Life's Maddening Sameness

And the "quarter-life crisis"

I’ve had Thomas Merton’s spiritual autobiography on my nightstand for many months. After talking to an editor at the Festival of Faith and Writing, I learned I’m not the only one who has needed time to work my way through The Seven Storey Mountain. The book is a classic, and I suppose this is one way of saying that it will not abide our impatience for a quick and breezy narrative, a story easily distilled into actionable points for living our best life now.

I’m not yet 100 pages into this more than 400-page book, but I’ve gotten at least as far as 1926, when Merton, age 11, moves with his widowed father to Murat, in the mountains of central France. Murat is a Catholic province, as Merton describes it, and there he and his father board with a deeply religious couple, M. and Mme. Privat. Merton describes them as “among the most remarkable people I ever knew.”

M. Privat was short but stout, and he gave an impression of “solidity and immobility and impassiveness.” Mme. Privat was “more like a bird, thin, serious, earnest, quick, but also full of that peacefulness and impassiveness which, as I now know, came from living close to God.” The qualities this couple possessed were not spectacular in any worldly sense. On the one hand, it is strange they would capture the attention of a pre-pubescent boy like Merton, whose father was not particularly devout or devoted to his religious education. Merton was not raised to admire saints. On the other hand, isn’t it true that holiness always begs notice? It’s a paradox, of course, because holiness never insists attention be paid to it. It acts quietly, humbly, steadily.

“They were certainly saints,” Merton assures. “And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within, and from the habitual union of their souls with God in deep faith and charity.” As I read this description of the Privats, I starred it and wrote a note in the margin: **True sainthood

I’m struck by the paradoxical words that Merton uses to describe the Privats, that their lives were both ordinary and supernatural, that their tasks were common and yet infused with grace. I can imagine these people, whom Merton describes as “peasants,” labored as their neighbors did and yet exhibited, in the ordinariness of their daily work, a spirit of co-laboring with God. Their habit was a constant union with God “in deep faith and charity,” which is to say that their lives were marked by worship and love. Their activity was common—and their bearing, otherworldly. History would not have recorded their lives, but note the longevity of their memory in Merton’s story. It reminds us:

You don’t forget holy people very easily.

I thought to write about the Privats as an example of the holy ambition commended by Paul in one of his letters to the Thessalonians: “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody,” (1 Thess. 4:11, 12). I have a friend who has included this verse in her email signature line, and she very much lives into the beauty it commends of a quiet, steadfast humility. In mid-life, she knows the greatness of ambitions that pledge quiet faith and faithfulness.

But let’s be honest that this is likely not the life verse of the young. They have bigger, bolder ambitions than leading quiet lives. A couple of weeks ago, I was in conversation with some younger women from church, and they informed me about the phenomenon of a “quarter-life crisis.” They described it like this, that you’re 25, three years out of college. You’ve landed a job, even bought a house (if you’re living in Cincinnati, not Toronto.) Some of the uncertainty of your younger years is behind you, but for as much as you wanted all the rights and responsibilities of adulthood, you now recognize the burden of the responsibilities you’ve taken on: a gruelling 9 to 5, a yard to mow, a marriage to tend. Your crisis is a future of adulting that stretches ahead of you.

I listened to my young friends describe this quarter-life disenchantment—and I thought of holy people like the Privats. It’s true they seem like saints from another time, another place, weaned as they were from novelty and spectacle. They didn’t beg of their daily lives high-pitched emotional satisfaction. They accommodated themselves to the humdrum qualities of human existence. What is most alluring to me, as I imagine the witness of their quiet lives, is their ability to inhabit—joyfully—the routines of the everyday. The getting up and getting breakfast. The making of the bed and the minding of children and the thousand daily intimacies of marriage. The dayswork and the dinner and the dishes—and the doing it all over again, the very next day because it would be necessary.

In my practice of a rule of life, which I’ve written often about here, I’ve wanted this grace, and I’ve been in search of this joy.

Maybe it’s even true that I’ve made it my quiet ambition.

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