Whole religions, philosophies, cultures, and civilisations have been built on the recognition of some of these Themes at the expense of others. Even Christianity at times has chosen to highlight or ignore selected Themes. This is one of the reasons it is important to live in community, not just with those in our own home or culture, but with the holy, apostolic Church throughout the world and through the ages. We have our personal themes, and it is not wrong to have them. But we must realise that our own lives and themes are only a small bit, perhaps only one short note, in the grand Symphony.
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With apologies to Victor Hugo:* We may find ourselves playing the part of Cosette in life, but we must never forget that there are others who play the roles of Fauntine, Jean Valjean, Javert, Marius, Gavroche, the Thénardiers, and Éponine. Or if we are caught up in the grief of playing Fauntine, we must not forget that the part of Cosette does exist and is just as real and legitimate as our experience. It’s no use saying that one character is ‘better’ than another when the entire story would collapse with the removal of any one of them.
*And if you have not seen the musical version of Les
Misérables from last year, you absolutely must.
We each have our own biases. I tend to be more of a melancholy personality style, and I’ve been diagnosed with Dysthymia which almost always dips into clinical depression any time the temperature is over 80 degrees for longer than a week or two. As a result, the Themes of sorrow, pain, grief, yearning, and desire tend to resonate with me more than Themes of glory, ecstasy, utter contentment, and so forth. Some of my dearest friends, on the other hand, live their life experiencing those brighter Themes and hardly understand why I am sad.
We must be cautious, or rather, I must be cautious not to devalue those Themes that do not resonate with me. I happen to live in a culture that does not value the Themes I most value and experience, and I often find myself taking an air of superiority. I think the Cosettes around me are annoying and airheaded, superficial and naïve because they don’t seem to grasp the real horror in life.
This ought not to be. And it is, in fact, nothing but Sin rearing his ugly head in my life.
The fact is, I want to be around people like me because they affirm me and my personal themes – they reinforce the idea that I am the centre of the story. This is a result of a hyper-focus on individualism that has hijacked American and, to a much lesser degree, Western culture since the 1960s. Understanding why I am short-sighted does not excuse me or decrease my blindness, but perhaps it can lead me toward remedying the underlying problem. If I am prone to this type of sin (judgementalism and arrogance) because of my tendency to over-value individualism, perhaps I need a correcting message in my life.
It is not all about me. I am only a small part of something much bigger than me.
Submitting to the Christian Calendar demands a lot, what with its focus on when I must celebrate and when I must rejoice (even when I don’t feel like it), when I can and can’t eat and which foods I should and shouldn’t eat (even when I want something different), which clothes I should wear (even when I think they don’t suit me), which prayers I should pray (even when I don’t feel like praying), which nights I must stay awake (even when my body is screaming for sleep) and which times I must rest (even when I’m anxious to do something), and, yes, even when I must repent and grieve (even when I don’t feel particularly pricked).
Submission, in the old fashioned sense of the word, is about realising that it is not about me. It is a way for me to get beyond my own stubborn, sometimes unconscious, but always damnable belief that this is my story.
This Story is not about you. It is not about me. It is not about our group of friends or our church or our denomination or even our culture or civilisation. It’s ultimately not even about Israel or the Church or even Jesus Christ’s life on earth or the Holy Spirit’s continued work among us now. It is about the fullness of the Triune God.
Let me be clear: one does not get brownie points from God for following a fast or putting ashes on one’s forehead or eating fish on a certain day or waiting to up a Christmas tree until a certain time or saying a particular prayer at a particular time. God is not impressed or interested in these “externals.” That mindset once again presupposes that the Story is about the individual, and this is the great apostasy. God wants spiritual submission to Him, and that requires us to understand, experience, and act as though the Story were about Him, not us. Because It is.
The mistake the ancient Jews made was believing that the religion, festivals, and traditions God had given them were about them. I’ve always found it odd that God told the Israelites, ‘I hate, I despise your feasts, and I can’t stand your solemn assemblies’ (Amos 5:21)**. These were the very feasts and assemblies that God Himself had established! But He hates them because they have become about Israel rather than about Him.
**All Scripture quoted from the World English Bible.
That, I think, has also been a mistake the Church has made. It is the danger we face when we do anything. We can follow the Calendar and pray and fast and feast and celebrate and dress and eat and read our Bibles and go to church and do everything that we should do, and it can still be about us, and God will, in the end, still say, “I hate, I despise your holidays and your fasts and your church services and your Bible reading and your Christian Calendar...”
But that does not mean these things are useless. One cannot win the Tour de France with a tricycle, but that does not mean we should give our children mountain bikes when they first want to learn. Expecting Christians to be spiritually mature without Tradition is like expecting a child to play Beethoven’s Sonata Hammerklavier Opus 106 without ever having practiced a scale or even having found Middle C. Of course learning to do the scales does mean the child will learn to play the Sonata, but nobody ever did play it without first finding Middle C.
So, too, one cannot become spiritually mature, learn to submit to Him, and find that all of everything is entirely about the Triune God, until one has at first learned that it is not about himself. I think this is why God has made Calendars so unavoidable. If we choose not to follow the Christian Calendar, then our lives must be dictated by another. I think it’s most effective, in the long run, if we submit to those things that are consciously and actively designed to tell the Story, but, in the end, God can redeem even our own idolatry because it teaches us to worship something.
And that it is why St. Paul tells us, ‘One man esteems one day as more important. Another esteems every day alike. […] He who observes the day, observes it to the Lord; and he who does not observe the day, to the Lord he does not observe it. […] For none of us lives to himself, and none dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord. Or if we die, we die to the Lord. If therefore we live or die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died, rose, and lived again, that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.' (Romans 14:5-9)
I must resist the pull to judge the Themes that another man or woman understands, experiences, and lives; those are God’s Themes, and they are lived to God, and. If I throw out the character of Cosette or of Fauntine, I have destroyed the story of Les Misérables. The Story cannot be shattered, but if I seclude myself and hole-up in my own little circle of friends who live the same Themes I live and judge those who have experienced those other Themes I have a hard time with, I will shatter my ability to understand, experience, and live the entirety of the Story.
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