REFLECTIONS ON ORDINARY TIME
January 18, 2010
We
need not always be thinking about thinking, or the ways that we
make a world through thought and speech. But by doing so, we
show our care for the world; for this kind of philosophical
attitude opens the world to reflective wonder, and such
thoughtful wondering promotes an ongoing sense of duty and
responsibility. The natural world we inhabit with mindless
endurance can thus also be lived in with a concerted
mindfulness, focused on the very nature and meaning of our
worldliness.
Michael Fishbane, Sacred Attunement: A Jewish
Theology, p. 18
Liturgically speaking we have now
left behind the special seasons of Advent and Christmas and
re-entered “Ordinary Time.” We have taken down our Christmas
trees, removed our window lights, and unwrapped (and perhaps
stored away) our presents. All of the artificial light and
constant celebration that, at least in the Northern Hemisphere,
have relieved for some weeks the darkness and isolation of
deepening winter have come to an end. We now return to our
daily lives and work, our separate and more solitary lives, and
are again faced with the reality of our humdrum day-to-day
existence.
Yet, in Sacred Time the
“ordinary” is not merely routine and humdrum but suffused with
wonder and mystery. The Mystery of God-with-Us that we have
celebrated at Christmas is now to be recognized, appropriated
and responded to as it inheres in the ordinary and the
everyday. While we can readily assent to this theologically,
psychologically it is much more difficult to do so. The worlds
that we make for ourselves, individually and in our various
communal involvements, often become dissociated and distant from
the world of God’s creation. They cease to pulse with the
continuing created and uncreated energies from the One who is
always and everywhere continuing to create and form all that is.
At its most authentic, human life
is an experience grounded in wonder and awe, a wonder and awe
that “promotes an ongoing sense of duty and responsibility”
toward the entire World that is God’s creation. According to
Father Adrian van Kaam, awe and wonder constitute the primordial
human disposition. It is this dimension of our personality
that, in fact, makes us truly human, for it is a potency of that
human spirit which participates in the Divine Spirit and
recognizes the spark of the Divine in all creation. When our
focus becomes limited to “the work of our hands,” to
our own creations, awe in the deepest sense is impossible. We
replace it with what Van Kaam calls “inverted awe,” that is, awe
of our own powers. Our attention becomes focused exclusively on
the demands of daily life, the creation of self-identity, and
the anxieties these projects evoke in us. We become reduced to
being “managers” of a world that constantly threatens to
overwhelm our capacities to deal with it. In this way, life too
often becomes a series of problems to be solved while enduring
the irrepressible knowledge and fear of our limitations to do
so.
The great Orthodox theologian
Alexander Schmemann defined secularism as “a negation of worship
. . . of [the human being] as a worshipping being, as homo
adorans: the one for whom worship is the essential act
which both ‘posits’ the [human person’s humanity] and fulfills
it.” (For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy)
We live in a secular age, and even those of us who hold to and
are formed by the long-established faith traditions are
significantly affected and formed by the characteristic of
secularism that Schmemann describes. Even those of us who
participate in various forms of communal worship tend not to
experience the connection between the awe and wonder of worship
and our ordinary lives of work, family and community. We
relegate the religious or spiritual to an exclusively personal
and inner experience or sense that is quite split off from our
everyday work and involvements. Thus, our relationship to the
world, as dominated by the functional dimension of our
personality, becomes objectified and reactionary rather than
personal and responsible. As Michael Fishbane points out, it is
“thoughtful wondering [that] promotes an ongoing sense of duty
and responsibility.”
As we return to ordinary time,
how can we attempt to keep something of the sacred awareness of
the Christmas Season; how can we regain a sense of awe and
wonder in our ordinary lives? In the words of Michael Fishbane
we can discover a practice to help us: it is a mindful
attunement to “the ways that we make a world through thought and
speech.” We lose ourselves in the “ordinary” of the day to day
because we live the false assumption that the world we make is
the same as the one God makes. By becoming aware of our own
thinking, of our own world making, we create a space in which we
may recognize the limits of our self-made world. In that
moment of humility we open to the wonder that inheres in God’s
creation. From this new perspective we can recognize the
smallness of our self-created world and so experience awe at the
grandeur of God’s.
In this way we pass from
isolation and encapsulation in our own small worlds into the
greater world of relationship. Mindfulness, then, is an
experience of our own finitude and contingency on the one hand
and of the Mystery at the heart of Creation on the other. This
humble recognition of our limitedness in the face of the
vastness of Mystery is, of course, initially overwhelming, which
is why we avoid it until circumstances thrust it upon us. Yet,
as Fishbane points out, “the sense of being overwhelmed . . .
may give way to a sense of being claimed . . . in a fundamental
way. “ The awe we experience is awe of the Mystery in whom we
participate and by whom we are personally claimed. This
transforms our way of being in the world from an anxious form
based on fear to a responsible one, based on love.
Thus, by practicing mindfulness
of the ways we make a world through thought and speech, we
re-contextualize our ordinary lives and works within the larger
Mystery of Creation. In this context the tasks and
relationships of our ordinary lives are no longer burdens that
continually threaten us with failure, but are rather invitations
to participate in an ongoing Creation toward which we have a
unique response-ability based on the gift that we most deeply
are, a gift given and claimed by God.
