This was on the back page of one of the issues of the Atlantic I checked out from the library the other day. I liked it.
Brief and true. It begins with an anecdote and ends this way:
Strive for excellence, by all means. My God, please strive for excellence. Excellence alone will haul us out of the hogwash. But lower the bar, and keep it low, when it comes to your personal attachment to the world. Gratification? Satisfaction? Having your needs met? Fool’s gold. If you can get a buzz of animal cheer from the rubbishy sandwich you’re eating, the daft movie you’re watching, the highly difficult person you’re talking to, you’re in business. And when trouble comes, you’ll be fitter for it.
“Reality is B-plus,” says my friend Carlo. I’d probably give it an A-minus, but I take his point. “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things,” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins. But there also lives the dearest shoddiness. We’re half-finished down here, always building and collapsing, rigging up this and that, dropped hammers and flapping tarps everywhere. Revise your expectations downward. Extend forgiveness to your idiot friends; extend forgiveness to your idiot self. Make it a practice. Come to rest in actuality.
An aspirational, achievement-oriented culture seeds anxiety as pervasive as the mushrooms in my yard this morning. Especially among the young. In addition, more pertinent to this writer’s point, are the heightened expectations of the Awesome Excitement and Fulfillment we’re all due – because that’s what we see everyone else experiencing, right? And isn’t our God an Awesome God? And if He’s around, and we’re right with him, shouldn’t we always feel Awesome, too?
A church that doesn’t fight this, a church that, in its institutions and official and unofficial spokespeople, feeds this is not truly counter-cultural.
Counter-cultural is remembering the lilies of the field, the whispers to Elijah, a teen girl’s fiat in a backwater village, a priest’s angelic encounter in the midst of his dull routine duties, a traveling evangelist mending tents. Counter-cultural is reminding ourselves of our creaturehood and that we only see through a glass darkly right now, and God is not about emotion but about trust that yes, He lives, in this moment, here, no matter how ordinary and even no matter how sad. Counter-cultural is encouraging, above all, the holiness borne of living in that actuality, wiping newborn bottoms and holding aged, frail, cool hands, pushing a wheelchair, sweeping a floor, listening when you’d rather not and, as Parker says, forgiving the idiots, even yourself.
Charlotte was Both 