Ordinary Saints

The Monasticism of Mediocrity

I saw a meme a few years ago that said, “You’re so vain, I bet you think this Psalm is about you…” Ouch. As a young man, I knew “God’s plan for my life” was special. As a newly coined minister I had self-identified as a Jeremiah, a Jacob, a Paul, a young Timothy… a David, even a Christ-figure Himself.

So, I took some hard lumps in my fall back to earth, all my own fault, and years ago I came to the conclusion that I’m not a Bible character. Oh, for certain, I’ve done some pretty Bible-characterish sins, but even the worst of those sins, in the grand scheme of normal human sinning, were pretty pedestrian and done artlessly or ineptly, much like my best acts of faith.

After 20+ years Orthodox, I’ve also come to the conclusion I’m neither even a “Menaion level saint”. Just like there are only a handful of sermon-worthy Bible characters out of the billions of people who have lived on earth, there are only a few hundred people who are commemorated in the services of the Church as “noteworthy saints”. Not everyone has the opportunity to be roasted alive, our body parts cut off one by one, spend years of ascetical disciplines in a cave in the desert, nor do we murder, plunder, pillage, nor live in absolute wanton pleasure on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land until we encounter a miracle then live, fed miraculously by animals in the desert for the rest of our life. They all represent to us the highest attainments of spiritual endurance and faith, but also the lowest that a human being can sink to and still find salvation based on a single sentence gasped in blind desperation toward a man who said He was God.

The flip side of the delusion of attaining spiritual greatness via some exceptionally spartan, prolonged, painful spiritual feat is that we aggrandize the consequentiality of our garden variety sins and shortcomings. We are harder on ourselves than God. Excessive self-condemnation, shame and despondency at “confessing the same sin over and over” is a spiritual disease perhaps worse than the sin itself because it is born of the delusion that *I* should be unlike even the saints who struggled with their same sins to their last breath.

For the vast majority of us, like most people in the history of the world, we aren’t on the fringes of holiness nor evil. We kind of wallow in the middle, the media… the mediocre, the ordinary. We are, for the most part, just ordinary people who sin ordinarily because we are amateurs at resisting temptation, unimaginative in finding creative ways to feed our passions, or because we fear great consequences if we sin more adeptly or flamboyantly. And the reality is also, our repentance is equally un-spectacular: A 2:00am shamefest, a ten minute after-Vespers “rinse and repeat confession”, and a guilty burden to be more resolute about changing, much like all the other people in line who yelled at their kids, resented their spouse, watched internet porn, lied to the boss or lost their religion in comment boxes. It is easy to say, “I am the greatest of sinners”. The more difficult thing to say is, “I am the most ordinary, mediocre of sinners.”

It is harder to say that because it is the truth about our real lives, that I am unremarkable in my spiritual state except to me. It is facing the fact that the wonderful plan and purpose God has for our life is to be an ordinary person falling in predictable ways to the same struggles and issues that billions of other people endure with no end of the daily grind in sight, and no discernable greatness or exalted point to it all. Our martyrdom is just common, ordinary, day after day, year after year, unremarkable slow dying, like being pecked to death by a duck.

It has been noted by some that it is obvious that the Services and Menaion of the Church were written by monks, for monks for the most part. There is an occassional nod to a “married saint” but what made them “remarkable” was not their marriage or family but their atypical life as a married person with children: Husbands and wives lived celibately, or apart in separate monasteries, they and their children were martyred or became bishops. There are no mentions in the Menaion of saints who slept through the alarm because the kids were sick and threw up in the middle of the night in their bed, had to skip morning prayers to get to work and got chewed out for being late, came home, drank a couple beers, played with the kids, did the dishes for his wife who took care of sick kids all day, called his mother on Sundays, fixed the garbage disposal on a Saturday night instead of going to vespers, and an “epic spiritual event” was getting the entire family to church fully dressed, before the Gospel without an exasperated word or a threat that had something to do with McDonald’s after church.

So pretty much the reality is, in the monastically driven culture of the Church (or as Fr. Tom Hopko put it “the monastic captivity of the Church”), you are mediocre, you are not the “chief of anything” spiritual or sinful. You live an un-extraordinary life just like millions of other people and you won’t be a “saint” unless you figure out a way to be more of a “monk” than a pious husband or wife or parent.

The thing is, the Gospel says something about all that: By the fact of the incarnation God into a middle class family of step kids and sketchy beginnings, He exalted the mediocre, the ordinary, the daily grind of messy family life. In a very real sense every ordinary life is extra-ordinary. The “wrestling with our passions” and the principalities and powers is not just overcoming a temptation to deny Christ while having your eyes gouged out with hot sticks, it is overcoming with great effort the very ordinary sins that beset every human person, including Christ Himself. Virtue is as simple as doing what must be done rather than what you want to do. Every choice we are conscious of, no matter how ordinary or mundane the situation is, is an opportunity to become a saint.

But that’s not a “wonderful plan”, it doesn’t feel special. We wonder what God ordained thing can make our life extraordinary, what will give it meaning and lift us out of the mundane and dullness of our quotidian existence? The Gospel tells us how that’s done. Christ rose from the dead, the greatest miracle in human history, but no one saw it. So, how was the miracle manifested? How did people recognize Christ after His resurrection? In the very most ordinary of domestic human events: when He cooked breakfast for His disciples, when He walked with them as a friend, when He accepted their invitation to a meal, when He sat down with them and broke bread together. The supernatural was, wellll… super natural.

So, maybe living the extraordinary life is accomplished simply by being truly un-remarkably ordinary in our most ordinary circumstances. Or perhaps better said: Live as Christ lived in His incarnation. Live ordinarily in the meta-ordinariness of our fallen world.

What does this look like?

Can you not get agitated when you are in a grocery checkout line and the old lady at the register is fumbling through a thick envelope looking for a 25 cent off coupon for toilet paper?

Can the phrase “What an idiot” never cross your mind or lips when you listen to someone talk?

Can you scroll past that FB post? How about not respond to that comment, much less even write a rebuttal and then delete it, much less not even think about writing it?

Can you do a good thing and tell no one about it?

I could go on and on, but you get the idea…. Our mediocre life hands us plenty of opportunities to be saints because all temptations and sins have common roots whether we are wrestling with demons in the desert or with a self-possessed “Karen-customer”. A quick death by the sword is, in some ways, actually easier than living fifty years in a dysfunctional family. Ordinary people and ordinary life offer up everything we need to overcome our selves. The cave in the desert is as close as your dining room table and your demonic assault is available at the click of your mouse in a comment box, or answering your phone. “Location, location, location” might be important in real estate but the demons (and “our demons”) work everywhere equally well, but so does the Holy Spirit who is everywhere present and fills all things.

So, that has become my goal: To become a saint by finding the grace of the Holy Spirit in the most trivial and ordinary things in my life in a way that attests the outrageous truth that the utter holiness of God can be manifested in my same ordinary flesh and within my most mundane circumstances. But unfortunately that doesn’t make for inspirational holy hagiographies and glorious spiritual church hymns. So you kind of have to figure out how to be piously exhorted by someone standing on a rock for three years in prayer while you’re switching off feeding and changing a newborn in the middle of the night and you have to be at work in two hours.

The reality is we will never hear a troparion or kontakion about someone who lives a truly holy “ordinary” life. But I wrote a song about it anyway… Wanna hear it? Here it goes…. (points for getting the cultural reference there).

The Troparion for the Mediocre (Tone 1 Obikhod)

Listen here (the sheet music is below if you don’t want to hear me sing…)

So yeah, we all know that’s never going to be sung in a Divine Liturgy. The church may not ever write a hymn about any of the 99% who live in the real world and are the invisible holy, but in judgment I’ll settle for One Voice instead of a choir, “You have been faithful in the big things that you believed were small, but you did them anyway. Well done my good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your Master.”

‡ ‡ ‡

*This post was adapted from “Mediocrity”, one of my “Steve the Builder” podcasts HERE

**Thank you to Geoffrey Zoidberg Thompson for doing the sheet music!