Holy Trinity Sunday: Bedazzled by the Banal
Many look for God by glancing around and being caught in the corner of their eye with a shaft of light that captures momentarily their attention (as in, perhaps, “that can’t be just a coincidence, can it!?”). Others look for God by searching on a trek or journey with all the equipment necessary to sustain the hike and explore the surroundings. One way of looking is happenstance and the other deliberate, but neither will be able to find anything but their own aspirations.
Paul writes in Romans 8 that “focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God.”(The Message Bible). I believe all spiritual quest is a “focusing on self” and thereby and therefore doomed to failure. At the same time that is all we can do. That is what we do. It is how we are wired. We cannot but be, we will not but be, the Subject in the Sentence, the Actor on the Stage, the one who is in search of its own comfort and safety if not its own eternal glory. Nicodemus (in John 3) is bewildered by being told by Jesus that enlightenment, any sense of God, any presence of God, is necessarily an action by God on us, a gift of God to us. “Born from above” is how Jesus puts it. “Born again” is another way to say it and the whole enterprise of a life enlightened only by God without our agency sounds as illogical and impossible as a human body going back into its birthing womb and entering the world yet again. A person can’t find something without looking for it, after all.
Finding something without looking for it? The other day I was cleaning off the pavers on our porch and there as bright as day was a roofing nail on the ground, a remnant from our roof replacement of two weeks prior. There it sat, after prior diligent searches and sweeps many times over to ensure no harmful nails remained. As well, a few months ago I lost a book I had been reading, one normally kept in a drawer in the bedside nightstand. Where did it go?! And it’s no small size. It’s bulky. It doesn’t hide easily. Did I forget that I took it on a trip and left it somewhere? But it’s so cumbersome, not a good one to travel. No, I wouldn’t do that. I searched under the bed, all through my bookshelves throughout the house, many times over. Where in the world is this thing? Then, of course, one day when I was not looking for it, months after its disappearance, I opened a drawer of a different nightstand, one upstairs in our guest room, and eureka! There it was! I found it without looking for it.
But watch this now (no pun intended): there were searches that found nothing but then there were eyes open and paying attention to what was right there in front of me. It was the latter where discovery was made. So it is with the roofing nail, the book, and with God. Frederick Buechner reminds us to “listen to your life.” In other words, pay attention. Today we might call it “mindfulness,” (stripped of any spiritualizations that we are prone to layer on – there’s that “we cannot not think of ourselves as the Main Character in the drama” thing again). Name it what you will, it’s a living life as it is and finding life there, not somewhere else.
