Thank God for Good Plumbing

One of the joys and terrors of parenthood lies in the realization of the significance of little
things. If the birth of a child is significant, then so are potty training, teething, and
coloring. Children remind us that every little thing has meaning. Remind us, because we
are so apt to forget what takes such hard work to remember.

Judaism works hard to remember. The Babylonian Talmud has a prayer for just about
every moment of the day. There is even a blessing to say for the ability to go to the
bathroom:

Blessed is He who has formed man in wisdom and created in him many orifices
and cavities. It is fully known before the throne of Thy glory that if one of them
should be opened or one of them closed it would be impossible for a man to stand
before Thee.

Thank God for good plumbing.

There is also a Jewish tradition that says never walk past a scrap of paper lying on the
ground. Pick it up. Examine it. For it may have the ineffable name of God written on it.
There may be treasures in the trash.

If God is to be found anywhere, I suppose it is in the ordinary, the humdrum, the

mundane. Saint Augustine said that God is to be sought in what we know, not in what we
don’t know. If we know anything, it’s our daily lives.

When people who have been in prison or held hostage are asked what they missed most
during their captivity, they usually answer with things like coffee in the morning with my
spouse, taking the kids for a walk, a family meal, hymns in church, a bathroom.

In other words, it is not the extravagant things that are missed most like Disneyland or the
electronic pizza parlor. It is the common- place that is yearned for when yearnings are at
their most intense.

The successful search for meaning is more likely to occur walking in the door of the
house than out the door into the world.

The stakes are high at home.

A severe case of diarrhea or constipation will indeed make it impossible to stand before
God. Which is also to say, in psychological terms, anal retentiveness, rigidity, on the one
hand and laxness on the other hand will mess people up.
The consistent analogy in the Judaic and Christian traditions for our relationship to God
is that of family. Thus the pressure on families is to live up to the analogy – to keep the
family plumbing in good order so that we may stand before God.

Parenting is nothing other than the attempt to reflect the divine in daily living – justice,
mercy, love, and, above all, grace. It’s the supreme standard, a severe and fierce calling.
It’s impossible, really. So we, as parents who are also children, as people who fail and
sin, need grace from our heavenly parent in order to parent – that is, to pass on grace. It’s
a wonderfully vicious circle.

The children themselves remind us of the significance and presence of grace in the
ordinary. A child sleeping may seem insignificant. But when you look in on a child
asleep in its soft bed in perfect serenity . . . is there anything more meaningful? Is there
any better sign of grace? Is there any better proof of the divine?

A child colors a picture with crayons. It may seem like incoherent, random scribblings –
much like our own attempts to parent. But don’t throw the paper away. If you look
closely you will see that, contained in those scribblings, hides the all-powerful, ineffable
name of God.