She was probably like many who had grown up in her church. She went to church weekly, she participated in various activities especially of the women’s organizations, but she and her husband were finally approached by someone at church who wanted to know if they would be willing to attend what was called a renewal weekend. Well, after some prodding and arguing and various things, she decided to go.

She came back after this weekend, and I’d have to admit, knowing her, that she seemed something of a changed person, and things continued on that way for at least a couple of weeks. Until one day—she was a neighbor of mine—I was visiting with her, and she said to me, “You know, Fr. Stephen, I’m just not very comfortable with all this Jesus stuff,” and I asked her what did she mean. She said, “Well, before I went on that renewal weekend, Jesus was… I understood him and things that way and all. We talked about him in church—but since then, he’s just been everywhere! Especially I haven’t liked him in my kitchen. I can’t cook! So the other day I just said to him: Jesus, you get out of my kitchen. You get back on your throne in heaven and you sit there and let me cook!”

Well, I couldn’t help laughing at her comment, though her comment shed a lot of light on her world and on the world in which we live. Her problem was that she lived in something of a two-storey universe and she liked it that way: that there was a second storey—as I’ve been talking about, a second storey on which God lived. You could put Jesus on his throne, where all these religious things belonged. And she could go visit there when she wanted to, in church, but other than that, she liked her world without God. She liked to be able to cook, to watch television, to raise her children, do whatever it is she was supposed to do, but without God invading her space. She liked having two spaces: one for her and one for God. She lived on the first storey, God lived on the second storey, and the danger of all this renewal thing that she was upset about was that it was threatening to bring God down into her life, into the first storey.

Well, some years back there was an Evangelical convert to the Roman Catholic Church, Thomas Howard, who wrote a book called Splendor in the Ordinary. In it, he argued for a sacramental world, what I’ve called a one-storey universe; he argued for a sacramental world, and spoke of how that might affect the local home. I remember the book because it came out while I was in seminary and caused a bit of a minor stir. Some of us were interested in a more sacramental life, but we as yet had no idea either of the scope of the problem nor of the seriousness of the cure.

Now, the title of his book shed a lot of light on what the true nature of the problem was. His title was Splendor in the Ordinary. Today when we use the word “ordinary,” we all know what we mean; we mean that which is as usual and common, the normal run-of-the-mill, and when something doesn’t belong to the ordinary, it’s extraordinary—extra ordinary; it’s not the usual: belongs somewhere else. And this language is very much part of a two-storey universe. The ordinary world that we live in has in our modern world been defined as a world where there is no God, or at least where God doesn’t interfere. We operate under ordinary rules, but when God becomes involved, when the second storey invades the first storey, things become extraordinary and unusual.

Interestingly, though, that use of the word “ordinary” doesn’t begin in the English language until around the 16th or 17th century, that is, around the time of the Protestant Reformation. Prior to that, the word “ordinary” had had a particularly religious meaning. It described… The bishop could be called an ordinary; he was the person who was in charge of the order within his diocese, and that’s what the word meant. But it came to be used differently and has come to mean something completely opposite from the religious today. An ordinary world doesn’t mean a world that is ordered by bishops; it simply means the world as it is by itself, without God.

But the rise of this new meaning of “ordinary,” meaning common or just the usual, is a modern or at least post-Reformation event. Thomas Howard, in his book that I mentioned, argued that the rise of the ordinary was the mark of a fall of the sacramental, of viewing the world as embued with the sacraments. As the world got rid of the sacramental presence of God, it became something else; it became just the ordinary world. And of course, with a word like “ordinary” or “usual,” it was presumed that the sacramental was somehow thus extraordinary and unusual. As goes the sacrament, so goes God. Adam and Eve had been expelled from the garden of Eden, and with the 16th and 17th century, man returned the favor and expelled God.

Well, this is another way of speaking about the two-storey universe, the world where there is ordinary and extraordinary, usual and unusual. If one adds to this the sameness of mass-produced goods and the sameness of the organization man, our modern world has little world for man, as unique, or room for God. It is hardly surprising that we sometimes are as crazy as we are.

It’s not until we cease to divide the world into ordinary and extraordinary, into usual and unusual, into sacred and secular, that we will have either the possibility of knowing God, much less living the Christian life. What substitutes for both is a second-storey belief system that is held up either by rigid, abstract dogmatics or various fundamentalisms, or by fear of the abyss of atheism and meaninglessness. Well, the first, that is the abstract dogmatics and fundementalisms, are not necessary, and the second, the fear of the abyss of atheism and meaninglessness, is our own creation.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann is quoted as saying that when we bless something, we do not make it into something other than what it is, but reveal it to be what it has always been. This can either be viewed as theological sleight-of-hand, or by some as somehow lessening the sacraments, making little distinction as it does between the ordinary and the holy. On the other hand, when Orthodox priests go to various portions of water at Theophany—the local river, an ocean, a spring, and do the service for the blessings of the water, is there a three-mile limit on their blessing? How far does the blessing extend? We call on the rivers the blessing of Jordan in the prayer at Theophany. A similar question: How long does the blessing last? What’s the half-life of holiness?

We have been blessing all the waters of the world for centuries. Schmemann’s explanation is the only one that makes sense: We pray the blessing because we reveal the water to be what it truly is. It is certainly the case that holy water is holy water, and yet when Christ entered the waters of the Jordan, we’re not told that John prayed a blessing over the water; none was necessary. Christ is who he is, and the waters are what they are, and they are more than what many think the waters to be. The icon of the Theophany reveals the Jordan to be Hades itself, the chaos of darkness into which we had plunged ourselves. Christ enters the waters just as at the cross he entered Hades. In the waters—and you can see this in the icon—he crushed the heads of the dragons. If you look at the icon of Theophany, Christ stands there on what look like two boards, crossed, put together in a cross-like fashion, as if he were surfing. Beneath it are what look like snakes: it’s referring to the verse in the psalms that he crushed the head of the dragons, just as in Hades, after the cross, he crushed that old serpent, the enemy of man.

At Christ’s baptism, there is a theophany, that is, a revealing of God, but there is also an epiphany, a revealing of the world in its greater meaning. Every tree, every rock, every word and action—all things have their meaning in relationship to God, not as things in themselves, not as what we would call “ordinary.” Nothing is “ordinary.” And it is only as they are handled as having their meaning in relationship to God that they will be handled rightly. The earth itself bears the scars of man’s declaration of “ordinariness.” It is not a word of blessing, but a curse.

My oldest daughter, who is a matushka in California, was relating to me some things from the writing of a diocesan priest in the area of Krasnoyarsk, Russia. She lived there for a year. She said the priest was commenting on various scriptural events with an eye to its symbolism, its typology. And it was marvelously revealing, what she shared. He noted, she said, that Christ took away the curse that had been on the earth from back in Genesis when he accepted the crown of thorns. The earth had been cursed on account of the first Adam, when it was said:

Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee. Thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground. For out of it thou wast taken; from dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.

That’s from the third chapter of Genesis. My daughter, quoting the priest, added, “Not only does Christ bear the thorns brought forth from the earth as in the curse, but for the sweat of man’s brow he offers his own sweat as blood when he does the righteous work of prayer and obedience in the garden of Gethsemane.” What wonderful images!

These are images that reveal the ground to be what it now is: blessed, because it was the tomb of Christ’s body. The trees are blessed, because upon them hung the One who suspended the universe. The rocks are blessed, because they reveal Christ who, as the Rock, was cleft and water flowed to save Israel from its thirst. Everything is blessed and revealed as blessed when we know the One who blessed it. Only in knowing him will we see the world for what it is and understand that the gates to paradise have been opened to us.

I’ve chosen to use this language of first and second storey to describe the kind of division, a bifurcation that the modern world has experienced over the past several centuries. Its results have been to smash the religious world into sacred and secular, and to make believing both harder and disbelief easier. Thus, to many atheists, their worldview seems obvious, while believers try to make leaps of logic in argument that render their own thought almost schizophrenic.

There’s obviously a problem. I have tried to describe the problems and to try suggest why language is either to be treated as metaphor at best or avoided when possible. The Christian faith is that God is with us. The Christian life is lived moment by moment in union with God and in harmony with nature, which God has rendered the bearer of the holy in the place of communion. Living a one-storey life can simply be described as living here and now. It is being present to God who is present to us. It is recognizing the true nature of the created world as the arena of both our struggle and our serenity.

Our argument with those who do not believe should not be about whether or not there is a second storey to our universe, but about the true nature of the universe in which we live. Whenever Christians allow the Gospel to be shoved upstairs, we have allowed ourselves to be disregarded and the Gospel to be marginalized. God did not become flesh and dwell among us in order to establish the truth of a second-storey universe; he came to redeem the very universe we live in. Those who cannot recognize hell among us will also be blind to paradise as well. Christ reveals both. Our daily struggle is to live in paradise and to proclaim the Gospel to those who find themselves living in hell. Our mission is to trample down death by death, that is, by the death of Christ, and upon those in the tombs, to bestow life. Glory to God!