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.
