Every year, I go on spiritual retreat to a rural property tucked into the Missouri River Valley. I take my prayer book and sit quietly on the dock at the lake. At first, it seems silent. I’m all alone. I feel loneliness like a dull ache in my bones. After a while, though, my ear becomes more sensitive. I hear the wind fluttering through oak leaves, the gentle rhythm of the water as it pushes to meet the shore, the hum of a windmill and the distant bleat of a calf for its mother. Southern leopard frogs nestle in the grass and the pollen-clad bees do their work in the clover field.

All around is the sound of life. The more I look and listen, the more my surroundings look back. Over it all, the Holy Spirit hovers, covering all us creatures under His wing. Like a sacred vessel filled to overflowing with grace, we are veiled and guarded.

Back home, during daily life, my children set up a buzz of activity in our house. They have endless energy for card games, crafts, skating, biking, running, digging and cooking in the kitchen. In the midst of the chaos I pour a cup of coffee and read a book in my easy chair. This household activity, it too participates in the sacred.

During the week, I meet friends at the coffee shop. They tell me how their lives are going, their victories and defeats. We laugh and commiserate. We make small talk and then pivot to sharing deeply about what we’re reading, thinking or praying about. Those conversations with friends are leisurely and invigorating. They’re also a reflection of God’s sacred friendship with us.

A parishioner recently remarked to me after Mass that the noise of the children comforts her. Those precious little ones who pray and wiggle with so much persistence, the clumsy bumps of their knees and elbows against the pews, the babies gurgling raspberries like springs of living water. To her, it’s similar to sitting in the woods at night surrounded by chirping crickets. It’s a gentle sound, a sacred sound. And, of course, this revelation of the sacred makes perfect sense. If the ordinary elements of our lives are sacred, it is only because the Mass itself is sacred.

Having a sense of the sacred means attentiveness to the deeper meaning of every moment, allowing God’s purpose to unfold. In my recent book, “The Forgotten Language,” from Sophia Institute Press, I explore how the language that describes the connection of everyday individual activities, people and things to the eternal sacred is poetic language. A poetic mindset reveals that a rose isn’t simply a rose. It’s a symbol of love. A falling leaf isn’t simply a leaf. It’s a meditation on mortality. In the Mass, bread isn’t bread, wine isn’t wine and you aren’t just another person. You are a saint, uniquely yourself and yet shining and shimmering with the universal love of Christ.

Your life is a poem. It all starts with the Mass, the greatest of all love poems.

Father Michael Rennier is pastor of Epiphany of Our Lord Parish in St. Louis. A former Anglican priest, he was ordained in 2016 under a pastoral provision. He and his wife, Amber, have six children.