“Christ’s ordinary years are part of our redemption story. Because of the incarnation and those long, unrecorded years of Jesus’ life, our small, normal lives matter. If Christ was a carpenter, all of us who are in Christ find that our work is sanctified and made holy. If Christ spent time in obscurity, then there is infinite worth found in obscurity.”
Look, Listen, Read, Pray, & Do
Some churches refer to these weeks as “weeks after Pentecost” beginning with the first Sunday after Pentecost also known as Trinity Sunday. Other churches refer to this time on the calendar as “weeks of Ordinary Time” (as in, “Today is Tuesday, the eleventh of September in the twenty-eighth week of Ordinary Time”). There are a few more variations, but I’ve found it more fruitful to worry less about what to call these weeks between Pentecost and Advent, and instead to focus and become more deeply formed in the theology of the church’s intentions. What does it mean that half of our calendar is left open to the ordinary? What does it tell us about the God who created and gives purpose to our lives?
One way I do this is to consider the parts of Christ’s life that Scriptures tell us almost nothing about. Between his newborn and toddler days which were spent in various locations of the earth, as his parents sought refuge from Herod to the beginning of his more formal ministry marked by his baptism in the Jordan River we know only a few sparse details. You could say this was the Ordinary Time of Christ’s life. The years we can patch together a few details of work and worship made up the vast majority of his days on earth.
Each liturgical cycle, we reenact that reality in the church’s calendar with days, weeks, and months of ordinary time. In the United States, this time of year (summer and autumn), the civic calendar is packed full with holidays and remembrances. The trinity of celebrations that bracket our summer (Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day) ensure we pay attention to the passing of a favorite season of barbeques, vacations, and recreation. From Memorial Day to Veterans Day, our calendars remind us to also set aside time to remember our place as citizens of our country with parades, memorials, and flag raising. (I happen to be writing this post on September 11, another day on our national calendar that will live in infamy.)
If the historic liturgical calendar teaches us to number our days to gain a heart of wisdom, there must be a lot of wisdom to be gained in our regular, working, resting, and worshipping lives. This is the model Christ seemed to have lived, and the church invites us to embrace the same pathway.
Ordinary Time Daybook Meditations
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Work Stories & Calling Stories
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In the words of theology professor Wendy Wright, Ordinary Time is a season:
“…to become attentive to the call of discipleship both outer and inner. What are we called to do? … What are we called to be?”
There may not be another area of our lives that we hold most in common without realizing it. We all spend time trying to fill the gap between what we were made to do and what we actually do with our days. This gap is no small thing; it often feels like an ache we can’t name and leaks out in the midst of our day jobs and our too-short weekends. We carry this sense of wanting something more with us into every relationship and every job interview. We know, in our innermost being, we were made for something good and most of us are not sure how much attention to pay to that feeling.
In the meantime, we have to pay the bills, care for our families, mow the lawn, and figure out what to eat for lunch.
Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I belong?
In between the lines of the thousands of posts I’ve logged into this blog you can hear these questions and this ache in Brian and me. If nothing else, nearly thirty years of our marriage have been trying to help each other figure out what we’re going to do when we grow up.
Starting in 2018, I’ve invited friends and acquaintances who are on the same journey. I’ve asked them to give us a one-day snapshot into their work life that will help us see what they know to be true right now about who they are made to be. Some live out their callings in a way that they get paid to do the thing they’re most uniquely suited to be in this world, others work jobs that pay the bills so they are able to pursue those callings. Most are a combination of the two.
In the first two years, I zeroed in on our work lives which is one facet of the way our callings intersect with our daily lives,. What we do to support our living matters in the economy of God’s kingdom, whether we’re working the job of our dreams or something we dream about quitting as soon as a better option arrives. Like any other commitment we make, our jobs teach us so much about who we are, why we’re here, and where we belong.
In my own crazy quilt of work selves, I’ve found answers to these essentially human questions more in the negative space between what is and what I long for it to be. Maybe you’ve experienced the same?
As the guest contributors in 2018 and 2019 shared their hearts for the daily lives of working at paid jobs, volunteer gigs, or passion projects, I noticed that this undercurrent of callings propels their stories more than any other reality.
In this short video clip about discerning God’s calling, spiritual director and teacher Jennifer Haworth shares a wonderful analogy based on the Mississippi River:
“If you’ve ever had a chance to visit the Mississippi River, it’s a really big moving body of water. On the surface you’ll see all sorts of cross-currents moving every which way, but deep down in that river there is a current and it keeps the river moving down into the Gulf of Mexico. It’s that current that keeps that river alive.”
Haworth explains that the cross-currents in the Mississippi are like the doubts, fears, anxieties, and disappointments that plague us as we consider questions about what we were made to do and who we were made to be. These cross-currents compete for our attention and cloud our ability to discern thankfully the invitations God is calling out to us. We easily lose our ability to listen clearly and begin to feel paralyzed about which direction to take.
The spiritual practice of discernment allows us to pause in the middle of all the pell-mell crosscurrents in order to notice and to listen to the true undercurrent moving our lives forward. Haworth offers a couple of questions for our discernment “What is my own life saying to me? What feels true and what feels illusory or false?” She suggests that when we listen, we’ll learn that “the deepest desires we have for ourselves are really the deepest desires God has for us, provided that we’re moving in a direction that brings forth love and life.”
Discernment allows us to be present to the invitations God is offering us right now,. As we practice this holy kind of listening within our own hearts and our trusted community we become more responsive to the undercurrent propelling our lives through this earth to our ultimate glory when we’ll know and see with complete clarity and joy.
Ordinary Time: posts from the archive
Recommended Reading: Ordinary Time
