Jesus and The Office

After persistently devoting every single laundry folding minute to The Office, it took the whole winter to get all the way through all nine seasons. Truly, it was like climbing K2. Only without the suffering.

There were several things I liked very much about the series. The first was the unglamorous nature of all the sex. I know that nothing on tv can avoid having lots of this main thing in everyone’s life, but I really liked the deeply awkward and appalling nature of almost all the stuff having to do with it.

The second thing I liked was the valiant attempt to have the people in the office look as normal and as unremarkable as possible. There had to be, of course, some much more beautiful than average people, but on the whole it was pleasant to see the drudgery of ordinary people trying to sell paper, and then spending lots of hours not selling paper.

Third, it was interesting to see the changing technology on one hand, and the sterilization of humor on the other. The devices got sleeker and less cumbersome and the humor became less sharp. I found myself genuinely shocked in the beginning by what we all used to be allowed to joke about and realized that even I, like all America, regularly self censor. Not every subject is on the table anymore. Lots of things that could be laughed about are never mentioned.

But, even so, with every effort made to preserve the flavor of ordinary office life, the point was to make you feel that if you sold paper there it would be like having a close knit family. If only you could move to Scranton, you would never chose to leave.

When truly, this must now be a counter cultural message–that the ordinary is worth it, that having a boring office job is a worthy kind of life to have. It seems like fewer and fewer people believe it any more. Life has to have apocalyptic meaning. Your job has to matter. It’s not enough to sit behind a desk and just sell a product and then go home at night in order to come back and do it again in the morning. The desperate struggle to find purpose and still acquire a pay check, with discontentment lurking in every paper crowded corner, is real.

In other words, it was a curious exercise to watch the ordinary outworking of life imbued with meaning by the camera rather than, say, God. You find satisfaction somehow–waiting for retirement, eating, drinking, looking for love, trying to rise to the top of the paper sales mountain, looking for a different and better job, trying to become famous–and the backdrop is the office, and so the space comes to have nostalgic weight, but truly, there isn’t very much beyond the paper. In the end, after nine seasons, they all go on to other kinds of work. Or they stay. But there’s no real difference between the first episode and the last one.

This year seems like the moment that the word Ordinary has bubbled up into Christian consciousness. I’m running into it everywhere, and using it rather a lot myself. In the face of worldwide persecution, and cultural hostility, the Christian out there in the world is uniquely equipped to reclaim the virtues of an ordinary, tedious life. The way that a Christian gets stuck, or rather endures, day after day the unremarked and obscure quality of ordinary life must surely be different than the way anyone else does it.

It’s not about mindfulness, or getting ahead, or beating back ennui. If a Christian goes to sit behind a desk and sell paper, besides probably wanting always to curse the darkness, that person would be able to sit with the sure and certain knowledge that paper isn’t all there is. That prayer and consistency and good humor and kindness, not for the sake of the paper, but for the sake of Jesus, make every moment endurable. In the end, if you did your job, and prayed for your coworkers, and told them about the God who loves them, and sacrificed yourself without hope of acknowledgement or reciprocation, than your work there would sanctify the office, would bring the weight of the love of God into that grey and hopeless backdrop. It wouldn’t be fun. You probably wouldn’t like it. But it would be worth it.

But also, it would be better if you could laugh at it all.