One of the paradoxes of being alive is that it is often through the extremes of sensation, through the shock of having a body, that we come most proximate to the subtleties of the soul. Walt Whitman knew this: “If the body is not the soul,” he sang electric, “what is the soul?” William James knew it: “A purely disembodied emotion is a nonentity,” he wrote in his pioneering theory of how our bodies affect our feelings. You and I know it, perhaps know it daily: Few things ensoul us more readily than a hot shower.
Having spent swaths of my childhood without hot water, I never take a hot shower for granted, and it is by not taking the mundane for granted that we contact the miraculous — the shimmering unlikeliness of this water world adrift amid the cold austerity of spacetime just the right distance from its star to neither freeze nor evaporate, the unfaltering fundamental laws that keep the entire orrery in motion, the miracle of the human mind and its immense Rube Goldberg machine of ideation, thoughts setting thoughts into motion across lifetimes and civilizations, to give us tile and the electric heater, pipes and the hydraulic pump. There is, after all, no way around John Muir’s observation that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” — for the moment we relish the tiniest miracle, we partake of the total miracle. And is there a better way to start a day, or to end one, than awash in the miraculous?
That is what Brian Doyle, patron saint of the miraculous, explores in one of the short, exultant pieces collected in his Book of Uncommon Prayer: 100 Celebrations of the Miracle & Muddle of the Ordinary (public library).
Under the heading “Prayer in Celebration of the Greatest Invention Ever, the Wicked Hot Shower,” he writes:
O God help me bless my soul is there any pleasure quite so artless and glorious and simple and unadorned and productive and restorative as a blazing hot shower when you really really want a hot shower? When you are not yet fully awake, when you are wiped from two hours of serious basketball, when you are weary and speechless after trip or trauma? Thank You, Inventiveness, for making a universe where there is water, and heat, and nozzles, and towels, and steam, and hairbrushes, and razors for cutting that line that distinguishes your beard from your chest, and toothbrushes. Thank You most of all, Generosity, for water. Deft invention, water. Who would have ever thought to mix hydrogen and oxygen so profligately? Not us. But it is everything we are. It falls freely from the sky. It carries us and our toys and joys. It is clouds and mist and fog and sleet and breath. There is no sweeter more crucial food… And so: amen.
Couple with another prayerful exultation in a simple pleasure — Rose Macaulay on the pleasure of being left alone — then revisit Brian Doyle on how to live a miraculous life.
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