I have chosen in this book to look at the theme of ordinariness through the lens of thirty-three biblical passages which all, in some way or another, touch on the theme of ordinariness. There is no great mystical significance to the number thirty-three, it is simply the number of weeks in Ordinary Time in most years. I do not for a moment expect that anyone will read one reflection a week throughout the periods of Ordinary Time but they are here to be dipped in and out of as suits your own pattern.
As in the other two books in this series (Advent and Easter), for the most part I deal with texts in their final form. Although, as an avid student of the Bible myself, I am fascinated by questions of how the biblical books reached their final form, I am all too aware that this interest is, to put it mildly, not shared by everyone. So, as far as possible, I have left overtly critical questions aside, only bringing them in as and when they are particularly important for understanding a specific text. Each chapter of the book is split into a number of sections. In most chapters there are six sections but since six does not go into thirty-three the final chapter has only three. Each section is headed by the specific passage that I will be reflecting on but also with the suggestion for further reading if, like me, you like to read a passage in context. Sometimes there is no easy wider context to suggest, and in those cases I haven’t suggested any, but for the most part there are longer bits of reading to do for those who would like to.
Also, as in the other volumes in this series, I have chosen an R. S. Thomas poem as an additional lens through which to view the essence of ordinariness. The poem ‘The Bright Field’ (which you will find at the start of the Introduction below) introduces something which is for me a vital strand to the whole question of ordinariness. This is the need for us to be people who can turn aside in order to encounter God. Indeed, it is so important that Chapter 1 focuses around this whole question, before we turn outwards to questions of the unsung heroes of the Bible, the ordinariness of God and his kingdom, living extraordinary ordinary lives and, finally, catching glimpses of God’s glory in our everyday lives.
Note
1 For a fuller description of what Ordinary Time is see pages 6–7.
Introduction
REFLECTIONS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ORDINARY
The Bright Field
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
R. S. Thomas
Where has Ordinary gone?
Ordinary is out of fashion; so much so, in fact, that calling something ‘ordinary’ suggests that it is somehow substandard, disappointing and certainly lacklustre. We might say that the food in a certain restaurant is ‘ordinary’; that the clothes we have on are just something ‘ordinary’; or of a football team that their performance was ‘ordinary’. What we mean by this is that the food in the restaurant doesn’t live up to our expectations, that our outfit is nothing special or that the football team could have done better. Describing something as ordinary isn’t quite an insult but it certainly isn’t a compliment. This dissatisfaction with ordinariness is, perhaps, summed up in the inspection of schools, where a school inspector can deem the institution to be excellent, good, satisfactory or unsatisfactory. Anyone in education will tell you that it is not satisfactory to be deemed satisfactory. In other words, ordinary is simply not good enough.
On one level I relate to this entirely. There is something vitally important about aiming for excellence in all that we do. The only adequate response to the God of infinite care and generosity is, in our finite way, to meet his extravagance with the very best of who we are and what we have. The pursuit of our own excellence (not in comparison with others but simply the best we can do) is surely the human vocation in response to God’s great goodness.
Nevertheless, you can’t help wondering whether our desire for excellence has got out of control and has, in some ways, become a monster that consumes us rather than a natural response to God’s goodness. In marketing, things are constantly branded as ‘all new’, ‘best ever’ or ‘20% bigger’, as though we simply cannot buy something unless it is demonstrably better, bigger and more attractive than before. Our expectations these days are constantly angled towards the expectation that whatever we do today will be more exciting and more satisfying than yesterday. It sometimes causes me to pause in the supermarket, with my hand hovering over the hand wash (or other similar substance) and to wonder whether I really need it to be better and more exciting than my previous one. Since my old hand wash washed my hands, made them smell nice, moisturized AND killed all the bacteria, is there anything more left for this new improved, all new recipe, 50% bigger hand wash to achieve?
The time when this really rankles with me is in coffee shops. I can’t drink a lot of coffee so would prefer to have a ‘regular’ or even, shocking as though this might sound, a ‘small’ cup of coffee. This, however, is not vouchsafed in most large chain coffee shops where your choice begins with ‘tall’ and moves upwards from there. Starbucks, I read, has now even introduced a fourth size of coffee in the USA, called the Trente, which contains 31 ounces or 916 ml of liquid, in other words 16 ml bigger than the average human stomach. Where, I wonder, can we go from here? What happens when ‘bigger and better’ becomes either unfeasible or undesirable?
Ordinary, it seems, is no longer. We now move ever onwards from big to bigger, from good to better, from exciting to more exciting. Ordinary is dull, unsatisfactory and to be avoided at all costs.
Why 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,