We rise to the ordinary, the predictable, the mundane. We move through a pattern of daily repetitions: wake, shower, dress, eat, and go. Somewhere. Life is so utterly predictable.
If traumas don’t kill us, something odd happens. We keep living, breathing, existing. Peter denied Christ then woke the next day. Living in the present is so difficult because it is so ordinary. We dream of future possibilities or glorify past excitements while breathing in this ordinary present moment.
Thomas Merton once cautioned the would-be contemplative that prayer quickly becomes boring and repetitious, routine. The ordinary predictability of inhaling and exhaling becomes a weight that some cannot bear. They grow weary.
One way to respond to this utter predictability is to seek out crisis, to create crisis. Oddly, even wanderlust can grow tiresome. Crisis loses the edge of surprise over time. Reflecting on the horror of the trenches in World War 1, Eugen Rosenstock Huessy said that most of the time it was boring.
We may look at other people and dream of what could have been. In fact, some try to recreate could-have-beens. The man or woman who has an affair soon discover the malaise overtaking the newness. Binx Boling called my attention to the malaise.
In Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer,” Binx Boling is a man who has the good life. The life we all dream about. He is financially successful, comes from a secure family, enjoys the best culture has to offer, and spends his time watching movies and dating beautiful women. Binx also seems to be caught in a struggle. He feels the malaise at the back of all things, but at the same time, he is startled and surprised by existence.
Being alive is wondrous and dreadful. Why are we here? What are we supposed to be doing? What will it take to give our lives signification? Is it praise from others? Some recognition for all our dedication, all we’ve suffered, all we have given? Are we really yearning unlimited wealth? Some spiritual power? Lots and lots of stuff?
Why doesn’t any answer satisfy?
At times, the idea of eternal life can be horrifying. “You mean we just keep living and living and living?” This terror of never-ending life may be bound us in the terror of the ordinary, in the anguish of why?
The suffering of loneliness and sickness and broken relations may hide the suffering of being alive. We are caught between the wonder and the terror of existence. We know so little and feel even less.
For those who do not know the malaise, these words will make little sense. For those who do, you might hear a distant echo of anguish the trembles deep in the soul. My intention is not to solve our human dilemma in 500 words or less.
I am looking for clues. I am looking at the Risen Christ, and hopefully through the Risen Christ. In Him, I see life lived fully, completely. I behold love poured out with no restriction. All things were made, shaped, formed, properly ordered through the Son, the Word Made Flesh. In Him, I see the wondrous order of all creation.
Order? There is an order, a shape, a form to all creation. Without order, all form is but a momentary illusion.
The word “ordinary” derives from order. Our ordinary world, our ordinary moments are ordered.
In Christ, I see a glimpse of this order. His life is poured out fully in love: every moment from birth through death. In His resurrection, I behold the unrestricted reciprocation of the Father’s love by the Spirit.
In Him, I live and move and breathe. I breathe. I inhale and exhale. Each moment ordered by exhaling, inhaling: pouring out, filling up. In my very breath, I see but a tiny pattern of reciprocal life revealed in Christ. Within this wonderful and terrible existence, I breathe, we breathe. The wonder of reciprocation, of giving and receiving, of loving and being loved is enacted all around me in the sun and moon, man and woman, trees and bees. All creation echoes a reciprocation of life, a mutuality of giving and receiving.
Mostly I am deaf and blind to this magnificent symphony of love, this order of love. Some times, the blind will see. The light of Christ pierces my eyes. In this ordinary moment, I behold love unspeakable and full of glory.
* Image by Thomas Leuthard on flickr. (Used by Creative Commons Permission)
May 1, 2013 at 12:27 pm
Brilliant. The work of Peter Rollins is a nice (albeit somewhat nihilistic) companion to this kind of militant commitment to the mundane realities of life. This piece is earthy in the best kind of way. Thanks for inviting us into a poetic embrace of the everyday.
May 1, 2013 at 4:44 pm
I have not read Peter Rollins. Thanks for the heads up. I will check him out.
May 1, 2013 at 8:07 pm
Ordinary people living ordinary lives are ordinary, I would say. To live outside the box may I suggest that you find a homeless person dying under a bridge. Hold their hand. Bathe their forehead and their feet, all the while speaking to them of the love of GOD until they breath their last breath.
Then help load their body onto the garbage truck and go find another dying soul to minister to as they pass on.
May 1, 2013 at 4:45 pm
That is poignant David. We must see those falling through the cracks and embrace them even when we cannot make all their problems go away.
May 3, 2013 at 11:26 pm
Very thoughtful, Doug. While “the malaise” is undoubtedly an historically pervasive feature of the human condition, I wonder to what extent the peculiar features of the modern outlook have aggravated it to a pitch never before experienced in human history? The question that drove Walker Percy’s literary project: “Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments?” While an argument could be made that this applies to any period in human history, it is also a uniquely late modern question. Modern humans, after all, take a kind of democratic pride in regarding themselves as just another species of organism in the environment, “no different than any other.” We’re even rather eager (perhaps anxious?) to prove it. But this is problematic because no other species of organism goes around anxiously trying to prove it’s no different than all the others, and all the others feel appropriately good in good environments and bad in bad environments. In the animal kingdom there are no Binx Bollings who in the prime of their lives, at peak physical and psychological health; when they’ve been fed, clothed, loved, and protected all of their lives; when they serve a useful and rewording role in their communities and their talents are put to good use; and when their needs for religion, sex, friendship, culture, and entertainment are met, nevertheless acutely feel this “malaise,” this sense of being cut off, closed off from everything and everyone around them. Any other creature under analogous circumstances would feel appropriately good, or would at least evince behaviors indicative of well-being. Not so us humans, says Percy. I often wonder if more than any other single event in recent history, more than, e.g., industrial capitalism and the breakdown of the traditional agrarian ethos, if it is this peculiarly modern outlook, this insistence that we’re “just organisms in environments,” that has intensified the malaise of the human condition, marking it out as the single defining feature of the Western individual in the 20th and 21st centuries. Any thoughts on this? .
May 4, 2013 at 11:00 pm
Excellent question Ben. As always, you’re penetrating insight challenges and provokes me. GK Chesterton in His Everlasting Man explores this question from various angles. The book is asking what is man? who is man? He tells the story of man as in mankind and then tells the story of man as in Jesus Christ. While Chesterton is responding to a range of ideas that were popular in his day (and only went on to grow in popularity over the coming century), he is specifically responding to HG Wells “Outline of History,” where Wells sees us as a development in the evolutionary cycle of animal life. Chesterton suggests that there is a thought you can think that ends all thought. If we are not distinct and our minds are simply evolutionary process, we cannot trust our observations of the world and ability to process those observations because of the hidden evolutionary motives that override our supposed trust of rationality or the rationality of the cosmos. Our thoughts become untrustworthy thus we can no longer think but are merely insane trapped in a closed rational loop of our own making. Chesterton sees the modern world continuously falling into closed rational loops that border on insanity. For him, we need new eyes to see, we need to somehow recover wonder. As Chesterton describes his understanding of wonder, I have come to believe he is discussing a true scientific discovery not bound by the “a prioris” of scientism but open to discover the absolute oddity, surprise and delight of the commonplace world around us. Oddly enough, many of of modern inventions further remove us from wonder and eyes to see. Now we look at GPS Applications on our smartphones while missing the glory of exploring the world around us. Chesterton even has a quote about that. I must look for it and post it!