Ordinary Time

     I love this time of year.   In the church we call it ordinary time.  Together we have been through the grand days of Christmas, celebrating the incarnation.  What a glorious thing that God became a human being.  Sometimes I take this being human for granted.  I don’t see the beauty and significance of it.

    These ordinary days following Christmas and the Epiphany allow us to sink into all that has happened.  We can now settle and enjoy this almost unbelievable gift that Christmas has brought.  It reminds me of the days after Christmas as a child.  Those days after all of the big celebrations, allowed me to breathe, look around, and enjoy the gifts I had received.

     Centering Prayer is a practice that helps me to realize the gift of my humanity.  Sitting in silence, uttering a sacred word, I am allowed to see the many distractions that I live with daily.  Most of my time is so on task that I don’t hear the inner chatter.  Thomas Keating calls that chatter our patterns.  Most of those patterns have become ingrained since childhood.  Some of those patterns may concern not being good enough, competition and worry.  When I begin to die to the chatter, I awaken to the ordinary.

     Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town elevates the ordinary in a scene where Emily who has recently died longs to revisit one of those plain old days.  She is granted her request, “I didn’t realize all that was going on and we never noticed… to clocks ticking, and Mama’s sunflowers.  And food and coffee.  And new ironed dresses and hot baths… and sleeping and waking up.  Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

    My prayer is that we do not let life slip through our fingers without knowing and experiencing what a gift this being human is.  There are many spiritual practices which can help us to live in the abundance that we were promised.  Centering Prayer is just one of them.  I invite you to try this practice if you have never tried it.  If you tried it a long time ago, maybe it is time to try it again.  A new group is starting in February at 7:00 AM on Tuesday mornings, led by Dr. Gary Stewart, Beth Prewitt and me.  There is another group that meets at 5:00 Wednesday afternoons.

     What a joy it is to live with you in this community where we actively wrestle with who we are, dying from all that keeps us from that, and discovering our unity with God and one another.