A Healer’s Geste

Commonplace Entry: Mystery in the Ordinary

Splendor in the Ordinary: Your Home as a Holy Place by Thomas Howard

Hence Christians think more about God in their hearts than God in a temple. [...] Not only because of this inner focus in Christianity, but also because we modern men, Christian or nonreligious, live under the scientific myth which tells us that everything is explainable sooner or later and hence that there are no “divine mysteries” about — because of this, modern Christians often find it difficult to keep alive any notion at all of mystery or of the hallowed, except perhaps as a sort of cloud or glow that ought to suffuse their imagination when they pray or worship. It is hard to see ourselves as walking daily among the hallows — that is, as carrying on the commonplace routines of our ordinary life in the presence of might mysteries that would ravish and terrify us if this veil of ordinariness were suddenly stripped away. [...] Or, again, take something daily and ordinary like raising children. Of course we want them eventually to know and love God, and we teach them and take them to church and so forth. But all this daily clutter of potty chairs and toys and earaches and one thing and another — this is just hurly-burly. It’s because of all this stuff that we can never get around to the real business. All this clutter keeps us on the chase and never allows us time to breathe and think and live with our children. They inhabit the same house as we do, but we end up being mere laundresses and chauffeurs and umpires for them. If there was ever a simple time in history when parenthood and childhood could be carried on the way it was all supposed to be done, it has gone with the wind. Somehow we have gotten swept into a millrace, and it’s nonstop flailing and thrashing just to keep ourselves from drowning. The sheer necessities of modern life sweep us farther and farther from any sense that it is all hallowed, really. What are we to do? There are various things we could do, no doubt. We could resign ourselves to the millrace and abandon any thought of anything but the flailing. Or we could take some drastic step like moving to a farm in Vermont or an island in the Aegean, helping thereby to find some peace and quiet where we would be able to recollect ourselves and do things right. A third possibility would be to accept the fact that life comes tumbling at us nowadays, but that it is nonetheless possible for us to see our ordinary daily routines as proceeding among the hallows, so to speak; [...] doing once more what men have always done with things to hallow them; namely, offering them up in oblation to God, as literally as Abel offered up sacrifices from his ordinary routine of work. The point is, despite the changes in the scenery from one age to another, the drama itself does not change. God is still the Most High God, and our life is still set about with blissful and terrible mysteries, and sacrifice is still at the center of things; and we (all of us — Abel, Solomon, and we modern men) are bidden to offer sacrifices. [...] Somehow splendor, mystery, and terror don’t show up in the fabric of our life. It is the argument of this book that this will not do. Admittedly we do live in an epoch when the general shape and hue of things make it nearly impossible. But we will have allowed ourselves to be bilked if we take up with this despairing atheism, for that is what it is, really. The “secularization” of life urged on us by science and commerce and modernity generally is surely one of the bleakest myths ever to settle down over men’s imaginations.