Everyday God. Paula Gooder

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СКАЧАТЬ temple was gilded with gold, was also the God who cherished the two small copper coins of the widow in Luke 21.1−4. The God whose throne is in heaven, is also the God whose son was laid in a feeding trough and who lived in the hill country of Galilee. God is indeed a Sunday (or Saturday) best God but he is also an everyday God and is as much to be found with those washing up as with those in grand cathedrals, as much in mud pies as in gold and silver vessels, as much in the ordinary things of life as in the special, sacred things.

      This is something we all know intellectually but struggle to put into practice. Somehow it’s easier to expect to encounter God in splendour than in squalor; though in reality, if, as the biblical tradition reminds us, it is not God who prefers the splendour, we might need to ask ourselves why we are so keen to ensure that God is set apart in glory and majesty.

      Everyday Christians

      The reason why it is so important to recapture our sense of the ordinary is twofold. First, as I reflected above, if we insist in keeping God in splendour we lose so many opportunities to encounter him in our everyday lives. If we wait for silence, for fine surroundings, for spectacular music or art, then we devastate our chances of encountering the everyday God who stands by patiently illuminating the fields of our lives, while we pass by without noticing. The second reason is as important as the first. If we insist on God being ‘Sunday best’; then we naturally assume we have to be too.

      I remember, as a child, listening with wide eyes to the spectacular stories and testimonies of those whose lives had been transformed by their Christian faith. Oddly, however, I never found this encouraging for my own faith, since I knew that my story would never be as dramatic as theirs. It took me years to realize that the fact that I had been brought up Christian and could only recount the gentle companionship of God over years rather than a dramatic account of transformation did not make me an inadequate Christian. Mine is not a dramatic story of faith – more an everyday one − but my ordinary, unexciting story of faith is as valued by God as the spectacular ones.

      We do not need to be celebrity Christians, with fantastic, dramatic stories of faith. Our everyday God cherishes everyday Christians. What we need to learn to do, however, is to become better at telling our stories of everyday faith. This returns us to the theme of how important it is that we have confidence in ordinariness. We have become enculturated by the assumption that no story is worth telling unless it is dramatic, exciting and unusual, and so we no longer tell the ordinary stories. Because we do not tell the ordinary stories, we give the implicit message that everyday faith is of less value than dramatic, life changing experiences. The solution, of course, is to learn to tell our ordinary stories of faith with more confidence and in doing so we may discover that those moments of the sunbeams breaking through, that R. S. Thomas talks about, become more easily noticeable as we train ourselves to become recognizers of the extraordinary, ordinary things of God.

      On balance

      Of course the problem with all this is that it can feel a little like counsel in favour of laziness: don’t bother to set aside time for silence, you can worship God just as well at home as at church and there is no need to grow up into deeper and more profound faith – God loves you just as you are. All of these are true and false both at the same time. You don’t need to lay aside time for silence, God is as much present in the hustle and bustle of everyday life as in the silence and tranquillity of prayer, but if we never lay aside time for silence, our inner ear will became less attuned to the still, small voice of God and we will find it harder to hear him in the hustle and bustle. You can worship God at home but unless we make corporate worship an important part of our lives, our daily worship of God can become shallow and thin. God does love you just the way you are but yearns that we all become the fullest and most Christ-like human being that we can.

      The point about ordinariness is that it is the proper balance to extraordinariness. Our lives need both. The rhythm of the ordinary helps us to understand and celebrate more fully the festival times like Christmas and Easter; and those festival times help us to identify the things of God in ordinary times. God is to be found in the daily grind of life but it is taking time out of that grind in praise and prayer that helps us to recognize God in the ordinary things of life. God calls us just as we are, ordinary, everyday Christians, and summons us onwards into extraordinariness. We need both the everyday and the special, the ordinary and the extraordinary, and we need to wrestle to keep them in balance. Too much ordinary and we can lose sight of God; too much extraordinary and we slip into assuming that God, like us, does not really cherish the everyday.

      This book seeks to celebrate ordinary faith and life in all its forms and as it does so to weave the extraordinary into the ordinary: to recognize that ordinary people, no matter who they are and what they do, are all extraordinary; to celebrate the fact that the extraordinary God we worship is most likely to be found among the ordinary things of life; and to remind us that glimpses of God or glimmers of glory are most likely to be found when, in the words of R. S. Thomas, we turn aside at nothing more extraordinary than a small field, ‘to a brightness that seemed as transitory as your youth once, but is the eternity that awaits you’.

      PART ONE

      Ordinary People

      1. ON TURNING ASIDE

      One of the characteristics that allows someone in the midst of an ordinary, everyday existence to encounter God is their ability to turn aside from what they are doing and to notice the daisy or the rainbow or the burning bush in the midst of the mundane. I often wonder, however, what might have happened if Moses had not turned aside at the burning bush. What if, at the crucial moment a sheep had fallen dangerously and needed rescuing so that he didn’t notice that the bush was burning, or what if he did notice but it was a meal time and he thought he might investigate at a more convenient moment, or what if he decided it wasn’t that spectacular after all and not worth turning aside to see? Of course we cannot know, because it didn’t happen. No more than we can know what might have happened if we had turned aside, on those countless moments when the sunbeam broke through, when the daisy mirrored heaven, when someone was ready to talk, and we didn’t notice. Our lives are peppered with myriad potential ‘what ifs’. What if we had done this, not that? What if we hadn’t done that?

      Living a faithful ordinary life is not about torturing ourselves with the endless ‘what ifs’, so much as it is about focusing ourselves on the ‘what might bes’. If Moses had missed the moment and not turned aside, he might well have missed his encounter with God at the burning bush, but there would have been other encounters, other times when God broke through and spoke. Reflecting on what we might have missed could so easily become an exercise in regret, in living out our lives in wistful longing for what could have been if only … instead, the calling to faithful, ordinary living is about reflecting on what we might have missed, so that we don’t miss it again; so that the next time the occasion arises we are primed and ready to go.

      Part of this is simply training ourselves to be the kind of people who do turn aside. People who are not so fixed on the path we tread that our curiosity cannot be piqued so that we turn off and meet something new. People whose horizons stretch beyond the grind of life’s rat-run, who simply look up from time to time, and see the bush burning, or the sunbeam breaking through. People who when they see these things recognize them for the potential they offer and who turn aside in the hope of an encounter with God. Turning aside is the most ordinary of actions but can have the most extraordinary of consequences, as Moses discovered.

      * * *

      1. On curiosity and taking time

      Exodus 3.1−3 Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet СКАЧАТЬ