If God isn't in daily things, I don't know where to find him.
He is not in my neighbour's red Acura NSX. Or the exploitation of Haitian construction workers (my neighbours to the other side) who get paid three dollars a day to lug bags of cement up jerry-rigged scaffolding in forty-five degree heat. He is not in the razor wired, dog guarded, digital cabled palatial compounds that surround me. I may be wrong, but he doesn't seem to be in the rolling blackouts or water shortages. He is not in the genocide of the Taino or the history of brutal colonialism. It seems that people have made these things without need of too much help. It seems that these things are too flashy for God to have much to do with them.
I had a most exquisite cup of coffee this morning. I am not, traditionally, a coffee person, but I've recently been persuaded that coffee can be a beautiful and delicious thing. Besides the obvious (to me at least) socio-political implications of drinking coffee the biggest reason I didn't like coffee was the sheer volume one was expected to drink. Guzzling a vat of weak, Luke-warm coffee seems to be a quintessentially North American thing to do. One need not look far to find a better way to enjoy coffee. This morning I brewed a cup of coffee in a small espresso maker. I filled the bottom compartment with cold water. Then I filled the middle compartment with freshly roasted Dominican coffee, screwed the whole apparatus together and carefully balanced it over the gas burner. After a couple minutes the thing began to splutter and in another twenty seconds I had about three ounces of delicious coffee. I poured it into a small china mug and added a little bit of honey for sweetness. I could get used to this elegant ritual.
There is something sacred too about fruit. Bananas picked ripe that morning and brought into town to be sold on a fruit cart, or one of the many different kinds of mangoes. Like the Colmado, everyone has a fruit stand, they are every bit as frequent and convenient as the neighbourhood stores. From a block away you can see Papayas the size of footballs crowning the carts. If there's a patch of shade on the street there will probably be a fruit stand with a couple connoisseurs divining out the perfect mango as noisy, overloaded motorcycles smoke their way past.
There is also a small moment of grace at the end of each day. After the sun has burned a path across the sky and just before it sets, the heat suddenly dissipates. For about twenty minutes (before the cement begins giving back the heat it has been absorbing all day) you can sit outside in perfect comfort. Another day of relentless heat is forgiven just as the people begin to come home from work.
In this honking, roaring, sun soaked city, the daily things are often tucked into corners. But they are there, waiting to be found.