#VirtualRitual – Each weekday our friends from Penn, including Students, Staff, Faculty, Penn Religious Communities Council and other voices from campus will be sharing the ways their spiritual rituals have adapted while staying at home and as they connect to their spiritual communities remotely.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Today James Shelton Nalley, Office Manager at the Christian Association at UPenn  and who loves growing Ghost Peppers, shares:⠀⠀

Covid has brought about unexpected, and for most of us, unprecedented change to the way we live our lives and how we engage our soul with the divinity that is infinitely close to, and infinitely beyond, us. As a Catholic, I had to find a new way to see God in the mundane. Typically, this reality is most strongly felt in the Eucharistic feast where Jesus comes – body, blood, soul, and divinity – to the community. In the wake of Covid, and out of abundant love for the community, attending Mass is limited even though it is certainly possible to watch the celebration on TV or the internet. It just doesn’t have the same feel, or experience. I needed to accustom my soul to experiencing God in the everyday. Since all things are grounded in God, their source, sustainer, and end, all things, all creation, acts as a sacramental window to grace, I just needed to be open to it. I began to approach my hobbies, old and new, like making hot sauce and growing plants, with a greater awareness and intentionality, to “taste and see the goodness of Lord” in all the small things. This has opened me up to the depth of beauty in literature, the vibrancy of life in gardening, the power of transformation in aging spirits, and the grace of hospitality that is rooted in, and leads us back to, the primordial gift that gave us all existence. This time of pandemic has given me the opportunity to uproot the complacency in my soul and approach the sacrament of creation.⠀⠀⠀⠀

#DailySPARC #UPenn #universityofpennsylvania #universityofpenn #upennalumni #VirtualRitual