Coram Deo and the Hours of the Day (2 of 2)

The Reformers saw that this had cut the nerve of practical Christianity. The cobbler at his bench is before the face of God. The farmer behind his plow is before the face of God. The mother nursing her child is before the face of God. The schoolboy at his lessons is before the face of God. The whole of life, secular as much as sacred, is lived in the presence that the cobbler and the farmer were sometimes trained to think they had to enter a sanctuary to find. The presence is everywhere. The presence is constant. The presence is the structure of being, not a region of it.

R.C. Sproul made this phrase a centerpiece of his teaching. To live Coram Deo, Sproul wrote, is to live one's entire life in the presence of God, under the authority of God, and to the glory of God. The three prepositions matter. In the presence of, not outside it. Under the authority of, not in defiance of it. To the glory of, not in service of one's own glory or one's own comfort.

What does inhabiting Coram Deo actually look like in practice? Begin where the disciple actually is. The morning. The disciple wakes up. Before the awareness is even fully formed, the disciple is in the presence. The first conscious move is not the construction of the presence but the recognition of it. A breath. A glance toward the One who is already there. A word — even a small one — that names the fact. Good morning. Or thank you. Or here I am. The disciple is not summoning God. The disciple is acknowledging the One who has been present through the unconscious hours of the night.

The day unfolds. The disciple goes to work, or to the kitchen, or to the desk, or to the workshop. Whatever the work is, the work is done before the face of God. Not as a religious performance. Not with constant verbal acknowledgment. As the natural condition of the worker who knows the work is being done in the presence. The shoemaker's stitching is being seen. The accountant's spreadsheet is being seen. The teacher's lesson is being seen. The seeing does not make the worker anxious. It makes the worker honest. The work is being done for the One who sees it, which means the work is being done in the only kind of integrity that has any final weight.

The interruptions of the day are also in the presence. The phone call from a family member that disrupts the planned hour. The colleague who appears at the office door with a problem that was not on the calendar. The child who needs help with something while the parent is trying to finish a different task. Coram Deo holds in the interruption as much as in the planned activity.

The hardest hours come later. The post-lunch fatigue, when the mind grows dull and the body protests. The disciple who has lost touch with the morning's recognition. The mind has been on the spreadsheet, on the call, on the next thing after that, for hours, and the awareness of presence has faded to nothing. The presence does not lapse. The recognition does. The disciple's job in that moment is not to feel ashamed of having forgotten. The disciple's job is to recognize again. A breath. A glance. A word. The presence has not gone anywhere. The disciple has simply stopped registering it. Recognition resumes.

This pattern — recognition, drift, recognition again — is the actual rhythm of the Christian life. The disciple does not achieve continuous conscious attention to God. The disciple maintains an open posture toward a presence that is constant, returns to that posture whenever the drift is noticed, and trusts that the constancy of the presence is more reliable than the constancy of his own attention. The relationship is held by the side of it that does not drift. The disciple's part is to recognize, to drift, to recognize again, without despair at the drifting and without congratulation at the recognition.

This is what John 17:3 looks like Tuesday at 3pm. The disciple in the warm conference room is, in that very moment, in the presence of the Father and of the Son, by the indwelling Spirit, with eternal life as the present quality of his being. He is not aware of it. He is aware of the meeting. The eternal life is not in abeyance. It is operative. The disciple's drift is normal. The disciple's recognition, when he remembers, is the proper response to what was already the case.

At the end of the day, when the work is done and the household is quiet, the disciple sits down for whatever moment of explicit attention he has trained himself toward — prayer, Scripture, silence, the practices that hold the day's recognition in some conscious form before sleep takes the recognition away again. These practices are not the production of the relationship. They are the times in which the relationship is most clearly present to consciousness. They are necessary. But they are not the whole of the disciple's Coram Deo life. They are the punctuation. The prose is the rest of the day.