ALONG THE WAY · CONTEMPLATIVE ESSAY
The Tyranny of the Ordinary
On attention, formation, and learning to inhabit what we believe.
There are some truths we do not reject because rejecting them would require far more attention than we are usually willing to give them. We simply fail to remain with them.
A sentence in Scripture catches us strangely. Something we have read before seems, for reasons we cannot quite explain, to have become heavier than it was yesterday. We see a thing about God, or about ourselves, with a clarity that is almost uncomfortable because it asks something of us before we have decided whether we are prepared to give it.
Then the coffee maker beeps.
This is not, of course, a tragedy. One must eventually drink the coffee. Someone may actually need us. The day does not become less real because we have had a spiritual thought before breakfast. Yet there is a subtle danger here, because what is immediate has a way of presenting itself as what is important, and what is important often has the discourteous habit of making no such demand.
The bill has a due date. The phone announces itself. A child calls from another room. Work has a beginning and an end and usually someone who notices whether it has been done. But the things that shape a soul do not always arrive with such useful machinery. They may come quietly enough that we can postpone them without appearing, even to ourselves, to have refused anything at all.
This is one of the curious ways in which ordinary life can deceive us without ever becoming bad.
The familiar world is so solid. It has counters and traffic lights and receipts and laundry baskets. It provides endless evidence of its own existence, and because it is always in front of us, we can begin to mistake visibility for reality. A thing that cannot be measured, scheduled, answered, or crossed off a list begins to feel less substantial, even if we would insist in a theological discussion that it is the more substantial thing.
So a strange division begins to develop.
We believe one thing and live among another.
This is not always hypocrisy. Hypocrisy implies a deliberate pretense, and most of us are doing something less dramatic and therefore perhaps more dangerous. We are sincere. We truly do believe many of the things we say we believe. But sincerity does not automatically give belief weight.
A person can believe that God is near and yet move through most of the day with no practical sense of His nearness at all. One can believe that prayer matters and still allow it to become the first thing sacrificed when life becomes crowded. One can speak beautifully about trust and then discover, at three o’clock in the morning, that the imagination has been rehearsing disaster with far greater devotion than it has ever rehearsed providence.
The difficulty is not that the truth has failed.
The difficulty is that we have not yet learned to live at the speed of what we know.
Insight comes quickly. Formation does not.
There are moments in which we understand something almost at once, and then there are years in which that same understanding must work its way into the habits of fear, desire, irritation, self-protection, ambition, and control that have had much longer to establish themselves.
This is why the ordinary life matters so much.
We often imagine that the deepest spiritual work must occur in the obviously spiritual places, but most of what a person becomes is formed in situations too unremarkable to receive a title. It happens in the way we answer when interrupted, in what we do with disappointment before we have found noble language for it, in the private interpretation we place upon another person’s silence, in the small decisions by which we either surrender control or quietly reclaim it.
These things do not feel monumental while they are happening.
That is precisely why they are so revealing.
The ordinary moment has very little theatricality to hide behind.
We may know exactly what patience is while reading about it and discover, ten minutes later, that we do not particularly want to practice it. We may understand forgiveness with great theological precision and then meet the person who has made forgiveness necessary. We may speak of trusting God in the abstract and feel quite differently when trust means allowing an unanswered question to remain unanswered for another day.
It is there that belief begins to acquire weight.
Not when it is admired, but when it is allowed to interfere.
And perhaps this is why distraction deserves more respect than we usually give it. We tend to think of distraction as a minor inconvenience, something mildly embarrassing about modern life, but it can become a way of remaining perpetually near truth without ever being altered by it.
We hear something meaningful and move on before it has finished speaking.
We encounter conviction and immediately convert it into content.
We become so accustomed to receiving another thought, another teaching, another explanation, that we begin to mistake exposure for transformation.
There is no shortage of material to think about.
What is scarce is the willingness to stay with one thing long enough for it to think about us.
That sounds strange, but perhaps it is the better description.
There are truths we initially examine as though they were objects placed in front of us. We turn them over, compare them, decide whether they seem sound. But occasionally a truth ceases to remain politely on the table and begins to examine the person doing the examining.
This is where contemplation becomes less comfortable.
It is one thing to say that God is trustworthy. It is another to discover precisely where I do not trust Him.
It is one thing to say that my life belongs to God. It is another to notice the number of places in which I still insist upon authorship.
The mind can assent before the rest of the person has caught up.
And perhaps discipleship consists, in part, of allowing the rest of the person to catch up.
Not by manufacturing intensity, and certainly not by treating every mundane event as though it must conceal some dramatic spiritual message. That would merely be another way of refusing ordinary life as it actually is.
The coffee really is coffee.
The laundry really does need doing.
Some interruptions are only interruptions.
Yet none of this means that God is absent from the ordinary simply because the ordinary remains ordinary.
That may be the harder thing to learn.
We are often tempted to imagine that spiritual significance requires unusual circumstances, when in fact much of Christian maturity seems to consist in becoming the kind of person who can recognize the presence of God without needing the scenery to change.
A kitchen can remain a kitchen.
A commute can remain a commute.
A difficult conversation need not become poetic before it becomes holy.
The sacred does not always announce itself by making the ordinary less ordinary. Sometimes it enters so quietly that the only evidence of its presence is that we begin to respond differently than we would have before.
And this may be what it means for truth to become inhabited.
At first, we visit it.
We think about it for a while. We admire the architecture. We may even return often enough to become familiar with the rooms.
But there is a difference between visiting a place and living there.
Eventually, if the truth is to become part of us, we must begin arranging our lives according to its dimensions.
We discover that some furniture no longer fits.
Some habits belong to another house.
Some fears have been occupying rooms they were never meant to own.
And slowly, sometimes almost imperceptibly, what was once an idea we believed becomes the place from which we see everything else.
Perhaps this is why attention matters so much.
Attention is not merely concentration. It is a form of consent.
To attend to something is to grant it enough reality that it may make a claim upon us.
And in a world that is very good at keeping us occupied, one of the quietest acts of faith may simply be refusing to confuse occupation with presence.
The ordinary world will continue to ask things of us.
It should.
We were not created to live outside it.
But perhaps the question beneath all the other questions is whether we will move through that world as though the visible is all that is real, or whether we will become gradually more awake to the fact that reality is larger than what demands our immediate attention.
The coffee maker will still beep.
The day will still begin.
But perhaps, over time, the truth that met us before the noise started will no longer be so easily left behind.
Perhaps it will come with us.
And eventually we may discover that the ordinary life we thought was interrupting our formation was the very place where it was happening.
