Transcript

It’s always interesting to me how seemingly unrelated things come together in a moment of clarity (or perhaps delusion) when you aren’t thinking about them on a conscious level.

I drive a stretch of freeway in Phoenix quite often and there is a billboard for Grand Canyon University, a Christian college. The billboard says, “FIND YOUR PURPOSE”. Of course that is a marketing ploy to evangelical Christians. Every time I saw it, it bugged me but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.

A few days ago I had two unsolicited and out of the blue conversations with two people who basically said, “I stopped reading Orthodox saint and monk stuff because it depressed me. I’m not those people, I’m a regular person with a job and a family and I struggle to just be a decent Christian.”

That evening a meme showed up on my FB feed that said, “You’re probably mediocre”. And miracle of miracles, “You’re” was spelled correctly so I took it as a message from God.

All of those things put together brought back up to the surface an event 23 years ago that frames my struggle with my spiritual life that I’ve had since I can consciously remember having a spiritual life. So, I guess I’ll start with that.

I’ve always known to one degree or another that I have an ego. To this day, I clearly remember when I was in first grade sitting on the bus with Donna Barry trying to impress her on the way home from school and I knew that what I was doing was fake and a manifestation of my pride and ego. She didn’t buy it and she obviously wasn’t impressed. I got off the bus with a big sigh and a crushed ego… it’s still a big sigh even to this day. Over the years, my manifestations of ego got more nuanced and subtle. And now I’ve advanced to the point that I know it is usually an expression of my ego to publicly admit that I have one. Which is good and bad I suppose, at least I know what’s really going on when I claim to be the first among sinners when I know I’m not. However, as much as I’ve been aware of my ego, the problem has always been that I didn’t always know that my ego was sometimes expressed in my most spiritually intense moments. I had one of those moments a couple decades ago.

So, 23 years ago I sinned like an Old Testament bible character. Oh sure, I had sinned before in some manners like all bible characters do, we all have. But this one was well, really big. At least in my mind it was really big because it was really big in the Bible story even though throughout the world it happens thousands of times every day. So, for years I lived in dread and fear that God would punish me for my sin the way he did David and Bathsheba, and that our child would die because I had betrayed what I felt was my calling and purpose as a minister, teacher, and evangelist. After 23 years, in spite of my self assessment of my purpose and calling, and all my guilt and angst for betraying that calling, and my self identification with a Bible character, our child is still alive and I am still working out the source of that fear and dread… and that is what this podcast is about.

When the billboard, conversations, and Facebook meme came together, it occurred to me that the problem with the billboard is that “Find your purpose” is kind of the Christian equivalent of the New Age self-help’s mantra “Discover your passion” or “Live your dream”. These are all generally, at least in my experience, a narcissistic expression of our culture that has been formed by a gross amalgam of the Romanticist and utilitarian movements of the 18th century that essentially elevates personal experience as the measure of all things and views the human being as a tool in the grand scheme of the universe. These two things along with a thread of mild Calvinism woven in, these three ideas form the framework of our culture and modern American Christian spirituality and shape our interpretations of scripture, our self awareness of our personal spiritual experiences, and our interpretations and applications of even Orthodox spirituality.

Our culture has wholesale fallen for Romanticism, the notion that our personal emotional experiences are the measure and source of all true art and apprehension of reality and that the universe and humanity are on a path of upward evolution to higher planes of awarenesses. The new age and Christian charismatic movements have a direct line to this philosophy.

The Utilitarian movement was a later development that views the human being and the universe in terms of people behaving in a way that fulfills your role and place in the grand scheme of maximizing the collective good of all humanity and your personal happiness. The marriage of a mild Calvinism and utilitarianism demands that we fulfill our God determined created purpose for the good of all humanity and our own self-good. These unexamined and underlying assumptions of existence within our culture inform and shape our life, self-awareness, politics, and spirituality. And I admit freely, this is more of a semi-informed podcast prognostication of an armchair theologian and Wikipedia philospher’s ruminations than any kind of substantive dissertation topic. But no matter how we explain the current state of our American Christian consciousness and the annoying pebble in our mental shoe that it creates, it is there and a problem for a lot of people even if they don’t know it’s a problem.

So all of this is to say that my self-awarenesses and fear and dread regarding my sins were more a philosophical and theological delusion and a manifestation of ego than true spirituality. I came to the conclusion years ago that I’m not a bible character. The fact of the matter is that only a couple hundred people out of the billions of people who have ever lived on this earth are bible characters whose lives had a thread in the tapestry of salvation history. Now that I’m Orthodox I’ve come to the conclusion I’m not a menaion level saint. In fact only a few hundred people who have ever lived are commemorated in the services of the Church as saints. They represent to us the highest attainments of spiritual endurance and achievement but also the lowest that a human being can sink to and still find salvation based on a single sentence gasped in blind desperation toward a man who said he was God. For the vast majority of us we fall in the middle, the media… the mediocre, the ordinary. We don’t endure being roasted alive, our body parts cut off one by one, years of ascetical disciplines, nor do we murder, plunder, pillage, nor live in absolute wanton pleasure on a pilgrimage to the holy land until we encounter a miracle. We are for the most part ordinary people who sin ordinarily because we fear great consequences if we sin more flamboyantly. We fantasize we could be a martyr as Flannery O’Connor said, if they killed us quick. We love God but are guilt ridden about our lack of self discipline, and for the most part our martyrdom will never be being beheaded in the street confessing Christ, but it’s an ordinary, day after day, year after year, mediocre death, a martyrdom that’s more like being pecked to death by a duck. It is depressing for most of us to believe that the wonderful plan God has for our life and the purpose He has for us is to be an ordinary person with the same struggles and issues that billions of other people endure daily with no end of the daily grind in sight, and no discernable greatness or exalted point to it all. There are no mentions in the menaion of saints who slept through the alarm because the kids were sick and threw up in the middle of the night in their bed, skipped morning prayers, went to work and got chewed out for being late, came home, drank a couple beers, played with the kids, did the dishes for his wife who took care of sick kids all day, called his mother on Sundays, fixed the garbage disposal on a Saturday night instead of going to vespers, and resisted the urge to flirt with the cashier when his wife was unexpectedly pregnant with their fourth child. Of course there are a bazillion permutations of ordinary. You know what yours looks like. And you know your frustrations, guilt and despondency because you can’t find some special gift or ministry nor can you see an exalted grand purpose or point to your mundane daily existence.

The flip side of the delusion of attaining spiritual greatness is that we aggrandize the consequentiality of our sins and shortcomings and obsess about not being able to keep all the rules exactly because of our circumstances or personal weaknesses and failures. Excessive self-condemnation and despondency at our failures is a manifestation of the false idea that all sins are equally damning. But more often it is more about pride because it shows we think more highly of ourselves than we ought rather than being realistic about our capabilities based on our true state of our humanity. Yes, I “should” be able to play basketball like Michael Jordan because I am a human with two arms and two legs, or sing like Pavarotti because I have a voice, or I think like Einstein because I have a brain. Well, no. That’s all a lie we’ve been fed for about 5 decades now. We all come to the table of life, and the spiritual life, in various conditions and with unchosen and sometime chosen limitations and shortcomings. In some circles, guilt, self-condemnation, and claiming to be the worst of sinners even though you are clearly not is a badge of spirituality but is really about ego and pride. Romans 12 warns us to not think more highly of ourselves than we ought. Our failures are not in proportion to everyone else’s capabilities but only our own. God knows. Don’t be harder on yourself than God.

So you are mediocre, you live an unextraordinary life just like millions of other people do. The thing is, by the fact of the incarnation God into a middle class family of step kids and sketchy beginnings, He exalted the mediocre, the ordinary, the daily grind of messy family life. In a very real sense every ordinary life is extra-ordinary and every temptation to sin and every opportunity to virtue and to do what must be done rather than what you want to do is an opportunity to become a saint. Jesus’ greatest miracle was being raised from the dead and yet no one saw it happen. But he was recognized as God in the scriptures after his resurrection in the very most ordinary of human events: when he cooked breakfast and when he broke bread.

We wonder what can make my life extraordinary, what will give it meaning and lift me out of the mundane and dullness of my routine existence?

Maybe being the extraordinary life is accomplished simply by being extraordinary in our most ordinary circumstances.

Can you not get agitated when you are in a grocery checkout line and the lady at the register is fumbling through an envelope looking for a 25 cent off coupon for toilet paper?

Can the phrase “What an idiot” never cross your mind or lips when you listen to someone talk?

Can you not say, “You gotta be ummm… kidding me?!” ever again?

Can you not write that comment on a FB post, how about not even write it and then delete it much less not even think about writing it?

Can you sit at an intersection in a car with no A/C in 115 at a red light and miss the green because the guy in front of you was texting through the green light and not sin in thought, word and deed?

Can you do a good thing and tell no one about it?

I could go on and on, but you get the idea…. Our mediocre life hands us plenty of opportunities to be saints. Our thoughts of living an exalted life if we have not mastered even these 4 or 5 ordinary things is, well, a delusion. A quick death by the sword in some ways is actually easier than living 80 years in a dysfunctional family. Ordinary people and ordinary life offer up everything we need to overcome our selves. So, that has become my goal: To become a saint by living through the most mundane and ordinary things in my life in a way that manifests God. Chances are there will never be a troparion or kontakion about someone who lives an ordinary life that goes something like this:



“By not cursing in rush hour traffic, thou hast found the way to divine contemplation.

And by working 9-5 at a mind numbing desk job for 20 years to feed thy family thou hast broken the snares of the enemy,

By not judging the people of Walmart thou hast shown thyself an enlightener of all

O pure one,

Thou hast kept the faith even through the raising of teenaged daughters,

O holy husband and Daddy Bob, entreat Christ God to save our souls.

So yeah, we all know that’s never going to happen… but you know what, the church may not ever write a hymn about the 99% of us, but in judgment I’ll settle for “You have been faithful in the small things, well done my good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your master.”