Ordinary time

 I'm sure you know that in the Church of England the designation of the main portion of the ecclesiastical year was changed.

The Church year begins on the first Sunday of Advent, and rolls around through Christmas, Epiphany, Candlemas, Lent, Easter and Pentecost to Trinity Sunday. Then there's that long section going all the way through to All Hallows and All Souls, taking us back to Advent again. If you go to the Book of Common Prayer, you'll find the long green bit (green vestments in church on a Sunday) designated as the Sundays after Trinity. At some point in the Methodist Church (and maybe in the Anglican Church too I don't know) they altered that to being Sundays after Pentecost. But meanwhile, I think in the Catholic Church (correct me if I'm wrong about any of this and I'll come back to amend what I've written), these Sundays after Trinity were called Ordinary Time. The Methodists and Anglicans also adopted this phrase, but I think stuck with "Sundays after Pentecost" for the lectionary.

I love tradition, for which reason alone I have a nostalgia for the Sundays after Trinity, but for the most part it's Ordinary Time that speaks to my heart. Because that's where we live, isn't it? Ordinary time. And "ordinary" has both an everyday sense of "normal" but also a liturgical sense — "ordained" or "called", subject to the Word of God.

I like it that in the ecclesiastical year there are feasts and fasts, special times of observation, but that most of it is a long slow peregrination through ordinary time. We saunter through it. That word, "saunter" comes from saint terre (holy ground) and was the term for how pilgrims walked. You can't go quick march on a pilgrimage, it's just too long, you have to take it slowly, you saunter.

This is how we walk, in ordinary time, how we move through the fields of grace in simplicity, sauntering home.

Not long ago Tony and I moved to a new home. We have lived fifteen years with Alice and Hebe in their house in Beaufort Road, and we loved that house and loved our shared life with them; but — do you know this song? — you gotta move when the Spirit says move, so that's what we did.

We are very happy in our new place.

This is what it looks like from the outside. That tower block behind it is one of four that are slowly but surely to be dismantled and replace by low-rise apartment block over the next few years.

It's an ordinary house in an ordinary street that looks like this.

It's a dear little house, just right for us. We had a bit of decorating to do, but not too much. Our front room now looks like this, very peaceful and cosy:

Our back room looks like this — well one corner of it does:

It's where I'm sitting right now.

Here's the other side of the same room, with evening falling now.

The feeling of the house is very happy and welcoming, and as we've settled in we've found a steadily increasing sense of peace.

There has been a dizzying amount of work to do — the day after tomorrow our very modest-sized kitchen —

— will be turned inside out because there are problems of damage cause by a long-term leaking tap. 

There are details like this still to fix — 

— the legacy of televisions having been installed in every room, plus a satellite dish, a CCTV camera, and some defunct aerials and internet sockets from former times.

And my bedroom has some decor issues!!

— which we are slowly addressing. The wardrobes used to be just black, adorned with panels of peel'n'stick dark grey glitter textured wallpaper. Yes. Anyway, moving on; though the room will in due course be painted a soft shade of green, my friends are there already:

So that's OK.

We began with the garden, which had a hedge too large and dominant for our capacity to maintain. We like hedges but said farewell to most of it, and are now slowly replanting with other choices.

And these — don't you think? — are the matters of Ordinary Time; the place where we shape our lives, where we work patiently to repair and maintain, the place where we pray and eat and think and lie down to sleep. What I love about Ordinary Time is that it is essentially our home, the spot of Earth where we are formed and challenged and loved, the place where we meet Jesus and are steadied by his voice.

It came to my mind today, as I was enjoying looking at the posts of Lynda by the River, that maybe now is a time for those of us separated (and even isolated) to draw closer to one another online, for the peace and comfort of one another's company in these wild days of unrest and antagonism. 

Peace to you, then, my friends. Waving from East Sussex, this little patch of England.

This I know: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." Our work is to hold the light steady. We are all anchorites now, anchoring the Light to our local spot of Earth, in our ordinary homes through this most extraordinary ordinary time. 

God bless you. xx