I’m not that important

The Fourth Discourseman

I keep on writing, or I should say, mostly writing, articles about all sorts of high-brow stuff, a bit like my one on early-modern atheism – which, in case you didn’t notice (perhaps you didn’t read it), is rather muddled, for the most part because my ideas shifted quite substantially in the course of writing. The bulk of it popped out while I was drinking my coffee one Sunday morning, gazing somewhat blankly out the window and patting myself on the back for my oh-so-genius thoughts; but I was rather hungry by c. 10:15 and found myself going a little dizzy, which might explain the prolixity. Then the rest was birthed at Ely train station, and travelling thence (I’ve always wanted to use that word in writing; do let me know in the comments if I have failed to do so appropriately) on my awaited train itself. Perhaps it was the grandeur of the Cathedral, regrettably shut to the public in these be-plagued health-and-safety times (with the pestilence of big-big-state thrown in for good measure), or just the chance to breathe some marginally more down-to-earth air – and I actually think Ely is slightly lower in altitude than my usual abode – but I had definitely changed my mind by that point; only, I was too attached to the rarefied genius of my initial writing to let it go. A bit like a relationship I was in once, but that’s a story for another day.

I’m meandering: my point is that there are a variety of other such works, mostly finished but still incomplete, sitting in the notes app on my phone, or squirreled away somewhere in Google drive, covering similarly learnèd-sounding topics (that ‘è’ is very important: make sure to pronounce it in your head). ‘Modernity as Oppression #1: the existential market’ is a particular favourite; I also noted ‘Let’s talk about Descartes’ as a title to write to; only, for the life of me I haven’t the foggiest what exactly I wanted to say about Descartes: perhaps one of my very many readers can help me work that out. There are a few spicy ones that might, perchance, see the light of day; ‘hot takes’, as folk like Aaron Renn, and Mr Discourseman the Second, like to say: ‘We must be Monks’ (which is obvious: of course we must); ‘Antichrist or vicar of Christ?’ (probably the former); ‘The Reformation: a lament’. Except those are the least written ones – almost all just titles. Unwritten they get to sit in my head stroking away at my ego; once they meet pen and paper – or, if I’m not to be disingenuous, keyboard and pixels – there’s no opportunity to give my really rather vast intellect the benefit of the doubt.

All this is to say that one of the utterly joyful discoveries of the past few months – and doubtless I will have to keep re-learning this one – is that I’m not that important. I’m not unintelligent; some might call me clever. But there’s always someone cleverer, and most of the ideas I have have been had before, and find their way into far better books than any I could write. I’m not going to change the world: even if everything went perfectly, that would be nigh-on impossible, or my fame/influence/repute would last for a year or two, maybe more, and extend to at most a few hundred words on Wikipedia (which actually, now that I write that, isn’t to be sniffed at). But that’s ok.

Five years ago I read an article on The Gospel Coalition that struck me powerfully: the joy of an unaccomplished life. Riffing on 1 Thess. 4:11, Chad Bird observes the danger of baptising our world’s obsession with human greatness. We are fed from infancy a constant narrative of self-exaltation. If it’s not all about greatness in absolute terms, then it’s expressed in terms of ‘fulfilling your potential’, that great shibboleth of secular piety, every bit as vacuous as ‘spreading positivity’. This was my education from a young age: I was simply destined to be one of the good and the great. Somehow it was in the fabric of my life, a promise the world made to me, and I’d be damned if it reneged on that.

I read that article five years ago. It has taken many years to begin to sink in. Years of crawling up the greasy pole, so rehearsed in the greatness that was mine – by right, birth, education; it didn’t really matter – that I could hardly celebrate successes when they came, and minor alterations from the script (for there definitely is a script) were crushing defeats. Success is a default in this mindset. And of course failure is the great fear: a stultifying, paralysing fear. Each success breeds more pressure; and slowly the pressure closes in, starving the joy out of it all.

What happened? I was brought to my knees. But in the most joyous way I have found that that is where I ought to have been all along. I used to think that it was a bit anachronistic to pray ‘give me today my daily bread’. I knew I’d have food on my plate and a roof over my head through the day; I knew I’d still be ticking along nicely at sundown. So I started to pray that, but mean something else: give me today my daily academic success, my daily social capital, that sort of thing. But we are meant to pray the words our Lord taught us. No daily bread is a given; the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, and his name be blessed. So there is a right humility – and, more than anything, a realism – to the humble reliance upon our Father that Scripture enjoins. It dissipates the crippling myth of our own importance. We creatures who cry out to God for food, for sustenance, for life itself: we know our place in the universe, and we know who our God really is, with all his greatness that renders as nothing the ‘greatness’ of man.

I’m not that important. My articles aren’t actually that clever. Discourseman #2 is a better writer; Discourseman #1 has more ‘hot takes’; and Discourseman #4 is a better teacher and handler of the Bible. But in that I rejoice. Because it never was about me, and it never was about my fellow Discoursemen either. We were made for God, and when we live lives of worship, lives of humble reliance upon his mercies new every morning – then we find true joy, and we become most human.

And the paradox at the heart of it all: only when I take the crown off my head, when I give up the impoverishing pursuit of human glory and resign myself to the all-wise providence of God, do I realise how precious I am in God’s eyes. More precious than any human glory can reflect. Precious enough that he would give me today, and give me this breath. Precious enough to give me his Son. And in that I rejoice.