'Ordinary' Time?

Now that the Easter season has finished, we have entered the ‘Green’ liturgical period – the Sundays after Trinity.  This is part of what is now called ‘Ordinary Time.’ That term leads me to two apparently different chains of thought.

My first reaction is to say that there is no such thing as ‘ordinary’ time for the Christian believer. Since the Resurrection of Christ, we all live in extraordinary time, for the Kingdom of God is already present and the Holy Spirit is at work – at least among all believers. God loves us, and each new day offers new opportunities for encountering him and experiencing his grace. We live in that ‘in-between time’ which St John describes: “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2.)

On second thoughts, I want to say that this season actually encourages us to celebrate ‘ordinariness.’ God is not only found in exceptional or miraculous events. His love does not only embrace spiritually advanced people. Most of us will meet him in the humdrum, the routine and the normal, in the things that happen every day - to people like you and me.

This is not a new insight: George Herbert touches on it in his poem ‘Prayer, the Church’s banquet’:         Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
                Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
                Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
                The Milky Way, the bird of Paradise.

But Herbert spoils the notion of ordinariness, with his use in the same verse of words like ‘exalted’ and ‘the best’. The real and exciting point is that prayer encompasses the flat and boring times, and is for more than the ‘best’ or notable – it for the mediocre and the flawed.

The implication of our belief in a God who creates, and who redeems through Incarnation is that God is not only to be found ‘in heaven’; his glory ‘fills the whole earth.’ Isaiah heard that in his vision of the Lord in the temple, and it is expressed in these words at the end of Isaiah 40:

                Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength.
                They will soar on wings like eagles;
                they will run and not grow weary,
                they will walk and not be faint.

Note the order: faith and hope in the Lord do enable us to soar and to run – but they also enable us to ‘walk and not be faint.’ In other words, God does – sometimes – lift us up to experience amazing things, but he also regularly enables us simply to ‘walk the walk’, to carry on with the normal, mundane patterns of our daily activity without being discouraged or diminished. Few saints have haloes – most are fallible, but faithful.

That is truly good news. Many, if not most, of us live with a sense of being unimportant or insignificant. We are more aware of our failures than our successes. To dare to believe that the little things we do and think are as important to God as the great and significant (even though we are still called to attempt great things) can be liberating. Perhaps George Herbert expressed this better in another poem:

                Teach me, my God and King,

                In all things thee to see.

                And what I do in everything

                To do it as for thee

The two trains of thought converge. God delights in the ordinary – and so nothing is, in fact, ‘ordinary’!