The maple leaves are down, back behind the old cemetary, a great drift of them. They're a bit damp from the recent rains and so are less satisfactorily crackly than they were, but still, it's a bounden duty at this season.... So on my way back from the grocery store with a backpack full of cherry yogurt, eggs, and oranges, I scuffled/shuffled through them, doing a thorough job of it. One must, after all.

I've known these trees for most of 11 years now. Like the trees along my street and my house's own particular trees, they are part of the landscape I live with. It's not a particularly handsome landscape; it's a little scruffy, a little unfocussed, mildly apologetic. There's nothing special about it except for the Rideau River to the north, flowing broad and silver and placidly powerful on its way to the Ottawa, to the St. Lawrence, to the sea. Other than that, it's just ... a place.

Right now, as the last of the leaves subside and we settle once again into Mud Season, it all looks drab and a little seedy. You could drive past the place without a second thought on your way from (say) Ottawa to New York, with no notion of who or what lives here--what small dramas are enacted, who is suffering or happy. You could be safely cocooned in the comfort of your car on the main road, listening to music, sipping good coffee, glancing at the exit signs as they flew past you--and the place would evade you utterly.

And yet: I know for myself that I could not write or make my own soul if I weren't rooted here--or at least rooted somewhere. It's as though I have to kick against the earth to get anywhere near Heaven or Hell. We tend to think of Good and Evil on the grand scale, of salvation and damnation in broad operatic terms, but really, it all happens here--in a flock of pigeons bursting upward over the the old hotel, in grubby apartments over failed stores on the main drag, at the truck centre and the beer store. God's souls are the worn-out overweight women in unbecoming jogging suits in the workaday supermarket; they are the paunchy middle-aged guys in their Chevy trucks down by the greasy spoon. They are the louche teenagers skateboarding down by the discount clothing place, the closed-faced children biking back from the playground.

Gloss, smoothness, fresh paint are all so much more attractive. We think we owe it to ourselves, given our stressed-out lives, to live friction-free, take it easy, have it predictable--no nasty surprises. We give up rootedness for sleekness, the roadhouse (where the pie is really good) for the safe speed of McDonald's, where no one will invade our privacy. We live in cookie-stamp houses with beautiful finishes. We don't mend our old clothes (who has time?); we throw them out. We shop in polished malls, safe from the weather and the street poor, soothed by creamy, attentive materialism. We eat whatever the latest fad is, raddochio or raspberry salsa. We turn our backs on myth and history. And then we wonder why it is we never feel at home.

But home isn't necessarily a neat and tidy place, physically or emotionally. Home's all in the friction. We do much of our best soul-work by rubbing up against each other's roughnesses and getting necessarily rattled. Spiritual growth can be exhilirating and joyous, but it can also be confusing and exhausting, shaky-making and even fractious. Love's in the dailiness of things, in the slightly agonizing give-and-take of trying to do the best we can by each other. I need this; you need the opposite. If I put my need aside for yours, am I doing the most loving thing I can by both of us? Or am I just choosing the easy route? It's almost dismaying, how completely ordinary this work is; there is nothing special or grand about it, any more than there's anything special or grand about this place.

But who said that God isn't deeply here in the ordinary, living with us where we are? I keep coming back to this place I live, not for its specialness and beauty, but for the lesson it teaches: that God's beauty is not our beauty. God's beauty may, in fact, be wrapped snug in a ratty old towel and laid in a a lost shopping cart in the desolate empty lot back behind the Canadian Tire store. God's work in us may not involve huge noble sacrifices that secretly please our heroism, or forms of beauty and discipline that soothe our itch for the safe and predictable. It may only be suppressing a snap when a child wants attention, making a small choice here, putting aside a desire there, being cheerful when we'd rather not be, speaking honestly when that's difficult, getting up an hour early, setting aside a worry in order to listen attentively. God's pleasures may lie as much in the noise of two tired feet scuffling through a drift of maple leaves as in the greatest and highest work of liturgy.

God is here. All we have to do is to notice, to be aware of it, and God's love washes through and over the ordinariness like a sideways light, flooding the ordinary leaf-littered grass and turning it to subtle gold and soft umber. And then it becomes so easy to love this plainness, to see the beauty that shines softly through this shabbiness--a beauty that seems strangely more immediate in empty lots than in shopping malls, however tastefully decorated.

The faces of the worn-out women in the market are soft and ready to smile, when you smile at them. You notice one of the paunchy good ol' boys buying flowers for his woman, with a secret softness to the set of his mouth, and suddenly he's twenty again and handsome as a prince. You trade a friendly word with an elderly woman walking her very elderly dog, united in companionable kindness. You hear the skateboarding kids shout in the intense delight of the young in their own youth and quick skill. The kids do wheelies on their bikes, and joy spins from their bike wheels like flying gravel.

Very ordinary. Full of friction. Nothing special. Just a place like any other.