Ordinary Thoughts

According to the church calendar, we are in the midst of Ordinary Time. You can see the swath of green fabric on the communion table, which is a subtle reminder to us of this. Stretching from Pentecost Sunday to the first week of Advent, this is the longest time slot on the religious calendar. I think of Ordinary Time as, well, ordinary. Technically, Ordinary Time gets its name from the word “ordinal”, meaning numbered or counted time. But, still, I think that it does have a kind of everydayness about it.

In Ordinary Time, we look for God in the regular cycle of our lives. The daily rituals of washing the dishes, going to the park, commuting to work, pulling weeds, writing reports, all of these are activities that can be holy when we look for God’s presence with us. I went on a Silence & Solitude retreat last weekend and was given a cup full of things to meditate on: a delicate Japanese maple leaf, a spicily fragrant gardenia, a sliver of bell pepper, a frond segment from a fern. These were among the thirty or so items in my cup. For over an hour, I looked at the details of every item, tasting, feeling, examining and marveling at God’s good and varied creation. The time spent just looking at the miraculous in things that I see every day was wonderful and I highly recommend that you go right outside and pick a leaf off of every bush and flower and tree that you see and then compare them in all their variety and uniqueness. It will be ordinary time well spent!

I’m currently reading a book by Wendy Wright called The Time Between: Cycles and Rhythms in Ordinary Time, and I came across this paragraph that seems to fit so nicely with both my retreat experience and our emphasis on the arts this month:

What Monet saw he gave to the world. He saw the infinite beauty of the most ordinary of things – a water-lily pond. He saw the dynamism and variability in objects that many of us would regard as generic: lilies and water. But Monet saw that each lily in each season at each time of day was an irrepeatable astonishment. In the particular, in the concrete, in the finite, infinite wonder is beheld.

I will claim this, knowing it is merely an analogy: what Monet saw when he gazed on his water lilies, God must see when beholding creation. Irrepeatable astonishment. Infinity coded in a single leaf. Eternity uttered in the late hour of a summer’s afternoon. Beloved.

Wishing you the joy of ordinary, everyday miracles.