Tom Gorman .com is a step on a journey, my journey of the heart and mind, emotion and will, love and joy and pain. Along the way I found the courage to make commitments and decisions about who I choose to be and, more importantly, who I believe I am called to be. The site’s name “Coram Deo – Before the Audience of One” encapsulates what I think that calling entails:
- Coram Deo is a latin phrase that means “Face of God” and literally refers to something that takes place in the presence of, or before the face of, God. To live coram Deo is to live one’s entire life in the presence of God, under the authority of God, to the glory of God.
- The Audience of One refers to God also but I intend more here; I intend to acknowledge that it is only his opinion, his approval that matters. The approval of the crowd is not what I seek. At the same time, I do not mean radical, obnoxious individuality as much as I mean having the courage to live and speak from my conscience before whatever audience is present.
Borrowing from, and paraphrasing, R. C. Sproul: To live all of life coram Deo is to live a life of integrity. It is a life of wholeness that finds its unity and coherency in the majesty of God. A fragmented life is a life of disintegration. It is marked by inconsistency, disharmony, confusion, conflict, contradiction, and chaos.
The person who compartmentalizes his or her life into two sections of the spiritual and the not-spiritual has failed to grasp the big idea. The big idea is that all of life is informed by our spiritual beliefs or none of life is. To divide life between the spiritual and the not-spiritual is itself schizophrenic.
This means that if a person fulfills his or her vocation as a steelmaker, attorney, or homemaker coram Deo, then that person is acting every bit as spiritually as a full-time minister or priest. It means that David in the Old Testament was as spiritual when he obeyed God’s call to be a shepherd as he was when he was anointed to be king. It means that Jesus was every bit as spiritual when He worked in his father’s carpenter shop as when he surrendered to the cross.
Integrity is found where men and women live their lives in a pattern of consistency. It is a pattern that functions the same basic way when others can see you and when they cannot. It is a life that is open before God. It is a life in which all that is done is done with him in mind. It is a life lived by principle, not expediency; by humility before God. It is a life lived under the tutelage of a conscience that is made true by God.
Coram Deo . . . before the face of God. Next to this idea our other goals and ambitions are trivialities.
