Routines and Other Routes

I suffer from too much routine. 

Routine keeps me thinking one way. It keeps me business-minded, focused on the same old world and the same old possibilities, always ready and able to see other people in reduced terms. Routine allows me to finish things at work. 

Most of the time, routine is nothing more than the usual baleful plodding that every half-conscious person must bear daily.

However, I do occasionally look up from my routine, Then I get a bit more thoughtful about what is right in front of me, and I start to see other possibilities. I even begin to suspect that it is possible to get more imaginative.

That is not my usual routine, of course.

No Paradoxes or Parallels

Most days, I don’t think I am required to go into anything in much depth. I’m not about to deal with higher math. And I won’t go near something as confusing as paradox. 

Paradox, I tell myself, must not exist in the real world, though here is the rub, if I’m perfectly honest. Perhaps the most important word to people of faith is the word "grace." This is a word that breaks down easily into paradox. Grace is something we can't earn, and yet it is something we think we must work for. There is the grace of routine, and there is the grace that breaks in on routine. I would like to propose that we have at least two ways of understanding this word. There is our routine way of seeing and using it. And then there is the more serious, more powerful, freeing way of seeing it.  

Grace and routine seem at odds in my life. I plod along, fail miserably, and then ask other people or God for grace. I ask to be let off the hook. Forgive me. Let me go on. Let me stay with it. 

Then there is the grace that has as its root the Greek word charis. This is the power of God for charity cases. There is nothing in my routine to improve me. There is nothing I can do to become better. My routine just makes me increasingly weary and a little harder at hearing. The idea in charity, or grace, is that it empowers us in some way to do what we should do. I think that people who are empowered by grace must be the most imaginatively alive people we could meet. 

Creative people do share in this. They see new combinations where most people only see the old. And while most people talk about being outside the box, these people wonder “what box?”

I don’t know if routine is the enemy of living or if it supports it. But routine I can afford. Staying in routine means I won’t over-spend. But I also stop seeing clearly. I have little use for experiences and things that I might see in new ways. And I don’t see much promise in the people around me, and I don’t make time for them. But routine is usually preferred to the breaking out of grace.