ife with a "religious department" is a dangerous form of Christianity. And perhaps Christmas is a useful time to question the compartmentalization of our faith. At this time of year our communities set us an instructive example, taking an ostensibly Christian event and adapting it to all manners of purposes. In fact, about one third of each year's retail spending happens in six weeks over the Christmas season.1 When it suits, our retailers allow something of the spiritual (however faint and twisted) to pervade their businesses.
We need to rediscover a Christian blurring of this distinction, smashing the "religious" box of secular Christianity in which we often put our faith and spirituality. Any facet of our lives is only secular as far as we choose to exclude God from it--and even then, as David reminds us, we might be kidding ourselves: "I can never escape from your spirit! I can never get away from your presence! . . . even in darkness I cannot hide from you" (Ps. 139:7-12, NLT).
But perhaps the myth of the secular is an easy temptation in a church that emphasizes the specifically sacred: the one day in seven and the 10 percent of our income, for example. There is even a risk--rather than raising the peculiarly sacred to a still higher level, we might try to privilege the sacred merely by denigrating the remainder.
Ironically, this trap is little understood by those without a religious background, which raises the unnerving possibility of religion obscuring the Object of its worship. C. S. Lewis recognized the value in the specially and specifically sacred, but also saw this risk: "If these holy places, things, and days cease to remind us, if they obliterate our awareness that all ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to do harm. Hence both the necessity, and the perennial danger, of 'religion.'"2
It comes down to a way of seeing the world--a different way of thinking. Lewis continues: "We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always hard to penetrate. The real labor is to remember, to attend. In fact, to come awake."3
Another way of describing this alertness to the spiritual is living sacramentally. "As a start, I can aim to make my daily life sacramental, which means literally to keep the sacred (sacra) in mind (mental).4 Again, this is not about living life under some kind of contrived holy glow; it is choosing to find and serve God among the ordinary things of our lives and the world around us.
Many devotional writers emphasize the element of choice in this way of seeing. We see what we choose to see: "We are all of us more mystics than we believe or choose to believe. . . . Through some moment of beauty or pain, some sudden turning of our lives, we catch glimmers at least of what the saints are blinded by; only then, unlike the saints, we tend to go on as though nothing has happened."5
In this way, resisting the myth of the secular and living sacramentally are merely more complicated descriptions of the simple, practical advice on Christian living given by Paul: "Whatever you eat or drink or whatever you do, you must do all for the glory of God" (1 Cor. 10:31, NLT).
Too many religious people attempt to contain God's glory within their limits, perhaps fearing that it will be tainted if mixed with the supposedly secular world.
A nonsecular Christian sees the world already filled with that Glory, chooses to live with the intentional consciousness of the present reality of God--and basks in that light.
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1 Average additional spending over the holiday period averages between $850 and $1,150 per family. Thomas Hine, I Want That: How We All Became Shoppers-A Cultural History (HarperCollins), pp. 169, 170. Perhaps a shopping-free Christmas is worth considering.
2 C. S. Lewis, Prayer: Letters to Malcolm (Fount, 1998), pp. 71, 72.
3 Ibid., p. 72.
4 Philip Yancey, Rumours of Another World: What on Earth Are We Missing? (Zondervan, 2003), p. 44.
5 Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), p. 152.
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Nathan Brown studies and teaches English literature in Townsville, Australia.
