Category: Reflections on the Christian Life

These were the words that the composer Antonio Salieri spoke as they wheeled him down the halls of the asylum in the end of the movie, “Amadeus.” 

To me the message hit with real power. There is something within us that longs for purpose, meaning and value. No one wants their life to be characterized by being bland or just existing. No one wants to be condemned with the criticism of being “mediocre.”

Whether the story of the movie is true or not, the concept rings true. Salieri was portrayed as viewing himself as the patron saint of the mediocre. He was in essence judging everyone. He was calling all the people around him, “mediocre.” He was calling all of us mediocre. He could do this because he had judged – or perhaps – had condemned – himself to the lot of the mediocre.

The movie shows Salieri promising himself to God if God would bless him with musical greatness. His world was music and composing. He wanted exceptional – heavenly – talent. He worked hard at it. 

But then he saw Mozart. 

In Mozart’s genius he saw the very essence and beauty of God. This drove him crazy. What he had sought after for so long was given to an irreverent Mozart. Mozart lacked the deep serious commitment to God that Salieri had made. And yet in this one that Salieri could not respect, he saw the very beauty and hand of God. 

Salieri fought against it. He in fact used Mozart’s passion for music to drive him to his death. He secretly pushed him to compose a requiem mass that in the end would be for Mozart’s own requiem. In spite of all Mozart achieved, he suffered a premature and untimely death at the age of 35.

This plot may not be entirely true. It makes for a fascinating movie. There have been many legends about how Mozart died, including one that said that Salieri poisoned him gradually with mercury. The movie picked up on this theme and amplified it. It played on the irony of Mozart continuing to work on his own funeral music while he was lying on his death bed.

But the concepts – or themes – do ring true.

Mediocrity! Mediocrity!

That is a fear. It is a fear that we will have lived our lives and have squandered them. That we will not have achieved anything meaningful. That our time here will have just been going through the motions of life and nothing more. That we will have spent our time running in circles doing nonsense. And then we are gone.

We give awards and honors and speeches. We do things to reassure each other that our lives have not been “mediocrity.”

We were created to be creative. We are meant to achieve. We are meant to do things of meaning and value. We should leave a legacy – not of money or things – but of value and meaning.

And so, we all may face at times the insecurity of Salieri. 

We may judge ourselves and our lives. We condemn what we do and what we have done to the level of the mediocre. It does not compare to others who we view as great. It perhaps does not compare to the myriad of dreams and aspirations that we held for ourselves when we were young. When we were young there were so many possibilities. The world was wide open, and we had so much that we could and would do. As we age, we fear that in old age we will represent little more than a patron saint of the mediocre – the bland and purposeless – the ordinary.

It is interesting to look within the movie at Salieri’s envy and resentment of Mozart. Salieri was achieving fame. But Salieri allowed himself to be destroyed by the greater genius of Mozart. Had he never known Mozart he might have been happy. But having seen the greatness of another he would never be satisfied with his own talent. 

It went beyond this. He viewed it as a frustration – or perhaps a curse – or a disrespect of his prayers to God. Rather than God granting him the incredible talent he had asked for, He gave it to the irreverent Mozart. How dare God do this? If God would not answer first his humble request, then his earnest request, and then finally his demands, Salieri would instead then destroy the beauty God created.

How dare God not answer his prayer? Who does He think He is?

Uhhh. Well. God. That is who God thinks He is. 

He is the almighty creator of the universe. He is the one who created all things, and knows all things, and who has a beautiful plan of restoration and glory for His creation. 

He is the one who is to be worshiped and obeyed but also trusted. The world may not make sense as it is. And we have a choice. We can be driven crazy by it. Or we can submit and trust and be content in it.

Are you mediocre?

If you are willing to listen and obey and accept the role in this world that God has for you, you will in no way be mediocre. 

Imagine that the almighty creator of the universe loves you and not only has a plan but that He wants to allow you glory by being a part of His plan. The secret is that by humble submission to the plans of God you will achieve greatness far more than any who would seek it on their own.

Salieri felt that in not being blessed by God and then by opposing God he had become mediocre. That makes sense. But the opposite is entirely true. By accepting God and the place and the purposes and the roles that He has for you, you are or will be given amazing glory. 

For in the humble service of the Lord, the common becomes sacred. The help that you provide to a small child is no longer just what anyone would commonly do, it is a sacred calling. For the Lord can use your kindness to impact that child’s life and help them to achieve amazing things. The word of comfort to a friend is no longer some pop culture advice, but instead can be the ministry of God’s children to each other, blessed by His love and power.

Don’t be afraid to dream big in the Lord.

He might have great things in store for you to do.

Don’t also be so foolish as to disrespect what roles He has given you to do. From a heavenly perspective they may be so great – so beyond mediocre – that it will fill you up with wonder when all is made known.

The simple can become sacred. The smallest act may become the greatest achievement.

The movie hit me hard in 1984 when I saw it because it reflected a great truth in the error of Salieri. A fool is one who lives his life without wisdom. Salieri then was a fool who could not see the greatness and wonder that could have come from accepting God’s role for his life. A life lived in opposition to God does indeed result in mediocrity. I wanted to cry out to the figure on the movie screen. A life lived for the purposes that God has for you – no matter how simple it may look on the outside – is one of true greatness and glory.

Your life can be sacred. Your life can have immense meaning. It is not necessary to be in great positions or power. The one – the Almighty – with the greatest position and power has commissioned you to serve. Can you faithfully accept that service? In that nothing is mediocre. It is glory.

It is a good thing that I have it all figured out. You know – life, how to live my life, the universe, my place in it all – all of it. It is a good thing that I have it all figured out.

Not.

People like puzzles. They like to be challenged so that they can then conquer them and be satisfied. We want to think that life is the same way. There is this odd and very tempting thing in our minds that challenges us to figure everything out. We think we can make sense of it all. If we just try hard enough, we will pull it all in order and make it all make sense. It will finally click. It is just on the tip of our tongues – or just barely within reach of our brains.

I can be in charge then. I can with great cleverness and wisdom drive the pattern and direction of my life. I can figure out what I want to do, where I want to be and how I want my life to run. I can be in charge of my destiny. I can do it my way and make it my own.

But it is not true. 

There are times when I don’t have the slightest idea what to do next. I go from times when there are dozens of things in front of me to do. And then a moment later I don’t know what I want to or should do next. 

I don’t know what is going to happen in the coming day let alone in the coming months or years. I like to pretend that I am in charge. Like some huckster or magician, I pretend that what happened was in my plans and that I pulled it all off with great grace. But the truth is that I was mostly just responding to whatever happened in the moment as it came. It was really much more like “sight-reading” rather than performing a well-practiced and planned piece of music. 

The universe is so incredibly complicated. There are so many moving parts. There is of course purpose and meaning. That is why my brain seeks it out and tries to make sense of it. There are many things that do make sense. But there is a lot that does not. There is a lot that goes far beyond my simple ability to understand it. 

I think that if we were to be able to be pulled far above and beyond ourselves, we would see this. Imagine it is like google earth. You can zoom out so that you are looking from way above so that you could see all of the events on your life’s timeline and all the intersecting events from others timelines in perspective. Then all of the swirling complicated influences would make sense. We would be able to see the outrageous complexity and we would laugh. “There was NO WAY you could understand it all,” we would tell ourselves.  “From here you can see it. But when you are down in it there is no way you could see it.”

Chaos theory says that there is purpose and order in our universe. It only appears to be chaos because there are multiple very complicated intersecting levels of purpose and order. A pebble drops in the water and the waves make clear sense. If two pebbles drop in the water at the same time the intersecting waves are more complicated, but our brains are strong enough to be able to understand the interactions and reflections of the waves. But if a thousand pebbles drop in the water at the same time the complexities are so amazing that the waves look like utter chaos. Of course, there is order and purpose behind all of those waves even if we cannot make sense of them. It is just too complicated for us to see it all.

In living this life then I go from confidence to despair. I go from thinking in my cleverness that I understand my place and purpose to feeling like I don’t understand anything. I go from arrogant independence to humble dependence. I go from confidence to insecurity and at times to peace.

Peace. How can we realize that? I had a friend one time who dropped his guard and said that peace is a fallacy. It is a word that people say but does not really exist. The problem of course was that he was really really smart. His mind could make sense of science and the problems in front of him. But his reality was not just a thousand, but a million pebbles dropped in the water all at once. This reality could not be neatly sorted out by his brain and it therefore robbed him of the concept of peace.

I have felt peace at times. How?

If only there were someone who could be pulled way up into the clouds to oversee my timeline. Like the google earth zooming out so very very far that they could see the myriad of intersecting events that were driving my reality. If that person could be trusted – a friend – a love. They could reassure me. “Peace, child.” “It all makes sense.” “You cannot see it all or understand it, but there is purpose and order and meaning.” “It is too complex for me to explain it to you. You are going to have to just trust me. It makes sense. It is ok.”

I think you can see where I am going with this.

Our brains and our very beings seek purpose and meaning. We sense that it must all be there. And it is.

So how do we live within this:

1. Step one: Seek God. Seek one who has created and understands this. The God of the Bible says that He is a loving and all-knowing God. He amazingly wants to be in relationship with us. Through the gospel He has created a way so that we could be in relationship with Him. He wants to be that person – that friend – that Father – who has the perspective that we long for. 
2. Step two: Spend time with Him. Rather than hours spent wrestling with the complex reality puzzle as though you are going to figure it all out, spend time with the one who understands the answer to the puzzle. It is ok to try to solve the puzzle. It is natural for us to want to do this. But when we are frustrated it is time to go to the answer key – or more appropriately – to the one who holds and knows the answer.
3. Step three: This is the hard one. Be at peace knowing that there is an answer key but that we are not going to get to read it. This is really hard. “Yes, there is an answer to the riddle. But “no” I am not going to tell you. I will not tell you because it is too complex for you to understand.”  Perhaps a better way to phrase this is, “Peace, child, you cannot understand.” Peace comes from trusting the relationship. That is hard. We have to admit that we are limited and be willing to trust and rest and love the one who can see it all. It is truly humble dependency.
4. Step four: Pray. “But certainly, He does not want to hear about all of my little concerns?” But He does. Because the concerns are not little to you. Because they are important to you then they are important to Him. Just like I would want to hear about my children’s concerns. The second-grade spelling test was not a small thing to them. So then it was not a small thing to me. God is very clear about this. He wants to hear about it all. Even if He cannot explain it all to you, He wants to hear nonetheless.

In arrogance we often pretend that we have it all figured out. We make the world into crisp lines of black and white. We provide advice and simple answers to the so many that are struggling to navigate through this world. When it is our turn to struggle, we hide away our doubts and fears, just holding our breath waiting for the time when order will return. We wait for when we can be in control of our lives again. We put on a costume of being in control for those times when things are out of control. We lack peace but pretend as though it is there for us. 

I do not have everything figured out. I never will. Oh of course I will have aspects of things figured out. From time to time things will seem to make sense. But this is a complicated life. It does not all make sense.

My Lord knows me and loves me. He has provided a means by which I can have an intimate relationship with Him. In that relationship then I can have peace. 

“Peace, child. It does make sense. I know it can be hard on you. I know it can be painful. There is purpose and structure and meaning to it all. If I tried to explain it, it would not help. You must trust me. It is ok.”

“Peace.”