Sometimes I fantasise about what a genuinely pious life or
an ideal life as a Christian looks like. This is what I’ve come up with. First,
a timetable:
0500 arise to say
Morning Prayer
0530 reading/study
0700 breakfast and
showering (probably not at the same time)
0800 administration
(emails and the like)
0900 reading/study
1100 evangelism
(probably online)
1200 midday prayer
1230 lunch
1330 reading/study
Okay, I’ll stop now. I’m getting bored even just typing this
timetable. And I can see how unfeasible all this is. The ideal is that I would
arise early to pray, to do some study, to deal with all my admin in an hour,
and to punctuate the day with regular prayer times. Is my ideal of the
Christian life actually this monastic? Probably!—but all this assumes that I
don’t share a life with my wife or my son, that I don’t actually have work to
do on occasion, that I don’t check Facebook far too often, that I don’t play three or
four games of Fifa after lunch if opportunity allows. So this vision of my
ideal life as a Christian is far from realistic. But that is my fantasy.
But let me excavate another layer. When it comes to saying
my prayers . . . well, I am impressed by those whose context allows them to
attend Morning Prayer (or similar). I have found, in the ten years or so since I’ve
been ‘seriously’ Anglican, that saying Morning Prayer by myself is far more
stultifying than I care to admit. These days, when my son’s at school, I aim to
say ‘Prayer During the Day’ . . . but I do feel guilty when I miss it. The
daily office is really something that should be done communally because without
the presence of others, it’s all too easy to abandon it or to feel that it’s a
pointless exercise. But that is my fantasy.
I need to go further. I would love to have a prie-dieu to
say prayers at and a leather-bound copy of Daily
Prayer. In this day and age of digital media and the like, when the icons in
our churches are more likely to be PowerPointed photos of leaping silhouettes
on a beach, I find the need to have something material to make me feel ‘connected’
to the Word who became flesh—hence the desire for a prie-dieu in a small corner
of my home and a leather-bound copy of Daily Prayer (because such is far more holy than the slightly battered hardback copy I already own). But my home is a relatively small two-bedroomed flat with
no corners available. The walls are decorated with paperbacks and DVDs and LEGO
and board games and my ever-replenishing stack of Pepsi Max Cherry multipacks.
There is no corner for a prie-dieu and, to be honest, I doubt owning a
leather-bound copy of Daily Prayer
would result in my praying more regularly. But that is my fantasy.
I also fantasise about maintaining—no, being—a stable, pious presence on social media. Aside from
blogging, the only social media I do, as previously divulged, is Facebook. Sometimes
I get caught up in pointless discussions, and sometimes I have been called out
and/or shamed for not having a view that someone else has. And so I attempt to
maintain a peaceful, Christlike online presence where people will know me by my
serenity and occasional nuggets of wisdom. But I’m more likely to be sharing a
photo of a cat doing something highly amusing (cats are funny!) or some kind of
one-liner about gun control in the US or another political issue that I don’t
really know anything about beyond the fact that I found that particular one-liner
funny and a little pointed. Needless to say, once I’ve done so and have been
reproached, I regret the entire series of my life choices and wish once more
that I could be that stable, pious presence on social media of my fantasy. For
indeed, that is my fantasy.
So where do all these fantasies lead me? What can I say? All
I can say is that I remain as determined as ever to walk by the Spirit and live
under the lordship of Christ, ever-grateful that God is gracious. And this is
not so much my fantasy as it is my reality.
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A funny picture of a
cat
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