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 that our ordinary lives contain enough space within them for us to flourish.
As we mark week after week, we are challenged to celebrate the good times and grieve for the bad, to recall our joys and confess our failings. This rhythmic passing of time is one which the monastic tradition understands profoundly. The monastic life of regular prayer and worship, often in places of outstanding natural beauty is, as Esther de Waal notes in her book The Spiritual Journey, designed to help anyone ‘become more conscious of the sacredness of time and place’ (E. de Waal, The Spiritual Journey, St Bede’s Publications, 1993, p. 49). In other words the monastic life draws people deeply into ordinariness though the passing of time in a particular place and it is in that ordinariness that they encounter God.
Many people today are beginning to rediscover the value of monastic living, whether through its traditional forms or through ‘new monasticism’ which seeks to use the insights of the monastic tradition both in modern day communities and in everyday life. One of the aims of new monasticism is to take the principles of monastic living and to make it applicable to modern life. Even so the particular principles that arise in monasticism are not for everyone. The challenge for each one of us it to find a rhythm that works with our personality, our home life and our working pattern.
One of the complexities of this is that, when you have found the rhythm that works for you and you have done it for long enough, then the rhythm carries you. I have often heard the people who say Morning and Evening prayer regularly, reflect on the fact that no matter how bad your day is, how unprepared for worship you are, how distracted you are by the many competing demands of life, the service itself carries you along. It is a little like steering into the current of a river. Once there the rhythm does the rest, pulling you closer and deeper into the presence of God. The problem is getting into the rhythm in the first place. It takes discipline, practice and sometimes pure grim determination to get over the hump of boredom, distraction and busyness into the rhythm beyond.
Finding the rhythm of your own soul
For