Friday, January 17, 2014

Angels of Routine and the Ordinary

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Each year the church calendar sets aside more than thirty weeks for what it calls "Ordinary Time," a season I like you to think of as meeting the angels of routine, regularity, predictability, and ordinariness.

The term "Ordinary Time" sounds bland to us, even as we unconsciously long for precisely what it is meant to bring. Like the seasons of Christmas and Easter, this season too is meant to bring a special richness into our lives. But it's easy to miss both that season and its intent. But as we grow older it seems that we have precious little "ordinary time" in our lives. As our lives grow more pressured, more tired, and more restless, perhaps more than anything else we long for "ordinary time", quiet, routine, solitude, and space away from the hectic pace of life.

For many of us the very expression, "ordinary time," draws forth a sigh along with the question: What's that? When did I last have “ordinary time” in my life? For many of us "ordinary time" means mostly hurry and pressure, the rat race, the treadmill.

Many things in our lives conspire against "ordinary time"; not just the busyness that robs us of leisure, but also the heartaches, the obsessions, the loss of health, or the other interruptions to the ordinary that make a mockery of normal routine and rhythm and rob us of even the sense of "ordinary time". That's the bane of adulthood.

Many of us, I suspect, remember the opposite as being true for us when we were children. I remember as a child often being bored. I longed almost always for a distraction, for someone to visit our home, for special seasons to celebrate (birthdays, Christmas, New Year's, Easter), for most anything to shake up the normal routine of "ordinary time." But that's because time moves so slowly for a child. When you're seven years old, one year constitutes one-seventh of your life. That's a long time. In mid-life and beyond, one year is a tiny fraction of your life and so time speeds up - so much so in fact that, at a point, you also sometimes begin to long for special occasions to be over with, for visitors to go home, and for distractions to disappear so that you can return to a more ordinary rhythm in your life. Routine might be boring, but we sleep a lot better when our lives are being visited by the angels of routine and the ordinary.

It's extremely difficult to be attentive to the present moment, to be truly inside the present.  It's not easy to live inside "ordinary time."

We are challenged to be attentive to the various seasons of the year: Advent, Lent, Christmas, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost. This morning, we need to challenge ourselves to be attentive to "ordinary time." Our failure to be attentive here is perhaps our greatest spiritual shortcoming.

Let your heart pray these verses “But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me. (Psalm 131:2).

Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends that we get comfortable with this season of "Ordinary Time" that leads us closer to our angels of quiet, routine, solitude and space away from our hectic pace of life.