Loving Monday: Just Another Piece of Pie

The crumpled chart probably still sits somewhere amongst my old school papers, sandwiched between an analysis of theories of nuclear deterrence and a report on Mesoamerican prehistory.

It’s how I was taught to order my life.

A five-piece pie, promising to bring balance and structure and make me a super saint.

Social.

Physical.

Intellectual.

Recreational.

Spiritual.

That’s all there was to life, and if I could just keep the pieces the right size, I’d coast along nicely.

It worked.

I got up at dawn, ran the dorm steps to the weight room, cleaned up, headed to the student center to meet friends for morning prayer, hit the cafeteria for breakfast, and ran to class. One hour physical, one hour spiritual, half hour social, two hours intellectual . . . And so would go most of my days. I even had the color coded daily schedule to prove out my balance at the end of the day.

I liked the order, the slots, the compartments.

And who doesn’t like pie?

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It worked, yes. Assuming the goal was to take interrelated elements of life and break them into disjointed fragments and pretend that the term spiritual life is not redundant.

Turns out I was pretty good at untangling knots of what belonged intertwined and leaving a line of scrawny threads a safe distance from one another.

But never mind that. I was enjoying a scrumptious slice of my pie.

We’re on week three of our discussion of Loving Monday over at High Calling Blogs. In Part 2 of his book, John W. Beckett explores the difficulty we sometimes have in integrating our work and faith, and goes to what he believes is the root of the problem, the ancient Greek philosophy of dualism.

Fascinating, really.

To someone like me, anyway, who has an abnormally large slice of pie squeezed into my “intellectual” compartment. The discussion appealed to my academic parts, though I know some of you might prefer just a sliver off that side of the pie. For your sakes, only a brief recap.

The Greeks couldn’t get away from the concept of “dualism” — the idea of higher and lower planes of ideas and activities. Plato was the clearest on this. He sought to identify unchanging universal truths, placing them in the higher of two distinct realms. This upper level he called “form,” consisting of eternal ideas. The lower level, he called “matter.” This lower realm was temporal and physical. Plato’s primary interest lay in the higher form. He deemed it superior to the temporary and imperfect world of matter.

The rub comes when we see where Plato placed work and occupations. Where, indeed? In the lower realm. (p. 67.)

He goes on to credit Augustine with incorporating this idea into our Christian framework, distinguishing between “contemplative life” and “active life,” more or less renaming the higher and lower realms.

The higher of these realms came to be equated with church-related concerns that were considered sacred, such as Bible study, preaching and evangelism. Other things were secular, common, lacking in nobility.

Where did Augustine place work and occupations? As with Plato before him, in the lower realm. (p. 67)

According to Beckett, Thomas Aquinas sealed the deal with his dualistic categorization of life into “Grace” and “Nature.”

Revelation, which gave understanding to theology and church matters, operated in the upper realm of Grace. In the lower realm of Nature, man’s “natural” intellect stood squarely on its own.

Business and occupations, operating in the lower realm, didn’t require revelation. According to Aquinas, they survived quite well on a diet of human intellect and reasoned judgment. (p. 68)

In short, we come by our compartmentalization honestly. We have a fractured model of thought that predates us by centuries and has woven itself into the fabric of our theology and world view such that we don’t even realize we think this way.

And consequently, we elevate certain activities as “sacred” while all others remain in the realm of “secular.” It’s no wonder we have a hard time merging our work and faith. We tend to view work as a necessary evil.

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Beckett counters this philosophy with the wisdom of Francis Schaeffer, who said this:

It is not only that true spirituality covers all of life, but it covers all parts of the spectrum of life equally. In this sense there is nothing concerning reality that is not spiritual. (p. 69)

I think it was John Ortberg that said “all of life is spiritual.” When we consider that God never intended for us to slice up life this way, I have to wonder why we should choose to call a single aspect of life spiritual (as in, “I really need to devote more time to my spiritual life”).

Ultimately, Beckett argues, a Biblical worldview holds that “all things are good when in harmony with God’s design, or evil when in conflict.” (p. 73)

While Beckett blackens Augustine’s eye a little bit here, I think it’s interesting that it’s also Augustine’s teaching that gives us a solid basis for viewing life as the whole pie, not two slices and not five. Ortberg explains that

It is the quest for what might be called a well-ordered heart. The balance paradigm [such as carving up my tasty apple pie] assumes our problem is external — a disorder in our schedule or our job or our season of life. But the truly significant disorder is internal.

What does it mean to have a well-ordered heart? Augustine suggested that to have a well-ordered heart is to love

- the right thing

- to the right degree

- in the right way

- with the right kind of love.*

Which piece of pie, or residence in an upper or lower plain, is not the final word on what makes a pursuit sacred or secular, spiritual or not, good or evil. Rather, we must define good or evil based on whether it is in harmony with God’s design.

Augustine helps us out here again.

When the miser prefers gold to justice, it’s through no fault of the gold. For although it’s good, it can be loved with an evil as well as a good love.”

The whole pie is good. But I can make the spiritual slice go bad as much as the social piece.

How much better to just enjoy the whole pie in the context of God’s goodness.

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Join in the discussion over at High Calling Blogs, with Laura’s post The Big Picture.

Related posts:

A World Split in Two, Glynn Young
Chocolate Bread and Stripey Cookies, L.L. Barkat
Jesus was More than Hands On, Monica Sharman

Photo credit: Apple Pie by Joe Burge

* John Ortberg, The Life You’ve Always Wanted, p. 198