by Norman Walford
The history books have not been
kind to St Gregory the Try-harder.
He has no Wikipedia entry. Until
recently if you Googled him you wouldn’t have got a single hit, though happily
that’s starting to change now. In the annals of church history he has become,
strangely, something of a nonentity.
Why he has been neglected for so
long is a bit of mystery. It may simply be that our Gregory never achieved
anything in his life worthy of being recorded for posterity. That is after all
the common fate of those who try to live the Christian life according to the
try-harder philosophy (I wouldn’t want to dignify it by calling it a theology.)
As I mentioned last week, there is a basic spiritual principle that the harder
we try the less we achieve. Some people sadly go their whole lives and never figure
this one out. Others—and I include myself in these—understand the principle
pretty clearly but nonetheless find themselves falling in and out of the
try-harder mentality on a regular basis. Perhaps Gregory was just one of these.
This is the
week that I found out that the publisher of my book How to Survive in the Pharisee Church has collapsed after being
taken over by a fundamentalist Pharisee cult. Everyone else seems to have seen
this thing coming for about the last two years. For me, who’s supposed to know
about Pharisee things, I’ve just found out. Wake up Norman! Show a bit of
interest in what’s going on around you …