column on trivial pursuit and God in the everyday

It was my birthday recently. Now past 60, perhaps I should have worn mourning clothes. Instead, we wore hiking clothes and walked on some of the trails at Pere Marquette Park, one of the fine testaments to public works.

I had my closest clear encounter with mortality when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer not long after I arrived here. Facing death may alter one’s perspective. Turning 61 could alter one’s perspective.  I’ve noticed a small change, in that I hold time to be more precious and do not like to see the sand sin the hourglass sift away during a regional church meeting or  one of those presentations where the technology never works smoothly and we idly wait for the IT Savior to arrive. I rarely watch an entire sporting event as I did when I was younger.

Some spiritual directors urge us to examine our daily life and see the hand of God or its absence during that day, or week, or month, or year. One can do a life review as well. I look back at my life with real regrets that it is not marked by great deeds of public service. Has it been squandered? Have I been on a detour of trivia pursuits and lost sight of what is vital in a life?

Since I moved to this area, I noticed the number of social groups that use trivia contests as fundraisers. We have one at First Presbyterian on October 17. I love the idea that something absolutely inconsequential, trivia, can be the source of not only amusement but real help to social groups in our area. Ruth Wimp, the Marshalls, and I won an easy contest last Friday, but we were part of a group that raised over $5,000 for Ronald McDonald House in our area.

In the church year, we are moving through Ordinary Time, a period between great ancient important markers in the church year. It is recognition that the turning points are few, as life is lived in the ordinary flow of time. This year All Saints day will fall on a Sunday, so we are reminded that death is part of the normal course of one’s lifetime.

Sometimes, trivia is in the eye of the beholder. I’ve read a lot of American history, and our daughters would shake their heads that dates come easily to me in history. Quite simply, interest in something or constant exposure to something adds detail that we often call trivial attended a trivia for a health concern a while back, and they sold Jell-O shots. The folks around the table swore that they were not filled with alcohol, but by the 5^th round they were posters for the catatonic. Around round seven, a round of commercial jungles was being played; one of the group roused from slumber, mumbled the name of the product, and promptly returned to the land of Morpheus.

At times, God does seem to be at work in miraculous ways. Most of the time, the miracle is that god seems to prefer to work within the normal flow of life and events. The everyday, the quotidian, pieces of a life give it texture. Integrating all of these shards of experience into even a partial whole is a task of a lifetime. When people seem to review of life as they near death, they rarely move to the great events, but smaller, more intimate ones.

The sacraments take ordinary elements and see them transformed into something holy and meaningful, a limitless pool of spiritual depth. I am attracted to the Christian perspective that we can see daily life as sacramental, capable of revealing something of the holy even in the midst of the quotidian, the mundane. “Open my eyes that I may see.”