Meditations for Layfolks - Ideals

Man has here to work, and therefore must see to do his work. It is impossible to labour long and well in the dark. Hence man must have his vision. This we call the ideal. That is to say, he must not concentrate his thoughts on his material life, nor even in the spiritual life fix his attention to the mere acts of goodness that he performs: but it is necessary that he should look beyond the actual life to life as it should be lived, beyond the pathway to the summit, beyond the real to the ideal. For it is part of the discouragement of the spiritual struggle that we so often simply look at our failures. Failures obviously there are; and we should be truly foolish to ignore them and not from them draw lessons that may enable us to turn past defeats into material for future success. But there is still a great deal that is influenced by the mere attitude to life, for the result of a studied and one-sided attention to defeats alone cannot fail to numb my spirit; whereas if I can sometimes take the occasion to see the wonderful things I hope to achieve, it will lift up my heart to future efforts. It is not simply a question of the childish demand for a reward, but the human need to confront oneself with a vision of the purpose. Of course there is this other danger, that I shall be too content with the little already achieved. I shall see what I have done and think that nothing yet remains to be done; whereas when I am made aware continuously by contrast with the ideal of the vast difference that exists between it and my actual life, I am perpetually driven forward to greater things. So that in either case I am led on from my weak attempts at ordinary haphazard goodness to the summit-ranges of holiness.

No doubt as a child I formed for myself ideas of the adventure that I should find in life, had high hopes and high ambitions. There was a vision of my future work as some noble quest in pursuit of truth and justice. I read greedily the romances that came my way, and imagined that deeds of daring and hair-breadth escapes formed the chief material in the composition of human life. Then as I left the sheltering walls of home and school and came out into the business of life, I found it comparatively dull and uninteresting the glamour had gone, the golden light had faded, the gay colouring had turned to deeper grey. In consequence, not only has life become more ordinary, but more difficult. So long as I could see the romance or could imagine its glory flung over the dulness of existence, it was comparatively easy to follow the Faith. But when I found how workaday was the world, then the principles of sturdy independence that paid no heed to the jeers or sneers of the crowd, the straight forward and manly adherence to the regular practice of my religion, the high spiritual prowess exhibited in attendance at daily Mass and meditation, the complete observance of justice and truth, howsoever unprepossessing in their outward appearance and ungrateful and ungracious in their crucified victims, all these things began to weigh heavily and make me lose my vision, without which life grows in tolerable. "Common-sense," which all men approve and which usually signifies a merely material acceptance of the universe, a refusal to see in it more than appears upon the surface, is the most terrible foe to any idealist. It closes its eyes and says there is no light.

Now just because life is so dreary and so humdrum, we must keep hold of our ideals, and, despite appearances, convince our selves that it is a sacred thing. We must see in it nothing common nor unclean, but continually be searching for the nobler side of it not to live a life that is out of the ordinary, but in the ordinary minute details of life to see something always worthy of human effort. If we care really to do so, we can see wonderful things in the dullest of our neighbours; for birth is always a miracle, and death a tragedy. The beggar in the roadway, the drunkard staggering bestially, the fussy and garrulous district-visitor, have yet immortal longings, and have been loved by God. The faded mistresses of royalty are made the subject-matter of expensive volumes; but the bedraggled or tedious souls which have been bought by the Blood of God are passed by as of no value at all, or at least as of no interest. Yet if we have eyes to see, there will be for us no "mean streets," and the newspaper posters with their arresting headlines will be found to be true; every discovery will be literally sensational, every ending of life tragic, every rumour remarkable. For the world is for each one dull or full of interest according as each is interesting or dull. To the dreary all things are dreary. The consciousness of the great gulf between aim and achievement will only set up a divine discontent, without which stimulus no good efforts would here be made. Let me, therefore, keep before myself that ideal, not discouraged because it is not realized (for an ideal realized could no longer be an ideal), but driven to climb the higher, never contented with the petty values which men are wont to set on life, for these "see but dimly, if they see, the vision of the glory of the world."

- text taken from Meditations for Layfolk by Father Bede Jarrett, O.P.