowly simmering on the stove, I think that was when it really sunk in that there was something that really rooted me in carving out that time," she said.

Mahany said she can feel connected to the divine just about anywhere. She felt it at the bedside of a dying child while working as nurse, when interviewing people for stories for the newspaper and on the shores of Lake Michigan near her home in the suburbs of Chicago.

"There's this incredible beach here. I've never seen anything like it -- cottonwood trees, dune grass and a strip of sand. It's often a place where prayers come easy," she said. "There's something about sitting on the sand amid all those dune grasses and hearing the rustling of the cottonwood trees, whether it's sunrise or moonrise or just the middle of a crisp fall afternoon that's really sacred to me."

She considers the ability to recognize the divine in her life to be a blessing and hopes readers will learn to do the same. Like anything it takes practice, she said, but it begins with the intention -- "I want to see more and drink in the holy all around me." It could simply mean getting up a little earlier and soaking in what the morning has to offer.

"It's about the practice of paying attention, carving out quietude and opening all your senses and your heart to the sacred all around," Mahany said. "I absolutely believe it's there."

The book includes a "Count-Your-Blessings-Calendar," suggestions for paying "supreme" attention, as well as "Wonderlist" of each season. Autumn's Wonderlist says it's "the season of inflamed twilight sky, rose-streaked, purple-bruised, ablaze with setting sun" and "old quilts and thick bed covers, unearthed from their long summer's nap." A few recipes -- Blueberry Slump, Beef Stew with Pomegranate Seeds, Cranberry-Pear Relish and Oma Lucille's Famous Rolled Cut-Out Cookies -- are included, each with a story all its own.

It may take a little work to learn to sit still and see the sacred in everyday life, but Mahany said, "once you start to do it and start to feel the connectedness with the divine or whatever you call it then it sort of whets your appetite and you want to get up and try it again."

Religion on 10/25/2014

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