In their book, Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life, Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat define spiritual literacy: “Life is a sacred adventure. Every day we encounter signs that point to the active presence of Spirit in the world around us. Spiritual literacy is the ability to read the signs written in the texts of our own experiences. Whether viewed as a gift from God or a skill to be cultivated, this facility enables us to discern and decipher a world full of meaning.” Here is an example of a spiritually literate reading of a scene from a movie.

In the 1995 film Smoke, Auggie Wren manages a cigar store on the corner of Third Street and Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn. Every morning at exactly eight o'clock, no matter what the weather, he takes a picture of the store from across the street. He has four thousand consecutive daily photographs of his corner all labeled by date and mounted in albums. He calls this project his "life's work."

One day Auggie shows the photos to Paul, a blocked writer who is mourning the death of his wife, a victim of random street violence. Paul doesn't know what to say about the photos; he admits he has never seen anything like them. Flipping page after page of the albums, he observes with some amazement, "They're all the same." Auggie watches him, then replies: "You'll never get it if you don't slow down, my friend."

The pictures are all of the same spot, Auggie points out, "but each one is different from every other one." The differences are in the details: in the way people's clothes change according to season and weather, in the way the light hits the street. Some days the corner is almost empty; other times it is filled with people, bikes, cars, and trucks. "It's just one little part of the world but things take place there too just like everywhere else," Auggie explains. And sure enough, when Paul looks carefully at the by now remarkably unique photographs, he notices a detail in one of them that makes all the difference in the world to him.

We see Auggie as a model of a spiritually literate person. He reads the world – in his case, one corner of Brooklyn – for meaning. By its very nature, his project is rooted in the everyday. He knows how closely we may need to see the significance of seemingly ordinary and insignificant events. He understands that some of the most rewarding spiritual journeys are those we take on our own block.

As Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu puts it, “One has to be in the same place every day, watch the dawn from the same house, hear the same birds awake each morning, to realize how inexhaustibly rich and different is sameness.” That is the challenge of everyday spirituality – no star bursts, no skies opening, no mountaintop experiences. Just today and today and today. Just Auggie standing at the corner with his camera every morning.

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Join this Saturday's Awakin Call with Mary Ann Brussat: Everyday sacred renaissance -- Exploring the potencies of being spiritually literate. Details and RSVP info here.