Among the Pots and Pans
Ordinary responsibilities have a way of consuming the time we had hoped to spend differently.
A quiet morning disappears into a problem that needs solving. An evening set aside for reading becomes an evening spent helping someone else. These are rarely dramatic interruptions. They are simply the demands of everyday life.
Yet there is a subtle temptation to regard them as something to get through before we can return to what really matters.
Teresa of Ávila understood this tension remarkably well.
In The Book of the Foundations, Teresa recounts her experiences establishing Carmelite communities throughout Spain. Much of the work was intensely practical. Buildings had to be secured, finances managed, and the needs of the sisters attended to. For someone devoted to contemplative prayer, these responsibilities could seem like unwelcome distractions.
Teresa herself had once believed that spending so much time occupied with practical matters would make spiritual growth difficult. Yet she began to notice something that challenged this assumption. Some of the sisters who carried the greatest responsibilities were also growing deeply in their relationship with God.
In Chapter 5, she offers an observation that has endured for centuries:
“The Lord walks among the pots and pans.”
It is a wonderfully earthy image from someone whose writings elsewhere describe extraordinary experiences of prayer.
Teresa had discovered that the ordinary work of sustaining a community could itself become a place of encounter with God. The sisters did not need to escape their responsibilities to find Him. Their willingness to serve, especially when that service interrupted their own preferences, could become an expression of the very love they sought in prayer.
Benedict understood this relationship between prayer and work.
His Rule devotes an entire chapter to kitchen service. The monks were expected to take turns preparing meals and caring for the practical needs of their brothers. Benedict paid attention to how this work was organized, including provisions for those whose strength was limited.
There is a quiet wisdom in treating something as ordinary as kitchen duty with such care. Benedict recognized that the responsibilities of communal life provided opportunities to practice the virtues cultivated in prayer.
The kitchen and the chapel belonged to the same life.
This is worth considering because so much of life consists of work that rarely feels significant while we are doing it.
There is little satisfaction in repeating a task that will need to be done again tomorrow. Caring for others can be inconvenient. The responsibilities that sustain a household or community often go unnoticed unless someone neglects them.
And yet these are precisely the circumstances in which patience, generosity, and humility become something more than qualities we admire.
It is relatively easy to appreciate the virtue of patience in the abstract. Practicing it when someone interrupts an already difficult day is another matter.
Teresa was not suggesting that every obligation should be welcomed without question, or that prayer and solitude were unnecessary. Her own life demonstrated the importance of both. She understood that the soul needs quiet, even as she discovered that God was not absent from the noise of ordinary life.
Perhaps the more interesting question concerns the attention we bring to what is already before us.
The necessary work remains necessary. The dishes still need washing. The responsibilities of the day do not suddenly become pleasant because we recognize their possible spiritual value.
But the way we inhabit those moments can change.
An interruption might become an occasion to listen more carefully. A tedious responsibility might offer an opportunity to serve without expecting recognition. Even work that seems entirely unremarkable can gradually shape the person doing it.
Teresa’s observation suggests that spiritual life may be closer to ordinary experience than we sometimes imagine.
There will always be moments when we long for greater silence, more time for prayer, or freedom from the responsibilities that fill our days.
But perhaps there is something worth noticing before we turn away from the work immediately in front of us.
The Lord, Teresa reminds us, walks among the pots and pans.