Christianity on a Human Scale

By Jim Holland (written July 2013)It is easy to be discouraged as a Christian trying to live an ordinary human life. I think that the discouragement is as much from the Christian’s side as the world’s side, though both contribute. Being bombarded by slick images of what the good life is, enjoyed by people who look better than we could ever look, all carried out in more exotic places than we can ever live, tends to breed a dissatisfaction among us. We draw our identity from this imaginary world. We watch it, we read about it, we are fascinated with it, we vicariously live through it, and then we are utterly crushed by it. When we disconnect from it, either by turning it off or putting the pulp writing down, we feel a certain “smallness” about our lives. Much of Pop Christianity does the same thing, parading the spiritual elite in front of us, or giving us its own version of Christian pulp fiction to either escape into or mechanistically evolve into by following five easy steps. It is all so exciting until we get through wasting our time with it, and then we are utterly discouraged.The dissatisfaction then seeks to root its internal angst in pointing at the demise of the culture and how bad things are and pining for a nostalgic time somewhere in the past when things were not so difficult. Where did we get this notion? In thinking about where we are in our culture, I have come to believe that the dissatisfaction stems from us not liking our lives very much. We are too ordinary. We see large images and exciting ministry happening “out there,” and we don’t feel that what we do has much significance. So we watch and read about others, get excited for a moment and then totally discouraged; we are just not that large. The problem is one of connection. You can never connect with a mass culture. It is too distant, too impersonal, too big, and it can never fill your heart at the deepest level of belonging.In reading about Christianity in the first few centuries, we see a different matrix, a different perspective. In times far worse than these, against institutions and powers set against them, they found identity in living life on a human scale. Of course, they had no choice, not having communication capabilities that allowed them to view how miserable their lot seemed to be. No, they grasped a Christian identity that satisfied their hearts and they sought to live out their ordinary lives—basically from their households and in their local settings. In doing this, they “wowed” the world. By the time the Roman Emperor Julian (362 A.D.) was in power, he was trying to stem the tide of the growing influence of the church. He instructed the high priest to reestablish the Hellenic religion of the Empire. In doing this, he saw that the only the only way to succeed was to imitate Christianity in its care, charity and benevolence. In other words, Christians were merely living ordinary lives of grace and charity in their homes and communities, and it was extraordinary. It was a brilliant and shining testimony to those around them.This obviously means that as bad as the world around them was, they neither retreated from it, nor drew their identity from it. They were jazzed by the gospel and saw it as a matter of course to build the Kingdom in the midst of the ruins around them. They did not seek to get out of the culture, but to build a new kind and quality of life in the center of the locations in which they lived. This is obviously true, because the Emperor was looking to their example as a way to build the culture! Knowing that government could not do it alone, they looked at Christianity as a model of embodied goodness to be imitated.Only as we begin to see Christianity as local, physical and lived out within the limits of our own geography will we begin to see how much dignity and meaning life can have. The “good life,” the truly human life, knows that, as C. S. Lewis says, “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.” Progress and technology makes it possible to avoid your neighbor and your local situation with promises of fulfillment in some nebulous cause, far removed, participated in vicariously with all the really good and committed people. The only problem with that is that there is no risk, and were you to find this vicarious community and really live with them, they would be just as dull and cantankerous and those people around you. They would be just as flawed, marred and selfish as you and all those people you seek to avoid, for that very reason.Yet, when we do tune into the local situation, to love it for its own sake, warts and all—messy, flawed, trying and imperfect—we will be changed. We will begin to see Christ hidden in those people who used to irritate us. We will begin to see ourselves involved in a local story, connected with others, and over time, participants in something that might not make headline news, but is rich in meaning. This is the only way we learn the divine charity. Opening our hearts to the place and people around us is hard when we are promised so much in the images on TV and the Web, but if we only participate vicariously, we will never be more than strangers. We will never learn new skills, nor will we see the areas around us transformed. We will participate in a dream that exists everywhere and nowhere. We will be “everybody” to no one in particular, and remain unsoiled, mechanistic and totally inhuman. Christ took our flesh and lived a life of passion with a few people, and he tells us to do the same. We can build our identity and dreams with a community that is local and real, or build it vicariously with strangers we never see or really share life with, except electronically. One smacks of the robust life of heaven and the other an illusion leading to death, which is hell.