A Fault of Mine - Overlooking the Ordinary

Finally, I’ve completed this most lengthy writing that I have ever endeavored to read.   It has taken me close to four months, off and on.  To think I began the journey by becoming intrigued by the enjoyment of Bettyann’s reading of novels. I had ordered a hard copy for her as a Christmas gift and thought I would download a copy for my own edification and maybe something we could share thoughts about. I had no idea at the time that Middlemarch is the epic novel by Mary Anne Evans, better known by her male penname George Eliot. This work is considered one of the most significant novels of the Victorian period and a masterpiece of English fiction.  Far from my assumption. I knew that the jig was up when I, admitting, passed up all the review stuff, forward, any introductions, etc. and began following Eliot’s exploring numerous themes in a series of interlocking narratives, telling the stories of ordinary characters intertwined in the intricate details of life and community. Eliot’s focus is the ordinary, and in fact her lament—in the form of 700 pages of detail—is that I not only so often fail to see it, but fail to see that there is really not such a thing. There is neither ordinary human pain nor ordinary human living. “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,” she wrote, “it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

Was the world Eliot saw around her anything like  my own in its capacity to silence the dissonance of details, the frequency of pain, the roar of life in its most minute and yet extraordinary forms. I don’t think so. Bettyann and I haven’t conversed about it yet because the hard copy’s print I got her is way to small and she has still not finished the series of books of one of her favorite authors. But I’m thinking out loud here by saying, for myself, there’s been too many times in my life that I’ve silenced the wild roar of the ordinary and diverted my attention to magnitudes more willing to fit into my control. It’s a little sad for me when I look back now as realize that most of the largest tasks and decisions were given more credence, the biggest life events of my remembered history has been the most studied and admired, and the greatest powers and influences have been feared or revered most. And on the other hand, the ordinary acts I undermined, the most common and chronic angst I managed to mask, and the most simple and monotonous events I silenced or paid no attention too at all. Unwittingly? (a very recent word used in a political indictment of recent days)  But have I judged correctly?

I’ve been noticing, and trying more intently, probably for the last couple of years  or so, in my  work and play, at pulling back the curtain on these places I have wadded out of sight and sound, showing glimpses of life easily missed, pulling off the disguises that hide sad or mortal wounds, drawing my attention to all that is deemed mundane and obscure. The more I pay attention to the eternal and creators, I'm finding they are often the subjects of the ordinary, but it is for the sake of the extraordinary, even the holy. Nowhere does Eliot articulate this more clearly than in her defense of the ordinary scenes depicted in the early Dutch painting of her work, Adam Bede. “Do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish those old women scrapping carrots with their work-worn hands….It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and flame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes.” I’m seeing more clearly that ordinary life, ordinary hardship, ordinary sorrow is precisely the scene of my need for more of God, and remarkably, the scene of God and miracles.

In this sense, I’ve begun to peer at the psalmist and prophets and ancient storytellers as all struggling artists, closing the infinite distance between the grandeur of God and an ordinary humanity. What are human beings that You are mindful of them? Mortals that You care for them?

Placing myself in the parables that Jesus told become so very rich in their artistic, theological pauses in the ordinary. I’m mostly like those listening.  Often finding myself beyond the need for stories, whether a little puffed up with a few bucks left over or self-importance, or at times engorged (new word) with religion and knowledge, His stories have been stopping me in my tracks.  I’m finding Him acutely aware that I, in my religiosity, my self-assuredness and my ease of distraction am often dancing around idols of magnitude, diverting my eyes from the ordinary. And yet His very life proclaims the magnitude of the overlooked. I’m seeing more clearly now that the ordinary is precisely the place that God has chosen to visit all along—and not so much as the God of magnitude. 

When Bettyann requested a week or so ago, that I re-grout a backsplash that was grouted ten years ago I was reminded how very prone I am to not giving attention to the ordinary when I approached the counter and commented to myself: ‘how in the world could I have missed this? I’ve seen this at least twice daily, many more often, for how many years?’  Then I thought, ‘eureka; the ordinary is worth considering’

Father, God, thank you for drawing my attention to the worth of considering the ordinary.  It has been far too easy to miss the world as it really is. May Your Holy Spirit to continually remind me that while Jesus’s own disciples bickered over the most significant seats in the kingdom, they were put off by a unwanted woman at a well, they overlooked a sick woman reaching out for the fringe of His robe, and they tried to silence a suffering man making noise in an attempt to get His attention—all ordinary scenes which became the places of miracles. Even in my religion where the last are proclaimed first, where the servant, the suffering, and the crucified are lifted highest, the story of the widow’s coin is still easily forgotten, the obscure faces Jesus has asked me to remember; I so easily overlook. Forgive me!  Also, I ask forgiveness when I read and remember, all to glibly, Your great acts in history and in everyday living that I mistakenly at times see as less great.  For the ordinary is filled with a God who chose before time to visit.  Amen

Having a Plan and Purpose

I’m wondering; did Dad and Mom have a plan and a purpose for my life?  I can’t rightly say.  I know they loved me with their full being. And the care and comfort provided me was staller. But a plan or purpose? I’m not sure.  At least not in the way I view Michelle and Mitch, Amy and Jason growing Grace, Clair, Sarah, and Braydon. I’ve observed them wrapping my grandchildren in their dreams of an assurance of a plan and a purpose for their lives—albeit a purpose shrouded in hopeful mystery. Maybe it was because, growing up, I was too much a mover and shaker, with little room for contemplative thought, unwillingness to listen, too bull-headed to embrace a thought that my life was set apart.  As I delve more into leading conversations with, especially Grace and Sarah, I've noted they understand that their lives are set apart. And it doesn't appear to be strange to them, at all.

For John the Baptist, the only son of Zechariah and Elizabeth, there is much less mystery for me. From the get go John grew up knowing that he would one day be called a prophet. In fact, he grew up knowing his life’s exact call: “You will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him,” Luke records. He was to be a Nazirite, literally one consecrated to God and separated from the general population.

There is very little to know about John’s life outside of his short public ministry. On the other hand, I read that he was a miracle child, just like my grandchildren, of a barren womb, grew strong in spirit and lived in the desert. He ate locusts and wild honey and wore clothing made of camel’s hair. His entire life seemed to be marked with the knowledge that he was set apart for a unique and specific role. I imagine that he thought often of the day he would meet the Messiah whose way he was to prepare. But I can’t imagine that he ever expected it would be someone from his own family, a cousin who grew up beside him.

John was baptizing in the Jordan River when the sky opened up and the Spirit descended like a dove, the sign that God had told him to expect. “The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is he who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.” The Spirit rested upon Jesus. Twice, John seems to note his astonishment; “I myself did not know him.” It is safe to assume that John knew who Jesus was; his mother, Elizabeth, was Mary’s cousin. But John did not know Jesus as the Christ, the One he had been set apart to proclaim, the one whose sandals he was not worthy to untie.

I’m struck by how often I do not see the person in front of me—the loved one, the colleague, the stranger I sell short as an imager bearer of God. John was so taken with what God revealed about Jesus that he realized he had never really known Him. This distant cousin; wasn’t He present at family gatherings and near on holidays? The cousin on occasion he had kicked a ball around with, was the Lord, the one he had been waiting for all his life. Without questioning God, without doubting Jesus, John immediately reframed his perspective and bowed before the Lamb of God. For the remainder of his days, Luke again records that John gave this testimony of Jesus: “I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. I would not have known him, except that the one who sent me to baptize with water told me…  I have seen and I testify that this is the Son of God.” 

How quick am I adjusting my eyes to all You, Father, would have me see in the person in front of me? Yet the answer is repeated again and again in the gospels. If I am unwilling to let God transform the world before my eyes, there are going to be people I will never really know, dynamics that will I will never know because I’ve not noticed, signs I’m going to miss completely. Eureka! In the kingdom of God, astonishment should not surprise me!

Reading on here in Luke: The day after John was shown the truth about his cousin, it says, he introduced two of his disciples to the Christ. “Rabbi,” they said, “where are you staying?” “Come,” Jesus replied, “and you will see.” Like Jesus Himself, I find this exchange has both an element of the spiritual and the physical entwined. Something divine and something human. The Holy Spirit is reminding me here that there is a vertical quality about my life, a reaching to taste and see the goodness of God and to know the one in whose image I am formed. Likewise, there is also a horizontal quality about the invitation of Christ to come and see. I’m called to see the image of God in all my neighbors, to be present in a crowd that prefers escapism, to reach out to the world as if reaching to Christ Himself.

Father, God, I come this morning to answer Jesus’s invitation to come and see, learning at my age that it was indeed a multi-dimensional offer. I want to fall in love with being in Your house, meeting and greeting Your family.  But give me eyes to discover the kingdom of Christ that is not of flesh and blood. The kingdom that only You can reveal. Then help my unbelief and willingness to see. Amen