“In extraordinary times, the ordinary takes on a glow and wonder all of its own.”
--Mike Lancaster, American author
The extraordinary. The ordinary.
Wash the pots and pans and pile them up on the counter to dry. Bake rye bread. Boy, does that taste so good, toasted and with peanut butter! Write my weekly newspaper column. What will this week’s topic be? Sing and record the bass parts for my virtual choir. Snow blow the end of the driveway so the ice doesn’t build up. Take a walk on a chilly afternoon and listen to the crunch of snow underfoot. Write a letter to my friend Eric in Minnesota. I loved the birthday note he sent to me. And don’t forget to make a dentist appointment.
Pretty ordinary things to do on a pretty ordinary Monday in the ordinary month of December. Thank you God, just today, for the ordinary.
Ordinary tasks calling out to me, the mundane and seemingly ho-hum activities that make up my life and that take up all human lives. Grocery shopping and fixing dinner and helping with homework. Little things we accomplish, the to-do list with activities that are not earth shattering or unprecedented, that don’t have much at stake and are absolutely not extraordinary.
The ordinary: it makes up most of the time we are allotted on this earth. That’s a truth I need to hang onto for dear life and sanity in these extraordinary days.
For along with COVID fatigue, I am also struggling with an affliction I call “extraordinary fatigue.” Being bombarded on a daily basis with the extraordinary, the unprecedented, the intense. Life in a year unlike any other year I’ve ever experienced. I’m getting sick of it. Feeling that life’s volume is turned up to eleven and I can never turn it down, or mute the incessant chatter of doom and gloom, or just turn off the ferocity of living. I’m wrung out by it all, emotionally exhausted and I’m ready to move on to the normal, the predictable, the boring even!
But the extraordinary: we all face it. Days and nights of lockdowns and fear of lockdowns and cancelled holidays and remote schooling and economic angst and becoming a “zoombie” with all those hours staring at a screen. But wait—there’s more! An election that’s over but apparently it’s not over for tens of millions of my fellow citizens. Hope for a vaccine as soon as possible but ominous warnings too about the dark days of winter yet to come. Wondering when I will once again be free to actually be with people, closer than six feet and for longer than one hour and without a blasted mask covering my face!
So, my prayer this day is pretty simple: God, wake me up to the ordinary details of life that I need to do, to think about, to plan for, to tackle, and most important to be thankful for.
I have a feeling that the ordinary is what will get me, get all of us, through to the other side of these extraordinary days. The ordinary is what will keep our paths straight and our thoughts sane and our hearts full and our souls serene. The ordinary. The woodworking projects I have planned out for the months ahead: building blanket chests for my three nieces. The recipes I will experiment with in my slow cooker and the loaves of bread I will bake and then share with my friends as a way to say, “I love you.”
One of my favorite religious icons is a drawing of Saint Therese of Lisieux, standing at a sink and doing the dishes, as the steam rises up, like incense, like a prayer, to heaven. As her fellow saint, Saint Teresa of Avila, noted, “God walks among the pots and pans.” God walks among the ordinary things of life. In a saints’ past and in the right now too.
God help us all to embrace the ordinary, as we continue to walk through these extraordinary times. For the divine is right here, right with us, right now. The holy. The eternal. That which saves us. May we all remember this small miracle the next time we wash the pots and pans.
The ordinary? It is extraordinary.
No comments:
Post a Comment