Delight In The Ordinary

     Ordinary is what a majority of our daily lives consist of, constantly exposing us to pleasures and pains from our culture and the natural environment around us. It is suggestible, then, that the ordinary is where we find most our our callings, our interests, but also our temptations. This past Easter weekend I was reminded of a sermon delivered by my previous pastor regarding the path to Emmaus, on which we can either lead our lives in the direction away from God towards Emmaus, or towards God in the direction of Jerusalem. Similarly, our experience with the ordinariness of everyday life can lead us further away or closer to God depending on the choices we make. This two sided attribute of ordinariness is something discussed by C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters, wherein [the devil] Screwtape criticizes his nephew Wormwood in permitting his patient to take pleasure in reading a book simply because he enjoys reading it. This is important because it suggests that important events in life are seldom extraordinary in appearance and are easy to miss, and that it is our daily decisions that affect our moral and spiritual growth. It is as though we are traveling a road toward self-actualization, which could or could not also be considered a path towards perfection and that through the development of our character, or spiritual and moral growth, we are able to or unable to gaze upon the face of God.
      Letting go of our pleasures along the path towards self actualization can be difficult, and therefor quite easy to dismiss in the pursuit of other pleasures and desires. The attempt to hold onto our everyday pleasures eventually crumbles, and leaves us with only ourselves. Retreating further into ourselves, caring only about our own pleasures would take us further way from our own self actualization, and lead us away from God. It is this predicament I find myself currently in, faced by a flux of pleasures and interests I find myself retreating further into my self, gradually falling away to value nothing more than myself rather than other people. There is a tension then, between the natural forms of love we express and our love towards God, and it is the idolization and isolation of these loves that make it so easy to turn us away from our own self-actualization. As a result of this isolation and idolization, we experience the transformation of love as painful, which is probably why few can say they have lived to see their own self-actualization and find themselves on the road to Emmaus. If anything is to be taken from this, for me especially, it is to find truth in the old adage that to take pleasure in the small things now is to look back later on and realize that some of them were the big things that truly do matter.