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Plugging Along

 

            Many times I am convinced that so much of the spiritual journey is simply plugging along.  There are no lightening bolts of revelation.  There are not thunderclaps of amazement.  So many days look and feel pretty much like the day before.  There is nothing spectacular and nothing awful either.  It is not a rut, but it is routine.

            The question is how the spiritual is to be lived out in the midst of our routine.  For most of us routine is how life comes to us---for the most part.  I do not lament this.  But I do need to be alert and discern where and how the Spirit is present.  We have to guard against the idea that if there is nothing new, I conclude somehow I blew it.

            In such a place, I am glad to run into some words from Luke Timothy Johnson, well-known New Testament scholar from Emory University in Atlanta.  I encountered these words about hope and I laugh a bit.  “Why do I keep grading ‘C’ papers even when they persist in being ‘C’ papers?”  He continues in the same vein.  “Why do my wife, Joy, and I savor the sweetness of each moment of life even as we feel life slipping away?” 

            He begins to lead us to his punch line.  “I once thought that my positive disposition toward life was due to animal high spirits.  But as the animal in me weakens, the spirit does not seem to waiver.  Perhaps my hope really is in something/someone other than myself.”  Johnson offers us much to ponder in these words. 

Initially, Johnson tells us he thought his positive, optimistic outlook on life came solely from his animal nature, that is, his own inner strength and ability to make things happen in the world.  This would be tantamount to saying that “we make our own breaks.”  Indeed, many of us feel like we made our own breaks in life.  We were the movers who created opportunities.  If we were quite good at this, arrogance comes in the wake of our success.

Others of us may feel like we “never got any breaks!”  Others prospered or succeeded, but we always came up short.  Life is unfair and we got the short end of it---all too often.  We can blame, we can lament, we can complain, but this is of no avail.  “Facts are facts,” we have heard, perhaps, all our lives.

And then comes Luke Timothy Johnson with his experience and his interpretation.  He acknowledges that the animal in him is weakening.  On one hand, I am not altogether sure what all he means.  But on the other hand, I feel like I have a pretty good clue what he means.  Surely, those are the words of someone at least in his middle age years…and probably beyond.  He is coming into awareness that the life being lived is really more than just his living it. 

In spite of the weakening animal in us, our spirits remain strong.  It dawns on him that he has hope.  But the hope is outside of himself.  It is in something or someone other than myself.  To me this is a subtle affirmation of God.  Beyond me and you, there is Something Else.  I capitalize this for emphasis.  And I have faith there is a spiritual connection between that Something Else and my own spirit.  It is Spirit and spirit, if you will.

Now that I am assuming there is Something Else and in that is my hope, I now possess the key to my routine.  I know for me an encounter with that Something Else will mostly happen in my routine.  It might actually be in that ‘C’ paper-writing student.  Why should God only deal with ‘A’ paper writers?  If that were true, so many of us average, perhaps mediocre, students of life are doomed!

I think I am beginning to get it.  God does not expect me to produce ‘A’ papers to be a participant in the Divine party.  But rightly, God expects us to write our papers….to live our routine lives---plugging along---in hopes that we have been invited to the party.  And we will get there!

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