On Lives Spiritual and Secular

In his book, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, Fr. Alexander Schmemann lamented the all-too-common division of life into the “spiritual” and the “secular”:

There are those among us for whom life, when discussed in religious terms, means religious life. And this religious life is a world in itself, existing apart from the secular world and its life. It is the world of “spirituality,” and in our days it seems to gain more and more popularity….Lost and confused in the noise, the rush and the frustrations of “life,” man easily accepts the invitation to enter into the inner sanctuary of his soul and to discover there another life, to enjoy a “spiritual banquet” amply supplied with spiritual food. This spiritual food will help him. It will help him to restore his peace of mind, to endure the other—the secular—life, to accept its tribulations, to lead a wholesome and more dedicated life, to “keep smiling” in a deep, religious way.

Here, I think, Fr. Schmemann put his finger on a serious bifurcation that I accepted for a long time. I regarded as part of my “spiritual life” or “interior life” those things that I thought pertained to God—prayer, fasting, church services, Bible reading—and subconsciously or unconsciously relegated the remaining areas of my life to the “secular” category—eating, sleeping, work, grocery-shopping. This division, for me, was hardly intentional. I just thought that it was the way things are, and were supposed to be.

My experience of this bifurcation was exactly as Fr. Schmemann described it. I thought of my “spiritual life” as the compartment filled with life, peace and energy (akin to a battery, if you will) in which I could find strength to wade through the thick, dark swamp of the secular world. There were several problems with this division.

First, my “spiritual life” wasn’t always so spiritual, life-giving, peace-filled or energetic. Many times, I didn’t feel like praying, church services were long (I’m a Byzantine Christian, after all), and the Bible seemed like an incomprehensible specimen of (venerable) antiquity. On top of that, the “fellowship” that I was supposed to enjoy around Christian friends turned into grumbling sessions about “the world” which left me feeling burdened, depressed and, worst of all, self-righteous.

On the other hand, I found aspects of “secular life” rather rejuvenating. There were moments when I was profoundly affected by a “secular” movie (say, 13 Conversations about One Thing) or found lightness and joy in a hike, a concert, a cup of coffee, or a good workout at the gym. Looking back, I think I actually experienced the movement of the Spirit in these things, but didn’t know how to fit them into my spiritual-vs.-secular paradigm, which meant that it only left me feeling guilty about enjoying these “secular” activities so much.

I responded by trying to “amp up” the spirituality in my life—longer times in prayer, going to more services, and so forth—so that I could have more energy to live in the “secular world” and counter its effects. The more I tried, the more drained I became about things “spiritual”, and the thicker the wall between my life with God and my life in the world seemed to grow. As Fr. Schmemann wrote in the same book:

The result [of this division of life into “religious” and “secular”] is the same: “religious” life makes the secular one—the life of eating and drinking—irrelevant, deprives it of any real meaning save that of being an exercise in piety and patience. And the more spiritual is the “religious banquet,” the more secular and material become the neon lighted signs EAT, DRINK that we see along our highways.

I began to realize that I hadn’t allowed myself to find God where I found Him (if that makes sense at all) because I’d built up my own very fashionable wall between where He was to be found and where He was not. Problem was, He kept surprising me on the wrong side of it.

I’ll have to write more about my own change of heart in this regard later, but suffice to say for now that reading the works of Fr. Schmemann helped me to realize that all of life can and should be lived as communion with God. To say it with more theological suave, all of life can become sacramental—insofar as a sacrament is an event through which we encounter the Living God. After all, there is only one life with which I eat, pray, sleep, and play. Slowly internalizing this has freed me to experience God in more and more places in my life, and to expect to find Him in some of the most difficult times.

One summer night, I went for a walk in my…how shall we say…shady neighborhood, and had found Him everywhere: in the full moon, the sound and the coolness of the sprinklers, and the warm light pouring out of open windows. I got the strange sense that the Spirit was bringing about, in His own quiet way, a new creation out of a fallen world. And I was all right with His presence there.

Bumi Dipijak: The Malay Proverb

The Malay proverb goes, di mana bumi dipijak, di situ langit dijunjung, which can be translated, “on the ground where one stands, [in that place] one must bear the heavens”. In other words, man must live wherever he finds himself and not somewhere else. I must renounce my tireless quest for some “better place” in “better times” (past or future), for there is here and there is now.

A basic sentiment—and a Christian one, in my opinion. If the world is in fact a sacrament of God’s presence, if He is still acting and speaking today, then I must strain to listen and to live in the place where I am (whether in Denver or in Klang). Part of what it means to be a Christian, I think, is to believe that the Transcendent God reveals Himself in history, and can thus be found in my seemingly-profane life of eating, sleeping, work, bills and scraped knees.

A basic sentiment—but one which I find myself having to learn again and again. Too often I find myself living better lives in alternative universes. In those places, I usually suffer less, people are nicer, and things tend to turn out according to my wishes. The great tragedy (or consolation, depending on how one sees it) is that these worlds exist only in my head, and sooner or later I find myself pulled back into Reality once again.

If the God “ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, ever-existing and eternally the same” (the Anaphora of St. Chrysostom) has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ, who was crucified, who rose from the dead and who lives even today, then I must live in the “today” which is the day of salvation. Other worlds of my own making might appear more attractive, but the earth on which I stand is the only one He created, the only one He has redeemed, and the only one in which He continues to reveal Himself. In this very place I am asked to bear the heavens: to love the neighbors He has given me, to enjoy its trees and sunsets, and to find Him in my eating-sleeping-bills-scraped-knees life.