Return to Your Life

This is the main event. Those words have become a mantra in our house, or better put, a sacred phrase. Those early monastics developed the idea of a sacred phrase — as they pursued lives of prayer and contemplation, they practiced hesychasm, a form of inner stillness and continual prayer, often anchored by a few words that would remind them to think of God, consent to His will, and remember his promises. These phrases were brief, accessible, and easy to call upon and attach to the breath with one or two words spoken on the inhale, the rest on the exhale. A sacred phrase was one way of praying without ceasing and meeting God in the limitations and inconveniences of actual life.

My wife and I say this household sacred phrase of ours when the walls are closing in. We said it when we missed the call from the creditor, and we whisper it into the night as we rise, blurry-eyed, our children calling our names. We prayed it when our friend told us she found a lump, and when we feel so wound up and become so brittle, the jam jar smashing could break us into as many pieces. We say it when we want to run away, toward denial and fantasy, indifference and rage, we say aloud the invitation to re-enter our actual life. We say it as a prayer, earnestly reminding ourselves that God is present in the inconveniences and contradictions; and more often than not he comes to us dressed in them. It’s said when the disappointment comes and despair rattles his gritty knuckles on the door of our hearts. It’s spoken as an invitation to feel and not forget that life is made up of many parts, and if any of it matters, then all of it does.

It’s a simple phrase, but it calls us to attention because it’s so easy to imagine there’s something else that all this is leading to, but what if this is it? What if we’re standing at the top of a mountain asking when we’ll reach the summit?
The life we long for is hidden in the life we have. I believe that. It grates me and frustrates me, but I think that it’s true. I think the more we can see the trap door underneath the woven rug, the door upon the floor of our ordinary and contradictory lives, the deeper we live, the more fulfilled we are and able to be a gift of grace to others. Our invitation is to go downward, to consider what is the be-low the surface of a moment or a feeling, to pray with the Psalmist.
Probe me, God, know my heart; try me, know my thoughts. 

We all know something of the cell of which Abba Moses spoke. Especially on the days when, if we stretched our arms out to either side, we could touch the walls around us, and the wisdom here leads us to lean into the areas that most confine and restrict us, as a pathway to lasting liberation.

He tells us, as he did the young monk in search of wisdom, to ​“return to your life.” This is no easy feat; many of us face heart-wrenching and seemingly unchangeable situations. Yet, it is here, in the wake of the breakup, the financial ruin, and the relapse, that we are invited to embrace the pathway that sages and spiritual greats have trodden before us.

I must admit from the outset that I struggle with this sentiment. I am like the magpie, easily distracted by that which shimmers; I dive toward instant gratification and the myriad of offerings that promise to affirm my fleeting passions. But when the babe in my arms is screaming, thrashing around, and I feel my body begin to stiffen, my muscles tense, my mind beginning to numb, and I am being swallowed into the abyss of frustration and rage, it is precisely at that moment I am invited to look down at the child in my embrace and recite the following phrase: This is the main event. That simple sequence of words reminds me, as the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber put it, that ​“All actual life is an encounter.” When we pay close attention to the reality of our actual life — not the theater of fantasy that runs its morning, matinee, and evening shows in our mind, not the creeping envy stirred by the lives beside us or the ones paraded online — when we lean into our own life and embrace it for what it is, we open ourselves, like Jacob, to an encounter with the Divine.

It can happen in the most ordinary of moments: walking the supermarket aisle, counting the cost of every item you place in your basket, praying you’ll have enough for the basics. Rushing home to cook dinner before the school run, returning to wrestle your children into bed so you can finally catch up on work emails, and somewhere in the midst of it all whispering beneath your breath, ​“This is the main event.” In that hidden act you join your life to the monastic thread of those who discovered God in the cell.

So, woe to the influencers who peddle the illusion that a last-minute trip to Bali could offer you something more fulfilling than attending to an aging parent, salvaging a failing business, or changing your child’s wet sheets for the third time in a week. Woe to the charlatans who hawk, with deception, the belief that you could earn your worth through hustle and achievement that you are anything less than a child of God, filled with beloved breath.

And most of all, woe to me, in my own tendency to believe the good life is anywhere but here — in the cracked soil of my actual life, with a body I am still learning to love, with its folds and aches, with doubts I have yet to reconcile, with relationships that demand work and ordinary devotion, with a marriage that doesn’t always feel like the honeymoon did but has become a daily pursuit: a turning toward another in the midst of bills that need paying and children that need soothing and playing with, and a vocation that requires sacrifice and dedication. This is it: the masterpiece God is crafting from the raw materials of my actual life.

The life you long for is hidden in the life you have. If you seek enlightenment and the liberated self, you must return to the life of commitments with dirty dishes and oil changes, relational complexities and budgets. A life without limits only leads us to miss out on the only one we’re actually living. It is a body without bones. Abba Moses calls us to pay attention to the inconvenience, the moments we’d rather miss entirely, and to ​“listen to our lives and see them for the fathomless mystery they are,” as Frederick Buechner said.

This life, in all its limitations and inconveniences, is the main event.