On What the Ordinary Has to Offer

“Oh, you must think there is more,” said the spiritual director to his directee. “More?” the directee responded. “More what?” “More than ordinary life,” indicated the director. The directee had just relayed the disarray he felt every time he sinned. The content of this disarray? Interior anxiety, regret, guilt, fear, and frustration.

Such is the effect upon the soul when temptation is entertained. Sin never fulfills its promise. Every time the directee was bored of ordinary life, Satan came and said, “There must be more, find it.” Saints will tell us that to succumb to such a temptation opens the door to habitual escapist behavior. Sliding in with the regret and fear as the door of sin cracks open is also irrationality. Escapists from ordinary life tend to use the same sinful routes repeatedly, always discovering that such a route never leads anywhere other than disarray. But unreasonably they set off upon these familiar routes over and over. Sin does not deliver the desired goal; the “promised more” is never found.

Eventually the sinner may glimpse sanity and inner peace: “I become aware that the more I choose my habitual sin the less it satisfies.” Sin always delivers less. Humans want more . . . more than an ordinary life of relationships, work, leisure, service, and worship. Surely these cannot exhaust human existence, it is thought. Of course, regaining sanity alone is never sufficient for us to stop choosing sin and rest in the limits of ordinary life. Knowing that sin is fruitless does not suffice to empower our resistance to it. No, our will and reason are so damaged, we need a supernatural intervention to assist us in living an ordinary life within its limits, purposes, commitments, and virtue. Paradoxically, grace is needed for us to remain joyful and at peace in ordinary circumstances. Satan is always lurking to upend our glimpses of sanity and hawk again his wares: “Surely fidelity to one’s sacramental state is not enough for YOU, yes? There is more for you,” comes the diabolic lie. “Go find it.”

Beginnings are always slow. Conversion is a halting journey, one that is oppressed by the burden of nostalgia for sin (Num.14:4). The supernatural intervenes, if we are vulnerable, and tutors us in the truth that the ordinary, the very location of the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, is what the human soul is looking for. But the ordinary is rejected because we do not recognize it as the place God joins us to His divinity. Dark spiritual forces conspire to have us ask of ordinary life what was asked of Christ’s own small home town, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” (Jn 1:46) The demeaning swipe at the biblical hamlet (approximately 250 people lived there when Christ did) is in fact a perennial attitude by those who think there must be an alternative to the everyday sourced in continual excitement, diversion, distraction, and novelty. These temptations recur often. Each time they propose empty promises getting us to think they will be fulfilled, “this time.” “Let me try again, if not Jerusalem, maybe Paris, or New York or Vegas.” Somehow, there must be a way out of Nazareth.

Of course, there is a way out. But we do not like that the way out is only a way in. The only way out of Nazareth, out of ordinary life’s finitude, is to host it. We are, in other words, called to welcome ordinary time as our lives. The ordinary cannot be escaped through fantasy. Leaving the ordinary through diversions, possibly sinful ones, is not a REAL option in the realm of faith and reason. That is because the ordinary is the routine within which humans live out their sacramental vocation. That vocation is bounded by true limits and responsibility. Such vocations (marriage, celibacy) do not falsely promise “the more” but simply occasion grace. Even this grace is not to be hoped for as “the more.” Grace does not transport out of the ordinary. God’s life pours into the ordinary, making it the only place of encounter between God and Man. The life and love of God infuses the ordinary; it does not cancel it. From within ordinary life grace suffuses our activities, enabling our participation in God’s life. Such participation pays no immediate gratification.

Such communion is sustained by faith. This faith is sustained by contemplating the actions of God in Christ. Contemplation is permeated with love, ignited by the beauty of the Paschal Mystery. Contemplation anchors the human in ordinary time. Contemplation is a commitment to wait for the one we behold in love to become internalized. The sinner wants to rush time. He wants time to speed up. “I want it now.” Such is a form of violent impatience. Patience is the enemy of the one who disdains the ordinary. The saved human is the one who patiently hosts his own re-integration,¹ the end of disarray, disunity, within his being. He is the one who awaits the salve of the incarnation. The divine reaches into ordinary life as gift. For the escapist, such a gift is not awaited. He wants to take, make happen, escape, steal (Gen 2:16–17). Contrasting such an impatient one is the salved one, the one who receives and awaits the healing presence of God from within the ordinary, from within the sacramental. Such a man only wants to receive from within ordinary time whatever God has chosen to give. In this disposition of receptivity is humanity’s peace.

Nazareth, therefore, is another word for love. Within Christ’s own hidden years, we are told He simply grew in age, wisdom, and grace (Lk 2:52). This process is so common that the writers of divine revelation left its historical details to silence. Here is what our nature rebels against: “No, I will not embrace a life that can be summarized by silence, there must be more.” We think that there is a way to escape the common rather than enter its depths. And yet, the saints know that entering the depths of the ordinary is the only way to heal the restless desire for the disordered more. Here we see the power of St. Ignatius’ Examen of Consciousness.² In this meditation the believer allows the Holy Spirit to remind him or her how the presence of God was encountered in the ordinary events of each day. Divine intimacy comes within the commonplace.

We hate the ordinary because we compare it to our fantasies. Fantasies are also projections of perfection. When we project so, we doom the attractiveness of imperfect created realities. Not a fair comparison. Instead, if compare we must, compare ordinary life to sin or sickness or death or the absence of one’s beloved . . . then you will see its worth. God offers us His presence, historically, sacramentally within the finite, limited ordinary circumstances of each day. This divine presence does not disturb the nature of the ordinary but simply inhabits it in ways “veiled and densely embodied” as Bishop Erik Varden describes it. So veiled and so dense that one might miss God’s presence, especially in a culture that values exhibitionism. The one revealed God is coaxed out of his veiled presence only by our silent contemplation. He is not an insecure showman eager to fill up space. If that were His nature, Rome would have been His chosen city of birth or at least Jerusalem.

We want “more,” yes, but regularly the more we want keeps suggesting escape as its delivery mode. The authentic more our human nature craves is not escape but captivation. We long to be held by divine beauty, confined within it as it radiates it truth to us in quotidian ways. Our nature, elevated by grace, wants reality. And if we remain in reality, with God in other words, the ordinary will be known as the remedy for our restlessness, not an opportunity to exacerbate it.

What Christ revealed is that the ordinary can be filled with the divine. That is the genuine “more” He wants to give. He revealed this in the Incarnation, and this revelation is sustained in the sacramental economy. God will only continue to offer amid the ordinary — bread, wine, oil, blessings — what He has always offered: Jesus of Nazareth.