Sinking Into the Small to Stay Sane
A Review of
In Praise of Houseflies: Meditations on the Gifts in Everyday Quandaries
Elise Tegegne
Paperback: Calla Press Publishing, 2025
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Reviewed by Julie Lane-Gay
Above my desk on a sticky note sits a quote: “Everything in creation has theological implications, and one of joys of being human is figuring out what they are.”
I love these words for all they reveal about pine trees and jelly fish, even more for reminding me of the ongoing joy in figuring out, but I’m often puzzled by the “everything.” Do washing the dishes, filling the car with gas, and making yet another e-transfer have theological implications?
Elise Tegegne’s collection of essays, In Praise of Houseflies: Meditations on the Gifts in Everyday Quandaries, offers wonderful insights on God’s presence in the daily tasks, not to make them weightier, but to show us their value.
Structured into four sections, Tegegne’s essays start with “Pilgrimage,” mining her last months of university and early days teaching in a Ugandan elementary school, experiences that lead her to explore Humiliation, Loneliness and Goodbyes. Of humiliation, she writes,
Now somebody knows the secret: you’re not perfect.
Turns out you’re not as smart or as brave or as beautiful as you want everyone to think you are, as you think you are. The moment your friend tells you you’ve had kale in between your incisors for the past hour, all of the fervor with which you made your arguments over lunch, all your points made, you yourself, all melt into a humbled puddle. Therein lies humiliation’s gift.
In Part Two, “Stasis,” Tegegne plumbs her first years of marriage and graduate school. Delving into Boredom, Cancellations, Hunger and Waiting, she admits,
… appetites move beyond just food. King David knew the dangers of being trapped by appetites. After amassing wives and castles and kingdoms and daughters and sons and war trophies and anecdotes of holy behavior, after napping while his armies fought his wars, after the boredom of satiation—he lingered on the roof, leered at Bathsheba’s naked body, and tumbled into adultery, murder, and the death of his infant son.
… Looking beyond ourselves, we can see how gluttony of any kind also poisons our relationships with others, and God.
In Part Three Tegegne moves on to “Conception,” the season of hoping to, and becoming, pregnant – in which she dives into Unknowing, Annoyances, Fear and Winter. Contemplating Annoyances, she writes:
Either I am too blind to see the good in my car battery dying for the third time in three days, or annoying can be just plain annoying.
Bob Dylan singing “everything is broken” somehow unconstricts my heart a few notches. Yes, the battery is broken, as everything else seems to be.
Perhaps instead of being easily miffed, I should be easily amazed: grateful that anything right happens at all. This, the gift of good in a world abuzz with evil, is the true anomaly.
Part Four, not surprisingly, is about the early months of motherhood – Cleaning, Sleep and Pain. Tegegne asks,
What if the laundry (inevitably) begins to mountain? What if the counters clog with stacked bowls and unopened mail and strawberry-stained shirts for days, weeks? My home will never, ever be completely, wholly clean…Until that day when the veil is torn in two, there will always be a spoon left in the sink.
Don’t we all know that spoon in the sink?
While her essays are personal, they frequently lead to scripture. Tegegne reflects on fear with Moses. “For my own sake, I am thankful for Moses’s flaws, for they encourage me in my own. Moses would have saved himself great anxiety if he had chosen to trust first instead of tremble; but I am encouraged by how God redeems Moses’s faltering heart.” Of Jesus she observes, “…the God who needs no rest, who is himself a cool cove of rest offered and given, needed rest.” And then she notes that observation we never hear enough: “If Christ himself chose not to do it all, how much more should we be free from this arbitrary pressure!”
While these arcing essays will be a particular gift for those in the years of early marriage and parenting, upon a second reading I realized that the kale in our teeth (and the humbled puddle), the urge to consume, and the spoon in the sink are ubiquitous, as is the elusiveness of bringing Christ into our dailyness. These are lyrical essays for everyone.
Reflecting on the ordinary feels essential in these days when the world’s events are so dizzying that we have to sink into the small things to stay sane – the quick conversation in the grocery store, the shared humour in a Zoom meeting, the person who repairs your bicycle with a kind word – and find theological implications, within them. In Praise of Houseflies offers a winsome, observant guide.
Julie Lane-Gay
Julie Lane-Gay is a writer and editor in Vancouver, British Columbia. She is an avid gardener and trained horticulturist who writes for garden magazines in the US and Canada. She is also the Senior Editor of CRUX, Regent College's journal of thought and opinion and a Catechist at her Anglican church. She is the author of The Riches of Your Grace:Living in the Book of Common Prayer,(IVP,2024).
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