Memorial of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Priest

The Gospel tells us that the people took offense at him. I think a couple of things are going on.

The first is simple familiarity. They are saying to themselves: We know this man. We remember him growing up, and he was not special then. We know his parents and family; they are not special. So how could he be special now?

We all have some of that tendency in ourselves. Once we have known someone for a long time, we do not always allow that person to change. They have to remain whatever we once knew them to be.

But I think something even more fundamental is going on—something that is, to an extent, particular to religion. We expect spirituality and religion to be extraordinary. We expect signs and wonders. We expect experiences that carry us beyond ourselves and beyond the ordinary lives we live.

The people of Jesus’ hometown did not get that from him. They watched him grow up. He did nothing to draw attention to himself. He lived an ordinary life: first as a child, then an adolescent, then an adult. He did not even begin his ministry until he was thirty, and most of his miracles were worked outside his hometown. All they had seen was an ordinary guy. And we do not expect new revelations in faith and religion to come through an ordinary person.

John the Baptist, on the other hand, went out into the desert. He wore a hair shirt. He ate bugs. He probably did not bathe. So when he appeared and said, “God has spoken to me, and he has a message for you,” people could think, “Well, that might be true. This is extraordinary. He has lived a crazy life. Maybe God really is speaking to him.”

We have the same tendency in the modern Western world. People often turn toward Eastern religions—toward Hinduism, Buddhism, and similar traditions—because, from within our day-to-day experience, those things seem extraordinary. They come from places and cultures that seem foreign and exotic to us. They feel novel, and so we think, “Maybe there is truth there.”

But when it comes to the ordinary things we ourselves know—the faith in which we grew up, the faith in which we have not seen great wonders—we dismiss it: “There is nothing there to worry about.”

Yet that is not how Scripture presents religion to us. Look back at what God offers Israel in the Old Testament: it is an ordinary life. Scholars often point out that there was no word for “religion” in Hebrew at the time. They did not have the word or the concept. It was simply part of life. You lived day by day knowing that you had a relationship with God. You had rituals, laws, and all these other things, but they were simply part of human life.

Again and again, God’s promise to Israel is not fabulous wealth. It is not that he will do signs and wonders in their midst. Rather, he says, in effect: “If you obey my laws, I will make life go well for you. Your crops will grow. Your animals will have offspring. You will have children. Your enemies will not attack you.” That was it. His promise was, “I will make you very good farmers.” That was the promise: “I will make your life simple and good, so that you may enjoy it.”

God promised them something supremely ordinary, because religion is intended to be supremely ordinary. It is not about signs and wonders. God created this world, and it is good. An ordinary life is a very good and wonderful thing.

The effort to keep striving after the extraordinary, the exotic, and whatever else only brings us misery, because it is not out there. Life is what it is. The world is what it is. There is nothing truly extraordinary out there; there is only the ordinary.

Part of an authentic faith is accepting that and finding the goodness within it. It is genuinely good to wake up and have a peaceful day with your family. It is good to go to work, do the job, come home, and enjoy your family and friends. That is a truly good and happy life. Striving for anything beyond that will only bring problems into our lives.

God knows this. So no matter how often we pray, “Help me win the lottery. Help me live forever in this life. Help me do all these extraordinary things,” God does not answer those prayers, because those things will not make us happy. They only bring more and more problems. Instead, he continually calls us back to simplicity—to a simple way of life and even a simple way of relating to him.

You do not need extraordinary spiritual experiences. Such experiences are going to bring you greater burdens. Some people need them for the good of the whole Church, but they are not the substance of day-to-day life.

So we need to embrace the ordinary. We should not constantly chase novelty or whatever is exotic. We should recognize that God has already spoken the truth to us, both in his word and in the creation he has given over to us. He has told us where we will find our happiness.

We should not let familiarity persuade us that this gift is not good, and then resent or reject it. We should recognize instead that it is familiar because of God’s goodness: he gave us this gift, he did not take it away, and he continually tries to draw us back to the goodness he has woven into the fabric of reality itself.

If we can accept that—if we can embrace the goodness of a simple life—we will find happiness here and, ultimately, lasting happiness in his presence.