The great Lebanese-American writer, Khalil Gibran, wrote: “Truth is a deep kindness that teaches us to be content in our everyday life and share with the people the same happiness”. In Gibran’s view, truth instils inner joy amid the obvious travail everyday life presents to us.
Unfortunately, contemporary understanding of ‘everyday’ is quite dry and arbitrary. I say dry because it has become devoid of any eternal meaning. Its transitory thrust is rendering it somewhat unbearable to take in. For the common man in the street, ordinary life is none other than a life which simply conforms itself to normal practices and customs. It is a life that is totally absorbed in the daily, monthly, and yearly “round”. In other words, in that suffocating routine, denied of any special events or new vistas. Finally, the everyday life is a life that is enslaved by its obviousness and harshly controlled by its boring meaningless and empty monotony.
What is the way out from this existential gloomy impasse? The ‘Nazareth’ experience can be a very effective remedy against such a disastrous mode of living. At face value, Nazareth offers the most banal expression of ordinariness. How is it that the Son of God spent the first thirty years of his earthy life hidden and absorbed by the atrocious experience of being a commoner? Was this not Jesus’ most intensified living of that radical kenosis which the hymn in the Letter to the Philippians speaks loudly about when it says that “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Phil 2:6-7)? Furthermore, was Jesus’ dwelling in his hometown Nazareth a useless experience of senseless routine?
In this matter, the comment made by René Voillaume on the perspective of Nazareth as a beacon to ordinary life merits great consideration.
“Isn’t the normal course of our life a routine? People often give this word a deprecatory sense. The same word has a different colour in English; it means the daily duty that returns every day in the same form. The life of Nazareth was a long routine, of modest duties, which always remained the same.” Having said that, can daily duty be transformed?
God’s Word strongly replies in the affirmative. Within the hidden mystery of his daily life in Nazareth, Jesus underwent a continual growing in wisdom and a deep transforming maturing in God’s grace and love. Twice the biblical text assures its readers of this essential detail in the upbringing of Jesus Christ, God Incarnate. “And the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favour of God was upon him” (Luke 2:40). “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favour with God and man” (Luke 2:52).
The “ordinariness” of Nazareth shows that whenever such a gift is welcomed and lovingly interiorised, it becomes a time of great significance, a golden opportunity of growing in love. Under the docile guidance of the Holy Spirit, daily routine can mince our seemingly absurd empty existence by the capacity of celebrating it through our recognition that life is an unconditional gift. The ordinary help us realise that the everyday world in which you and I live makes us more responsible to care for one another, practice solidarity, walk with each other on the path to improving our relationships and fix our eyes upon the “great hope” of eternal life which keeps us persevering in God’s goodness. The truth of eternal life is the secret and joy of everyday life.
■ Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap
San Gwann