Everyday God. Paula Gooder

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СКАЧАТЬ Ordinariness is essential

      It is easy to parody this kind of attitude but it has a grip on us that it makes it hard for us to escape, even in church. The major Christian festivals such as Christmas and Easter have always, and rightly, been occasions of much focus and celebration within the church. The problem is not our celebration of major festivals, nor even particular times leading up to them such as Advent and Lent. The problem is what we do in between. What do we do on ‘ordinary’ days, whether they be Sundays or any other day of the week? What do we do on days that aren’t special?

      It is tempting either to focus entirely on the special days so that we wish the days away until those special days come round again or to attempt to make every day special so that there are no ordinary days left. Neither helps us to get in touch with ordinariness. In my view ordinariness is essential to our well-being as people and a vital part of our life in Christ. We need the ordinary in order to help us fully to encounter the extraordinary. It would be impossible to appreciate the light in a painting without any less bright shades. If it really were Christmas every day, as the song written by the glam-rock band Wizzard wishes with such fervour, then Christmas itself would lose its appeal let alone its meaning. Almost by definition, if things are special all the time they become the new ordinary and we then need to think up ever grander ways of being special. Ordinariness is the canvas against which we can appreciate the special and it helps us to appreciate much more deeply the meaning of days, events or moments that are extraordinary.

      Even more than this, however, ordinariness is the very essence of existence. We live the vast majority of our time in ordinariness. It is hard to make brushing your teeth, washing up or going to work every day glamorous, largely because they are not. They are the stuff of everyday living. They aren’t exciting but they are necessary. Our daily existence is one of ordinariness and we doom ourselves to a life of dissatisfaction and disappointment if we cannot find some way of living contentedly with the everyday.

      Seeing where the treasure lies

      As with so many things, the quality of the lives we live is shaped not so much by what we do but by how we do it. It is so easy to trudge through life, simply missing the gems and wonder of everyday existence, not because they are absent but because we don’t notice them. I remember an occasion when my daughters were small, when one of them squealed in ecstasy, saying, ‘Look, Mummy, look.’ I looked and what I saw was a somewhat grubby patch of grass − with rather more mud than makes a parent, who has to do the washing, happy − which was dotted with a few, to my eye, miserable looking daisies. She hopped out of the pushchair and rushed over to them, and crouched down as low as she could get. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘they’ve got pink edges right on the end, and the petals are like a fan and the yellow bit is all furry.’

      She was, of course, right, as anyone who has examined a daisy up close will tell you. What she was even more right about was that the somewhat ordinary muddy patch of grass held a treasure which I had completely overlooked. This is expressed much better than I could ever do by Saunders Lewis in his poem ‘A Daisy in April’

      Yesterday I saw a daisy

      Like a shining mirror of the dawn.

      The day before I walked over it without thought.

      Yesterday I saw.

      This is also one of the themes that R. S. Thomas was exploring in his poem, ‘The Bright Field’ (on page 1). The poem recalls Thomas’s experience of seeing sunlight breaking through onto a field but only subsequently realizing that the field contained the treasure for which he yearned, so constrained was he by hurrying onwards to a ‘receding future’ or ‘hankering after an imagined past’. We might add to this list looking upwards to heaven (or our modern equivalent) and waiting for a grand divine display of magnificence. What R. S. Thomas is reflecting on is that we all too easily hurry past the pearls of great price that lie along our way because we simply don’t recognize them for what they are. Our vision remains so dazzled by an imagined future glory or a rose-tinted memory of the past that we fail to notice what lies before our very eyes.

      One of the great dangers of becoming too sucked into a culture that glories in everything new, bigger and better is that it can – indeed it seeks to – take the shine away from what we already have. If ‘special’ is what we aim for, then by extension ‘ordinary’ is disappointing. The problem with this is that sometimes – often in fact – the special is embedded deep within the ordinary but it takes a well-trained eye to notice it.

      Ordinary Time

      For churches that use the lectionary, the problem of what we do with ordinariness becomes focused in what is now often called Ordinary Time. The problem is not unique, however, to churches which use the lectionary. All churches face the challenge of what to do, week after week, month after month in ordinary services when nothing particularly ‘special’ happens. Even if you happen to attend a church which manages to feel special every week of the year, the question remains of what you do in between, during the week, on a Monday morning, perhaps, in the middle of winter or Tuesday afternoon during a damp rainy summer. The liturgical season of Ordinary Time simply shines a spotlight on an experience that we all have at some point in our Christian life, when following Jesus becomes a part of the everyday routine of our daily lives.

      The term Ordinary Time is used to refer to a stretch of Sundays between the major seasons. There are two sections of Ordinary Time in the Church’s calendar: one, a shorter one, falls between Epiphany and the start of Lent and another, a longer one, between Pentecost and the start of Advent. How long each is, depends on when Easter is. If Easter is very early then there is hardly any Ordinary Time before Lent and there is, consequently, a very long time of Ordinary Time between Pentecost and Advent. In those churches which use lectionaries, I often hear people sigh with slight despondency about ‘Ordinary Time’, especially during the long period that stretches across the summer months. It can feel a little as though we are faced with a long stretch of not very much; a slightly bland, unexciting series of Sundays with little particular focus or indeed much to recommend them.

      There is a certain irony in the recognition that the term ‘Ordinary Time’ is not a historic one but comes from the liturgical revisions of Vatican Two in 1969. So the churches began calling thirty-three or thirty-four weeks of the year ‘ordinary’ just at the time when ordinariness was beginning to go out of fashion and was replaced by an increasing emphasis on the new and exciting. We should note, however, that the meaning of the word ‘ordinary’ in this instance is not ‘commonplace or everyday’ but ‘measured’. The Latin term ‘tempus ordinarium’ from which we get the English term ‘Ordinary Time’ means literally measured time and refers to the numbering of the weeks through a given period of time: ‘the first Sunday after … the second Sunday after’ … and so on.

      In step with the rhythms of life

      Ordinary Time has within it an expectation of rhythm, of the measured passing of time. This implies that Ordinary Time is not just to be endured or ignored while it slips dully away but to be noted, noticed and numbered. The rhythmic marking of the first week, second week, third week and so on, allows us not just to let time slip through our fingers but to remember it, to cherish it and to mark the span from the previous week to the following week. It is so easy with all the pressures of everyday life to let hours slip into days, days into weeks, and weeks into months, until years if not decades have passed while we barely notice.

      A commitment to Ordinary Time, then, is a commitment to time itself, to the marking off of days and weeks, not so that we can wish them away but so that we can savour them. Ordinary Time challenges us to become ‘measured people’, people who commit themselves to a greater spaciousness of living and to a less frenetic mode of being. It invites us to be more generous to ourselves and to re-interrogate the rhythms of our life to ensure СКАЧАТЬ