What Is a “Quotidian Mystery”? Discovering God’s Presence in the Everyday

Reflections from My 7-Year Seminary Journey and the Search for Meaning in Ordinary Life

Dear reader,

Welcome to my first subatck post!

This past June, I finally completed that pesky seminary degree I’ve been working on for far too long. I started my Master of Divinity degree back in 2018, when I was young and naive. Newly married and fresh out of Bible College, I immediately set out on my next theological adventure without much forethought, unsure of where it might lead. But I knew that God was calling me to be a laborer in His field, and so seminary seemed like a good training ground for that vocation. I recall a mentor of mine asking me if I was pursuing the full-time, 4-year sprint or the part-time, 10-year marathon. I didn’t really know how to answer him at the time, but I am proud to say that I finished it in a much more biblical timeframe—7 years. And then Graeme rested from all his labor… maybe.

Shout out to Northern Seminary for getting me across the finish line.

For those unfamiliar with this Harry Potter-sounding degree, the Master of Divinity is not a curriculum in divination or potions that one might find at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, although I am convinced that Koine Greek must count towards something in the magical world of Hogwarts.

No, the M.Div is the original bread and butter degree of seminary, a graduate-level, professional degree designed for those pursuing leadership in faith-based vocations. It’s a behemoth 108-hour program that covers the gamut of theological subjects: Old & New Testament Studies, Ancient Languages, Theology, Church History, Spiritual Formation, and Ministry Praxis courses.

I promise you I’m not tooting my own horn. I have friends who graduated from law school and med school and launched successful careers within that timeframe. Meanwhile I’m parsing Greek verbs, debating atonement theories, and reading more books and writing more papers than I know what to do with, all the while trying to figure out if I should add two more pizzas to my dominos order because some of the teens I pastor might invite their buddies to youth group on Wednesday night. Ministry is a weird and unpredictable vocation, full of God’s great mercy and never what you’d expect.

But, while 7 years of seminary might seem like enough reading and writing for a lifetime, the truth is, I’ve been missing those dual companions of mine as of late, and I need a place to commune with them once again.

This is what you’ll find here at Quotidian Mysteries. A communion table of my own thoughts, and I’ve pulled up a seat for you. Some posts might be morsels of bread, and others might be a feast. It all depends on you, dear reader. And yet it could be that a morsel to some might be a feast to another. After all, one man’s trash is another’s treasure. Maybe that will be true here also.

Nevertheless, QM is a curation of my own reflections, but I’ll try to keep it focused on things that I care about: spiritual formation, church & culture, life in the way of Jesus, and an occasional detour on topics like music, coffee culture, or the outdoors (I’m a seven on the enneagram people… three topics is too confining). Either way, I can’t be sure what will come of this digital communion table, but I do want it to be grounded in “the ordinary.” That is the thread I wish to punctuate, ordinariness with a dash of profundity.

The name for this publication comes from a memoir I read several years ago called Acedia & me by Kathleen Norris. It’s a beautiful memoir that shows the mystical and spiritual beauty in the bland ordinariness and repetitive monotony of life. If we’re honest with ourselves, most of our life is spent doing the same things, eating the same things, saying the same things, and then trying to convince ourselves to death that our lives are more interesting and spontaneous than this. The subtext is that repetition is not good for us, ordinary is not sexy, and monotony is meaningless.

Ordinariness might even cause us to question the meaning of our precious lives, like the teacher Qohelet in the book of Ecclesiastes (1:1-4),

“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”

What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.

If we’re not careful—when we are faced with the rote mechanics of existence—we might inch ourselves toward something more nefarious lurking beneath our ordinary lives: a naturalism and a nihilism, where, in the first place, we convince ourselves that only what can be seen and heard and tasted and touched is all that is. And in the second place, if we’ve seen and heard and tasted and touched everything there is to see and hear and taste and touch, we might very well come to the end of our rope, left only with a nihilism that forces us to question the meaning of it all.

The goal of Quotidian Mysteries is to help us befriend ordinariness. It is to persuade you away from naturalism and nihilism, to tame that nefarious beast lurking within us all, and to explore the possibility of a more beautiful and just worldview, where divine intervention is the rule rather than the exception, to be caught up in the drama of God’s work in the mundanity of individual human lives, and to proclaim, as the Psalmist writes (Ps. 24:1a)

The earth is the LORD’s and everything in it.

You are beloved, dear reader. You are created for purpose and for meaning. There is a personal, knowable God who created all of this, and you are a part of it, no matter how small and insignificant you think you are. This is an ordinary mystery, a quotidian mystery. And it is worth our curious contemplation. I’m glad you’re here.

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