Attending to Life

Attending to Life Comparative commentary by Jonathan Evens Cite Share Show Bible Passage The first letter to the church in Thessalonica was written to encourage the Christians there to continue to live to please God by living quietly, minding their own affairs, and working with their hands, so they might behave properly towards outsiders and be dependent on no one. These instructions differed markedly from those Jesus gave to the first disciples when he called them to leave homes and work in order to follow him in his peripatetic ministry (Matthew 19:29). The very different instructions given to the Christ followers in Thessalonica reflect a different context for ministry and a different stage in the growth of Christianity. While some continue to be called to a peripatetic ministry, 1 Thessalonians seems to indicate that the majority are now expected to remain where they are and to see their ministry as locally based and focused on example, through the everyday lives they lead for Christ (1 Thessalonians 3:6–8). This is, therefore, an incarnational form of ministry as it echoes Jesus’s life in the Holy Family, firstly in Egypt and then in Nazareth. Samual Wells has noted that 90% of Jesus’s incarnate earthly existence was spent simply being with other people in those two places, ‘sharing our existence, experiencing the joys and struggles of being human’ (Wells: 2018, 24). The Collect of the Feast of the Holy Family, which is prayed on 28 December in Western Church traditions, says that Jesus, by being subject to Mary and Joseph, consecrated domestic life with ineffable virtues. This seems to resonate with what John Reilly has painted in Holy Family, in which we may read the light and unity of the Trinity as finding expression in and through the human Holy Family, their relationships with each other, and with the community around them. As the Collect for this Feast suggests, the model of the Holy Family can instruct those who follow Christ, enabling them to reflect God’s glory in the world, and gain them eternal fellowship with Jesus and those with whom he shared an earthly home. This understanding then led the Church to speak, as French Jesuit priest and writer Jean Pierre de Caussade most memorably did, about ‘the sacrament of the present moment’ which: refers to God’s coming to us at each moment, as really and truly as God is present in the Sacraments of the Church … In other words, in each moment of our lives God is present under the signs of what is ordinary and mundane. (Obbard 2012: 10) We see this in, perhaps, an extreme form in Stanley Spencer’s The Lovers (The Dustmen) where the ordinary and mundane things that are offered up in worship are both the detritus of daily life and also those who collect and remove such objects for us. The dustman works with his hands and lives quietly in the way that 1 Thessalonians encourages (4:3–12). In this way, as Kenneth Pople notes, he ‘becomes for us our individual emblem of joy made manifest’ (Pople n.d.). As a result, something of the divine is seen in him; just as the ordinary staples of life—bread and wine—have also become carriers of the divine for Christians, as both sacraments and signs. Finally, Antoine Camilleri’s Prayer shows how artists such as Reilly and Spencer might arrive at their insight into the divine as seen within the everyday. Camilleri sees his life and art as prayer, which is the great connection between artists and mystics. Art and contemplative prayer both involve the paying of dedicated attention to the mundane and everyday in order to see what others miss, including signs of the divine. The paying of attention is the basis of art and is also an act of prayer. In this way, the Church has developed and deepened the valuing of everyday life that is found in these chapters of 1 Thessalonians by linking it to the incarnation and to prayer. As a result, what was initially viewed primarily as a missional strategy also becomes part of the prayer life of the faithful, so that the whole of life becomes sacramental and deepens their relationship with God. References Wells, Samuel. 2018. ‘Jesus: Human and Divine’, An address given at Baitul Futuh Mosque (2018), available at https://www.stmartin-in-the-fields.org/jesus-human-and-divine/ [accessed 21 April 2025] De Caussade, Jean-Pierre. 1989. The Sacrament of the Present Moment, trans. by Kitty Muggeridge (New York: HarperOne). Obbard, Elizabeth Ruth. 2012. Life in God’s NOW: The Sacrament of the Present Moment (Chicago: New City) Pople, Kenneth. n.d. ‘The Quest for New Cookham-Feelings: The Lovers or The Dustman’, available at https://www.stanleyspencer.co.uk/The%20Lovers.html [accessed 21 April 2025]